[lawnchair_larry]

Sam Altman is the President of Y Combinator, and that was roughly his experience as well. YC does not consider having a billion dollar exit to be a requirement for advising and picking billion dollar startups. Neither do most VCs I’d guess.

In some ways it may be counterintuitive, but in others it makes sense. A successful founder only has a single anecdote. Someone running an incubator has something much closer to empirical data. You can only run 1 experiment at a time, while they can have hundreds or thousands.

Also, you don’t necessarily need talent executing in a specific domain in order to recognize it in others.