You’re on the floor of the Nasdaq as confetti rains down. Filled with pride, you close your eyes and reflect on the time spent toiling and moiling at a company for over four years in order to celebrate its seminal moment. The founders ring the bell and those shares that have slowly vested are now (almost) liquid. What a moment. But do you realize how rare’s the air?

An acquisition or IPO is truly lottery level funnel math. In 2018 CB Insights published a study that showed, of 1,000+ seed funded startups in 2008-2010, only 1% made it to a $1B valuation and only 14% had some type of M&A event or exit.

Controlling the controllables is something we talk a lot about around here. Based on those metrics, reaching the mountaintop does not seem to be in the sphere of control. So what do we know?

• It takes a lot of time investment to go the distance at a future unicorn
• Odds of correctly picking the 1% of companies that grow into unicorn status are very very low

Another obvious but largely unacknowledged fact in startup land is that there are a lot of great successful companies out there that are boring as hell. B-o-r-i-n-g. No, we won’t name names. Could you make money there? Sure. Do you have to stay awake, put in the effort, and go to that job every day? Yep.

If picking unicorns is not a reliable way to select where to spend your professional time, perhaps there is another more important way to choose a startup independent of the stark reality of the industry’s funnel math.

To put it simply, it should probably be the customer.

Who are you helping to build for? Who could you be interacting with and thinking about every day?

• Do you want to build for dev teams?
• Do you want to build for finance teams?
• Do you want to build for marketers?
• Do you want to build for regular American consumers?

You may find meaning in all those zeroes alone. But, you’ll more likely find validation building products, teams, and companies for customers that you want to help succeed.

The investors cheering the acquisition or IPO of the month on Twitter don’t have to actually show up at that company for the likely 4+ year journey it takes to get to the finish line. So again, pose this question to any manager thinking about joining another company:

Who do you want to build for?

A question less often asked. Pick your customer and then the company consideration will be far less painful when committing years of your life to the projects, trials, and tribulations of rolling that boulder up to the mountaintop.