Dec 22, 2025 · 1h 12m · news
Predictions for 2026: Top Buy & Biggest Short | Why Salesforce Could Win & NVIDIA’s Challenges · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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In this special year-end episode of 20VC, host Harry Stebbings and tech experts Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll review the major venture capital breakthroughs of 2025 and make bold predictions for public stocks, AI monetization, and IPO activity in 2026.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 10% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 3.8 Guest teaching 4.8 Guest disagreement 4.3 Harry pushing back 2.5
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 36:42 Rory rejecting Harry's stock prediction question
Rory forcefully dismisses Harry's question about 2026 tech stocks as bullshit, challenging Harry on whether he even knows 2025's true top performers before asking for future predictions.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 13:40 Harry defending Hummingbird's 8x returnHarry holds his ground when Jason downplays Hummingbird's performance, firmly arguing that returning $800M on a $100M fund is objectively outstanding regardless of the era.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 36:44 Rory educating Harry with actual 2025 stock performanceRory schools Harry on the folly of top-down stock predictions by revealing that obscure companies like Planet Labs, Bloom Energy, and Oklo were 2025's true top performers.
Harry holds his own ▶ 14:41 Harry citing Benchmark's winning portfolioHarry demonstrates deep venture expertise by rapidly listing Benchmark's specific Series A investments including Sierra, Cerebras, and LangChain to justify his nomination.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome to the Big Fat Quiz of the Year | 4 | 3 | 5 | 3 | Harry sets up the year-end quiz format, proposing Founder of the Year candidates like Gwen Shotwell and Alex Wang. Rory immediately expresses disdain for the format, calling wrap-up shows bullshit and declaring he will be grumpy throughout. | |
| Venture Capital Fund of the Year | 6 | 4 | 4 | 4 | Harry showcases detailed venture knowledge by highlighting Hummingbird's 8x fund return and listing Benchmark's Series A hits. Jason teases Harry's European bias and jokingly questions whether an 8x return is impressive enough in the AI era. | |
| Individual Investor of the Year | 5 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Harry nominates Lee Marie from Kleiner Perkins citing exact liquidity events, while Rory picks Elad Gil while teasing Harry about how many employees support his 'solo' setup. | |
| 2025 Breakout Company of the Year | 5 | 2 | 2 | 2 | The panel collaboratively highlights top breakout companies, with Rory explaining Open Evidence's medical search monetization and Harry citing ElevenLabs' rapid growth to $400M ARR. | |
| The Biggest Surprise of 2025 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Rory points to extreme talent acquisition deals as 2025's biggest surprise, while Harry mentions his behind-the-scenes interview context during the Windsurf acquisition drama. | |
| 2026 Predictions: Best Performing Tech Stocks | 2 | 8 | 8 | 3 | Rory vehemently rejects Harry's stock prediction prompt as a bullshit question, schooling him by listing obscure 2025 top performers like Planet Labs and Oklo to show how top-down stock picking fails. | |
| The Battle of AI Pricing and Value in SaaS | 3 | 6 | 4 | 2 | Jason and Rory debate SaaS pricing dynamics, with Jason criticizing Adobe's performative AI-influenced revenue metrics while praising Notion for doubling seat prices effectively. | |
| Buy One, Short One: Big Tech & Nvidia's Capex Cycle | 4 | 6 | 7 | 4 | Rory chooses to short Nvidia based on capex risks, which Jason forcefully dismisses by calling anyone shorting Nvidia in 2026 a fool due to semiconductor production lead times. Harry pushes back on Rory's evaluation of Apple. | |
| 2026 IPO Predictions for Mega Tech Companies | 4 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Rory provides a thoughtful breakdown of institutional float mechanics and banking challenges for taking $1 trillion companies public, while Harry and Jason place concrete bets on upcoming IPOs. | |
| AI-Driven Unemployment and the Threat of Tech Lash | 1 | 7 | 6 | 0 | Rory counters Jason's focus on federal employment statistics by arguing tech executives have already confessed to causing AI job losses, ensuring a political tech-lash whenever unemployment ticks up regardless of the actual cause. |
Statements from this episode (24)
Lemkin: SpaceX, Canva, Databricks, and Anthropic will IPO in 2026
“I think we see four IPOs backloaded next year. SpaceX goes out first. Canva comes out of nowhere second. Databricks does it in the back half of the year because it's just time. Anthropic does it at the end of the year. OpenAI probably should have gone first, b…”
Stebbings: Robinhood has nine products generating over $100M revenue each
“Nine products do over a hundred million in revenue.”
O'Driscoll: VC funds should be judged solely by annual exit ownership
“The only fair way to measure things is, did you end up owning a lot, have a big ownership in big exits? And then you measure that for the year in which it happens. You don't try and account for other years, and then it's at least objective.”
