Regarding numbers, I believe he's talking about maximum potential revenue as determined by the market size.
VCs won't invest in companies they think can only grow so big because it's not enough returns for them. In that sense, he's correct - VCs won't blink at a business that has a theoretical maximum revenue in 8 figures.
Plenty of companies that cannot themselves beat 8 figure revenue numbers are worth many multiples of 8 figures to acquiring companies with better sales channels or strategic gaps.
I agree that the mere promise of eventual $10MM/yr revenues is probably not an appealing pitch. But the reality of $10MM/yr revenue is wildly different. If you're bringing in $10MM/yr, you can probably do whatever you want.
[Companies with 8 figures of revenue] are worth many multiples of 8 figures to acquiring companies with better sales channels or strategic gaps. <-- this is probably the most important sentence written on HN in July.
Let's say that you've built up, from essentially nothing, enough of a presence in your industry that you're selling $10 million a year of SaaS. That's only 10k accounts at a blended average of $100 a month -- far less if, like many SaaS companies, you make a significant whack of your money on custom enterprise deals that are not on the pricing page.
Now consider this company from the perspective of a Fortune 500 like, say, Intuit:
1) They have software which exists.
2) Their software creates clear value for customers. They have 10,000 people signing their praises and case studies up the wazoo. We know people will pay $100 a month for it -- we have copious, audited financial statements that prove that.
3) Oh yeah, we're a Fortune 500 company. Launching a new product costs us $250 million and we could fail to produce something that both achieves technical success and produces any value for anyone anywhere. Assuming we do, selling to our built-in base of hundreds of thousands of customers is what we do best.
Intuit can totally justify spending, say, $300 million to buy $20 million a year of revenue and the opportunity to 20x that by selling it to everyone who has ever heard of Quickbooks. Or mid 8 figures for something which has, say, a million a year in revenue.
We ran into this mindset in early meetings with some VCs once-upon-a-before-we-decided-to-bootstrap. We had some market validation, and didn't forsee needing much money to go from our humble launch to national presence (at the time we would have struggled to spend even $150k).
But by asking for a low figure, it seemed to signal that we didn't see ourselves as the next $100 million business (the horror!). As an experiment, we doubled the number in subsequent discussions and got a far more positive response. In the end we decided that getting early investment wasn't for us.
I completely appreciate where the more skeptical VCs were coming from, though. If you're going to spend the same amount of your time working with a group of people long-term, you might as well put that time into a company that is eventually worth billions instead of millions.
There's actually raw mechanical economics feeding into this: it turns out to be hard for VCs to find good places to put money at risk, and also a giant pain to be on lots of boards. Invest/dont-invest can sometimes be more or less binary, and if true, desired-amount=maximum.
VCs won't invest in companies they think can only grow so big because it's not enough returns for them. In that sense, he's correct - VCs won't blink at a business that has a theoretical maximum revenue in 8 figures.