On hand they say if everyone is digging for gold, start selling shovels. Everyone is doing start-ups, maybe sell them dashboards, log aggregation services, api testing tools, virtual whiteboards and such.

On the other hand, if you sell to just a few, now your own volatile future is coupled with theirs. You might run out of cash, hire bad people, make bad decisions -- the company fails, and that chance is now multiplied by the chance that other company make bad decisions, bad investors, burn through all the cash etc.

So it seems the answer is to just sell to a lot of startups, to spread your risk. That might end up like the sub-prime mortgage crisis. The risks everyone thought were decoupled from each other, weren't actually. So when start-ups start imploding and investors start looking at ... I don't know solar, hyperloop, or robots, the panic spreads etc.