A startup with 10 employees is now worth $5 billion

A million dollars isn't cool, you know what's cool?
A billion dollars.

That’s what a young Justin Timberlake told his castmates in a scene from The Social Network — the 2010 film about the rise of Facebook.

Back then, as Silicon Valley was entering its golden era, startups seeking to change the world were doing really well if they were valued at a few million dollars. Any mention of the “B” word was typically reserved for companies making serious waves, with a billion-dollar valuation typically taking years and a revenue (or user) chart that looked like a hockey stick.

Zero to one (billion of cash)

Things have obviously changed a lot since the early 2000s. But few things in the startup world in the intervening years have been quite as remarkable as the news that Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a startup co-founded by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion in a round of investment that values the company at $5 billion, according to an exclusive report from Reuters. The company has 10 employees.

That valuation is more than what iconic department store Macy’s ($4.2 billion) is worth. It’s more than triple what pizza giant Papa John’s International is worth.

The wave of AI hype that took Nvidia to a $3 trillion market cap is filtering all the way through the economy, and venture capitalists with deep pockets are willing to take bets that, even just 5 or 6 years ago, would have seemed ludicrous. Clearly, SSI is a special case and the expertise that someone like Ilya Sutskever brings is substantial, but with that kind of deal it is no wonder that nearly all of Silicon Valley’s ambitious founders say they’re working on AI in some shape or form.