Stebbings: Founders Fund deployed $3B in under 12 months into mega-rounds
“Founders Fund, deploying three billion in under 12 months, but deploying it into Stripe, SpaceX, and Anduril.”
Lemkin: Google is corporate investor of the year for its massive stakes
“Owning almost 10% of SpaceX, owning, ah, perhaps 14% of Anthropic, depending on dilution, right? Now, and obviously, now this is the greatest in circular investment of all, owning the vast majority of Waymo, which is going to blow up. But those three are, like…”
O'Driscoll: Elad Gil raised a $3 billion solo venture capital fund
“He's been good enough to be able to raise a three billion dollar solo fund.”
Rory O'Driscoll: Open Evidence reached 500,000 U.S. doctors in one year
“And they went from nothing to 500,000 doctors out of about a million in the U.S. In the space of one year.”
Lemkin: Databricks reached $5B revenue and is accelerating at 55% growth
“But Snowflake's AI revenue is pretty small. It's a Gentix strategy is just starting, and Databricks rode this to, now they're both at five billion, and Databricks is growing and accelerating at 55% growth.”
Stebbings: ElevenLabs scaled to $400M ARR in 2025 despite OpenAI competition
“I think when you look at what 11 labs have done this year, scaling to four hundred million in ARR, Standing off competition from OpenAI in any of the other incumbents.”
Lemkin: Vibe coding tools will eventually build $100M+ revenue B2B apps
“No one built a game changing B to B app with nine figures of revenue on lovable or replet. I do believe it will come.”
Lemkin: 2026 will see one or two trillion-dollar tech IPOs
“The idea that we will have a trillion dollar IPO next year, maybe two, we might have two trillion dollar IPOs”
O'Driscoll: Planet Labs, Bloom, Opendoor, Oklo, and Seagate topped 2025 tech stocks
“Literally if you rank every stock in the U S and vaguely defined as tech and don't put a market cap filter, you know, a very small one cut out to on and below planet labs, bloom energy, open door, Oclo and Seagate top five performing stocks this year.”
Lemkin: Three of today's top six B2B stocks will retain 2026 leadership
“My Pekumumusukus, Pekumumusukus, Palantir, Cloudflare, Mongo, Shopify, CrowdStrike, Snowflake, I'll bet you 10 grand, three of them are in the top six of this cohort at the end of next year.”
Lemkin: Salesforce will be the biggest public tech stock beneficiary in 2026
“I think Salesforce might be the biggest beneficiary next year, and I'll tell you why, because it has, it is, like, you have to also, we go through the ones that declined the most this year, and you have to be honest, are they at least tapping into AI tailwinds…”
Lemkin: Adobe's $5B 'AI-influenced revenue' metric is misleading vanity reporting
“The worst offender is Adobe, okay? Because Adobe announced they had five billion of quote, AI influenced revenue this year. That, listen, let, Let's be kind. It's, I'm sure it's true. I'm sure they're using Firefly and generating images with AI, but to me, it …”
O'Driscoll: Bundling AI without raising prices reduces software operating margins by 10%
“Because if all that happens is, you take your same revenue line, you bundle in a whole bunch of AI, you don't expand your revenue, congratulations, you've reduced your operating margins by 10%.”
Lemkin: Paid standalone AI co-pilots were B2B software's biggest 2025 failure
“The biggest failing of this year, we talked about, I want to say in twenties, going to Rory's point, it was the co-pilot. The co-pilot was the worst of all worlds. We're not going to put it in our base product. We're not going to make the core product better, …”
Lemkin: Custom chip competition will not threaten Nvidia's dominance in 2026
“You're a fool to invest against Nvidia for 2026. And I think you are arguably a fool to invest into Amazon in 20, 26 for a simple reason. Just a simple, I didn't say 20, 27 or 20, 28. It is not enough time for all this competition to come online. It is not eno…”
Lemkin: Amazon stock will underperform Big Tech peers in 2026
“Amazon stocks only up two percent this year, if, and I think they're gonna, they will be the underperformer next year, for the same, there's just not enough time”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic will likely IPO in 2026, but Stripe will not
“I think Stripe, least likely, take it off the table. My gut would be Antropic gets it done.”
O'Driscoll: A 2-3% unemployment jump will trigger an unprecedented tech backlash
“If unemployment ratchets up even two or three points, regardless of the reason, could just be the business cycle, I think you'll see a tech lash that makes what we're dealing with now an understatement.”
Lemkin: Official AI job loss statistics will spark widespread panic by 2026
“I think this will accelerate it when there's hard numbers at the top of the New York times and the wall street journal, assuming we still read anything at the end of next year. I think it will become every dinner table conversation for real.”
O'Driscoll: Tech will face AI backlash as CEOs blame it for layoffs
“I think actually we could end up in the weird quadrant of it's not as impactful in the short term as we think, but because we've confessed to the crime, we're going to take the heat when generalize, because every, every CEO, as you pointed out earlier, can go,…”