The Ledger

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why aren't all 124 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable

Prediction Held up
O'Driscoll: OpenAI misses next year's revenue target by 40% if growth matches Google
“If all OpenAI is, Is just as good as Google, then it's going to miss its number next year by about 40%.”
Rory O'Driscoll Jun 5, 2025 ▶ 47:06 Is DPI The Only Thing That Matters? with Sam Lessin, Jason Lemkin & Rory O’Driscoll · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
O'Driscoll: Musk earns $2B monthly selling compute to Anthropic and Google
“He found two of his biggest competitors who want to buy from him. You know, he's getting two billion a month, 1.25 from an topic and nine 50 from, no, the other way around, nine 50 from a topic, 1.25 from Google, the other way around, two billion a month. Two …”
Rory O’Driscoll Jun 11, 2026 ▶ 52:22 SpaceX Launches Largest Ever IPO | OpenAI Files to Go Public | Uber Cuts 23% of HR · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Mostaque: Only 5 or 6 foundation model companies will exist in 3-5 years
“I think that there's only going to be five or six foundation model companies in the world in three years, five years. I think it's going to be us, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft OpenAI, and Meta and Apple probably are the ones that train these models.”
Emad Mostaque Nov 24, 2023 ▶ 0:55 The Ultimate AI Roundtable: What Happens Now in AI, Why Google are Vulnerable | E1085 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
Socher: Bing and Google copied You.com's AI chat features
“Bing and Google copy, you know, what we have launched last late last year with you chat. And you know, they may have worked on it before, like some people, you know, claim, oh, for, I mean, we've also met the prompt engineering in 2018, but like, they've copie…”
Richard Socher Aug 18, 2023 ▶ 39:38 Richard Socher: The 3 Biggest Barriers to Building AGI; AI Startups vs Incumbents | E1050 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Foroughi: AppLovin will become the third-largest digital ad marketplace
“Like if you just to size it, that's Facebook, Google one, two, or in whichever order I'd have to check, but that's the third biggest digital marketplace for advertising in terms of scale that will exist.”
Adam Foroughi Nov 29, 2021 ▶ 32:04 20VC: AppLovin's Co-Founder & CEO, Adam Foroughi on How AppLovin Might Be The Venture Capital Industry's Biggest Miss, How To Run a 1,000+ Organisation with Very Few Meetings & Balancing the Demands of Wall St with Long Term, Sustainable Growth
Assertion Partly supported
Romanow: 40% of venture capital goes directly to Google and Facebook ads
“40% of venture capital dollars that are raised today end up going straight to Google and Facebook ads.”
Michele Romanow May 10, 2019 ▶ 8:13 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises
Assertion Supported
Atallah: Google's Jeff Dean is starting an AI agent lab
“Jeff Dean is starting an agent lab right now from Google.”
Alex Atallah Aug 9, 2026 ▶ 29:27 OpenRouter CEO: Why Chinese Open Models Are Beating the US | Why Enterprises Fear OpenAI & Anthropic
Assertion Partly supported
O'Driscoll: Nvidia's $50B Quarterly Profit Makes It World's Most Profitable
“It's the 50 something billion in profits, which makes it the most profitable company on the planet, because typically Google clocks in around a hundred to a hundred and twenty billion now a year. Right? These guys, in a quarter, made fifty billion plus, fifty-…”
Rory O'Driscoll May 28, 2026 ▶ 2:07 OpenAI & SpaceX S1 Drops | Layoffs at Cloudflare & ClickUp | OpenRouter & Polsia Raise Mega Rounds · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Omer Shai says most relevant global web traffic remains on Google
“And again, in general, when you are looking at most of the traffic, the relevant traffic in the world, it's still on Google.”
Omer Shai Jan 31, 2026 ▶ 31:25 20Growth: How Wix Built a $100M Marketing Machine | Why LTV is BS and Why Time Return On Investment is the Most Important Metric | How to 10x Your Growth: What is the Next Great Channel with Omer Shai, CMO @ Wix
Assertion Supported
O'Driscoll: Disney issued a cease-and-desist letter to Google over IP usage
“They sent a cease and desist letter to Google Because for unlicensed use of the content.”
Rory O'Driscoll Dec 18, 2025 ▶ 12:09 Will Cursor Kill Figma? Lightspeed Raises $9B & OpenAI’s $1B from Disney & #1 App in App Store · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Contradicted
O'Driscoll: Meta and Google control 70% of all global advertising
“Facebook and Google have 70% of not just all digital advertising, but all advertising.”
