Stop Chasing Unicorns

Why the $100M exit nobody writes about will change your life more than the $1B exit you'll probably never get.

A pattern shows up almost every week in conversations with founders. Someone raised $50M down the street. Someone else closed a $200M Series C. A competitor got featured in TechCrunch. And the founder sitting across from us is convinced they’re failing.

They’re comparing.

There’s a specific kind of comparison problem founders fall into, and it’s the most common psychological tax in startup life. The myth is that the only successful outcome is the unicorn outcome. Anything less than a billion-dollar valuation is a participation trophy.

This is wrong on two levels. It’s wrong about what makes a successful business, and it’s wrong about what changes your life.

The math nobody talks about

Run the numbers on a few exit scenarios and the unicorn obsession starts looking strange.

You hold 30% of a company that exits for $10M. You take home $3M.

You hold 30% of a company that exits for $50M. You take home $15M.

You hold 30% of a company that exits for $150M. You take home $45M.

Now ask the honest question. Is your life meaningfully different at $15M versus $45M? At $3M versus $15M? At any point along this curve, you’ve crossed into territory most people will never see in their lifetime. You’ve solved the question: “Do I ever have to work again?” You’ve solved your kids’ college, your parents’ retirement, your own peace of mind.

The marginal value of additional millions past a certain threshold is real but small. The marginal cost of chasing them, in years of your life, in stress, in time with the people you love, in health, is not small. It’s often enormous.

A $20M exit, the kind that gets zero headlines and doesn’t make anyone’s “founder to watch” list, lands you $6M if you held 30%. Most people would call that winning the lottery. Founders chasing unicorns somehow file it under failure.

Why this myth persists

Rob Walling at Tiny Seed Capital and the excellent podcast Startups for the Rest of Us, have been making this argument for years. A $10M or $20M or $50M exit can be fundamentally life-changing for a founder. They’re right.

But the louder voices in the ecosystem are big venture funds, whose business model only works if a small number of their bets become enormous. They need unicorns. Their math literally doesn’t function without them. So the narrative they push, intentionally or not, is that the only outcome worth pursuing is the unicorn (which coincidentally lets them return their fund).

That narrative is correct for them. It is often wrong for you.

You are not a venture fund. You don’t need a portfolio of bets where one wins and the rest die. You need one company. You need it to work. And “work” can mean a lot of things that don’t involve being on the cover of Fortune or Inc.

The comparison tax

There’s a second cost to chasing unicorns, beyond the math. It’s the constant low-grade misery of measuring yourself against outcomes that were never available to you in the first place. LinkedIn is to founders as Instagram is to teenage girls. It can foster unhealthy comparisons.

Your business is different. Your market is different. Your timing is different. Your team is different. The founder who raised $50M last quarter is solving a different problem in a different market with different investors and a different cap table. Their fundraise tells you almost nothing about whether you should be raising, what you should be raising, or whether you’re succeeding.

And yet most founders compare anyway, because comparison is the default human response to ambition. Don’t stop being ambitious; just be ambitious about the right thing.

What ambition can look like instead

None of this is an argument for being unambitious. If you’re a missionary founder who genuinely needs to see this thing through, who’s trying to solve a problem at massive scale, who would rather die on the hill than sell early, that’s a real and respectable path. Build the unicorn. Some people are wired for it, and the world is better for them existing.

This argument is against chasing unicorns by default. Against assuming that because the headline outcomes are the unicorns, the only outcome worth pursuing is one.

The alternative is to build a real business. A company that becomes profitable. A company that compounds over time. A company that, if it never gets acquired, you’d still be glad to be running in ten years. A company where your life is sustainable, where you’re not destroying yourself to hit the next milestone, where the work itself is the point.

If that company grows into something acquirable, great. If the right offer comes along at the right time, take it. $20M, $50M, $100M. Any of these probably changes your life. None of them will get your name on a billboard, and that turns out to matter much less than founders think.

The reframe

Stop chasing unicorns just because everyone else is. Stop assuming the only valid exit is the one that gets headlines. Stop measuring your trajectory against companies that got lucky in a different market at a different time.

Build the thing that makes sense for you. Build it in a way that doesn’t break you. And when an outcome arrives that would change most people’s lives forever, recognize it for what it is.

Winning doesn’t always look like a unicorn. Most of the time, it looks like a real business that quietly made its founders wealthy and their customers better off. That’s the actual game.