Yeah. There’s a lot of startups, but only a few that are actually promising from a risk reward perspective. VC investing is about home runs. So they all fight over investing in a few companies

It's not about the lack of startup projects, it's the lack of genuine unicorn projects that pays for the other 19 companies that fail in their portfolio along the way from MVP to IPO.

Everyone has ideas for companies that can be worth millions. But the current orthodoxy around VC economics balk if your game plan is to be a 50M sale. Either you make the big time, or you can be a tax write off when you fail. A "moderate" success won't pay the Limited Partners back at the end of the 10 year vesting cycle the billions the put in at the start.

Theranos is an example how how much money there is trying to find the next Jobs/Musk/Zuck/Gates. Everyone that gave Elizabeth Holmes money we hoping that she was the Steve Jobs of biotech.

There is much less money for someone who wants to create a a dating site for people with food allergies.

It depends a bit on the stage. It is definitely that competitive for the best growth stage companies, where "best" roughly means "highest growth in a market that can sustain a venture-level return (which in practice means a $1B+ valuation)." These companies tend to be large enough that they naturally gain access to investors, there's cheap capital everywhere, and there just aren't that many companies in big markets that are on aggressive growth trajectories.

Fwiw it also isn't just silicon valley at this point, the funding patterns increasingly hold across much of north america.