“what I tell founders is build a really great business that consumers love just that's your northstar right everything else will work out and let's just say you're running it maybe it wasn't going really well and it didn't work out with Strava there'd be another suitor you know why because people loved the app.”

Build something consumers love — acquisition rationale will find you on its own

Crowley's advice to founders tempted to engineer toward an acquisition: it doesn't work because acquisitions require precise company-to-company matching. The only durable strategy is consumer love — if the product is genuinely beloved, strategic rationale will come from multiple directions. Building for a specific acquirer is a bet with terrible odds; building for consumer love is a bet with compounding optionality.