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