I'm not sure if I agree with you. I'm not an immigration lawyer nor an immigration expert, so this is all anecdotal: I know a handful of startup founders, who were most certainly not at the top of their fields get O1 visas with the help of their top-top-tier investors / other things I'm not aware of (maybe speaking at second-rate conferences?). These were early stage startups that did not have much traction yet. While these founders would certainly be impressive to the HN crowd (open source contributions, cool things they've built), they were certainly not names you would have heard of even in technology circles.
Quite true. I am not a lawyer, but I help founders hack immigration while pursuing the general solution through passing immigration reform that includes a startup visa.
For the O-1, you need to make the case that you're in the top 2-3% of your field. I often have founders make the case that if they can raise funding, then they are in the top 2-3% of startups—coming from a top ranked VC matters less than you'd think because the bureaucrats have never heard of most of these VCs or angels. On the other hand, the top ranked VCs are more likely to know about the O-1 and ways to make use of it.
They can do it using O-3 visa, its the same classification as an O-1 but of a different type. Assuming they incorporated the startup, and then immediately received funding and started visa process (in that order) they can use percentage points (from zero to +++ whatever investment they received) as part of their case. USCIS is more interested in profit/revenue than any other metric.
