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.