Thanks to the meritocracy that is Silicon Valley, any doofus with a bloated bank account can become a venture capitalist. But you no longer need the right net worth to get in on the excitement of making speculative bets on startups!

That's right, Twitter engineer Buster Benson spent his free time making "Valleyball": a fantasy venture capital league that lets everyone bet how much startups with be "worth" in a year.

The problem with venture capital, according to Benson, is that investing in startups isn't a "very fun game." So Valleyball takes out all the pesky annoyances out of investing—namely, access and being ridiculously wealthy—and brings financing back to its roots: dreaming about how much your investments will grow in value.

Via Valleyball's homepage:

Venture capital, as a system, is designed to incentivize you to keep your special access to yourself. That didn't seem like a very fun game, so this is a fantasy VC league without the built-in unfairness, secrecy, and competitiveness. Instead of rewarding your ability to horde access and capital, this is only about your ability to predict the future.

Use all the information you have at hand (each company page links to the public Crunchbase page for you to begin your research), and make your best guess about the company's current and future valuation. All guesses are public, tied to your Twitter account, and timestamped. [...]

We'll finally be able to learn who's actually good at picking the winners. Is it you?

What is clear from Valleyball's dashboard of dreams is that no one's having a nightmare. Every company on the league's homepage, with the exception of three obvious turds, is expected to rise or maintain its value.

Let's take a look:

League members believe Slack, a wildly-popular group chat startup that just got caught exposing sensitive customer data, will have its valuation climb to $400 million in one year. This is one of the more sane predictions, considering Slack is already "worth" a quarter billion bucks.

Right around the time Airbnb locked in its $10 billion valuation earlier this year, venture capitalist Fred Wilson couldn't help but notice that we're "not in a normal valuation environment for high growth tech companies and we have not been in one for a while." But that didn't stop league players from betting up Airbnb's value to $20 billion in 2015. In fact, some players predicted it could climb to $30, $50, and even $100 billion by then.

Now we're getting into crazy territory. Clinkle was a startup with vast hype and major financial backing, but the app it released was a dud. It will be a miracle if the company hasn't managed to burn through the rest of its funding by next summer, and yet Valleyball players see it holding onto its value.

Same.

And of course, Product Hunt, the current darling of App Store fanboys, is expected to see its Nas-endorsed bulletin board rocket to $40 million in worth.

Unfortunately, fantasy VC leagues aren't an entirely new concept. From the sounds of it, tech journalists have been running their own pool for a while.

To contact the author of this post, please email kevin@valleywag.com.

Image: Shutterstock, with expert Photoshop treatment from Kevin Montgomery