Those numbers are hilarious. I can see an associate getting that many decks a week, then culling them down to 1 to 3 for the next guy up the chain. But there will be 3 to 12 associates.

Then the number of deals is also hilarious. These people don't have unlimited money, even in the good old days, you'd be lucky to be doing a deal a week out of the pool the associates approved.

So basically there are a hundred times as many decks as what the OP thinks there are for each deal. And the successful ones aren't open AI, the majority of the time a successful exit is getting sold for $10m to the incumbents in the field.

I didn’t read this as “10% will become 100B businesses”,

I read this as “10% are hot”—probably the author meant “like a team out of OAI” but maybe they meant “like recent rounds of OAI have been”.

In any case this post read as sophisticated, reasonable, and helpful, to me.

It's orders of magnitude off. The guy is just LARPing poorly, even lacking common sense.

One single OpenAI-tier deal every two years, consistently, would put you into Legendary VC territory.

I think he meant that they seem as exciting as OpenAI to investors. Not that all of them (or any) succeed.

You can bet on all 10% potential OpenAIs of the future and still loose all your bets.

Still feels way off. If VCs receive 1-5 pitches per week that seem as exciting to them as OpenAI, they'd spread their money around a lot more startups. Don't think they're that excited by half the "solid metrics, good founders, there's plenty of money in generic B2B SaaS if we throw enough at the sales team" stuff they actually invest in.

Now I can believe that at least 10% of the pitchdecks they receive are "we hook $industry up to OpenAI's API"...

What a colossal failure of OpenAI’s nonprofit charter that they’re repeatedly in a conversation about being good VC returns.

I read that comment a bit differently:

- Volume: Former founders who hit the jackpot are investing in a bunch of startups every week. There are hundreds of unicorns etc out there, and thousands of Series A's every year. That's a bunch of competitive deals being signed every day!

- Quality: Early silicon valley startups can easily look like openai's early days. With hundreds of unicorns out there, their execs eventually leaving and recruiting smart folks for their next thing happens almost every day. Pitches that are "We're solving X" are a dime a dozen. Likewise, they're each flawed in different ways -- in OpenAI's case, an easy negative phrasing is: no real business plan, positioned mostly as a non-profit R&D lab that'd do open source for Elon Musk to get google IP more easily. Likewise, having Stripe's CTO was one of those cool unicorn exec things, but for 0->1 business, maybe not so obvious, and Sam Altman's only 0->1 gig was running a small failed social mobile social network. It's easy to phrase in positive vs negative lights. Now imagine getting 5 of those on your desk every week, and you only pick 0-3 a year, hoping each win pays for all the duds, and then some...

I actually laughed when I read that