Rory O'Driscoll Dec 11, 2025 ▶ 29:01 SpaceX Valued at $800BN & Harvey Raises $160M at an $8BN Price & Netflix Acquires Warner Brothers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Frosst: All creators of the Transformer architecture eventually left Google
“It is interesting that all the people who worked on the transformer left To continue to work on the transformer.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 3:12 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Villig: Google heavily subsidizes Waymo rides to mask high operational costs
“Yeah, but there's a difference between price and cost. Google is one of the wealthiest companies on the planet. They can keep on subsidizing millions of rights for a long time. That doesn't mean the cost structure is there.”
Markus Villig Nov 13, 2024 ▶ 1:13:58 Markus Villig, Founder @Bolt: The Most Insane Story in Startups & The Future of Self-Driving| E1225 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Held up
Kant: Poolside, OpenAI, and Anthropic will rival Big Tech in AI
“What I would like to see and what I think is going to happen is that it's not just Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. It's going to be, you know, an open eye, an anthropic, a poolside, and a set of companies who are able to get that massive escape velocity needed …”
Eiso Kant Oct 7, 2024 ▶ 53:29 Eiso Kant, CTO @Poolside: Raising $600M To Compete in the Race for AGI | E1211 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Kant: Google relies on Broadcom for TPUs while Amazon works with fabs
“Because while Google has to work with Broadcom to be able to bring TPUs into the world, Amazon is working with the fabs directly.”
Eiso Kant Oct 7, 2024 ▶ 20:13 Eiso Kant, CTO @Poolside: Raising $600M To Compete in the Race for AGI | E1211 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Lemkin: Wiz must IPO within 18 months after rejecting Google bid
“When the CEOs in, in, in, in the letter to the team says, we're going to go public instead, you got to do it in the next 18 months or so.”
Jason Lemkin Jul 24, 2024 ▶ 20:08 Jason Lemkin: Crowdstrike, WTF Happens From Here? Wiz Rejects Google’s $23BN Acquisition Offer|E1181 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
ChatGPT's Release Forced Google Onto Red Alert After Delaying Transformers
“Google Brain invents the kind of transformer and publishes it, and it's kind of bouncing around as kind of a research project, and it takes OpenAI developing it, scaling it, and releasing it as ChatGPT for Google to go on red alert and go, oh my god, we should…”
Reid Hoffman Jun 10, 2024 ▶ 32:02 Reid Hoffman: The Future of TikTok and The Inflection AI Deal | E1163 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Held up
Zhang: OpenAI will aggressively compete with Google in web search
“They just hired the search leader from Google. Like, they are gonna go after that space, which is, like, the most lucrative space, and also a space that, you know, should be innovated on.”
Jiaona Zhang May 17, 2024 ▶ 56:28 Jiaona Zhang: Why All Product Teams Should Have a Scorecard & How to Use It | E1154 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
Richard Socher: Bing and Google Copied YouChat Months After Its Launch
“We've also seen Bing and Google copy what we have launched late last year with you chat. They've copied us in the sense that we've launched it earlier and then they launched something very similar three to four months after.”
Richard Socher Sep 15, 2023 ▶ 21:29 20VC: The Biggest AI Leaders on What Matters More; Model Size or Data Size & Where Does The Value in AI Accrue; to Startups or to Incumbents
Assertion Supported
Socher: Google Earns $500 Million Daily From Main Search Ads
“They make five hundred million dollars a day with privacy invading advertisements on that page.”
Richard Socher Aug 18, 2023 ▶ 40:30 Richard Socher: The 3 Biggest Barriers to Building AGI; AI Startups vs Incumbents | E1050 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Held up
Mostaque: AI-synthesized search results will destroy digital media ad revenue
“I think he is right to be worried. Like, again, you look at Google's announcements yesterday, they were talking about this day after Palm Two, You suddenly look at the new Google page where they've got the language model, and it's just text, and where are the …”
Emad Mostaque May 17, 2023 ▶ 29:56 Emad Mostaque: These 5 Companies Will Win the AI War; Why We Need National Data Sets | E1015 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Jordan: TikTok Buys Users at Scale Unlike Early Google or Facebook
“That's not a categorical rule, because TikTok buys users at monstrous scale. But, you know, Google really didn't buy many users, Facebook didn't buy many users, you know, tick, tick, tick, tick.”
Jeff Jordan Jan 24, 2023 ▶ 9:28 The Ultimate Guide for Building a Two-Sided Marketplace | a16z's Jeff Jordan · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Contradicted
Stebbings: 45% of Millennials Use TikTok Over Google for Search
“I saw an unbelievable stat, which is like, 45% of millennials use TikTok instead of Google as their primary search engine.”
Harry Stebbings Jan 24, 2023 ▶ 8:28 The Ultimate Guide for Building a Two-Sided Marketplace | a16z's Jeff Jordan · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Contradicted
Stebbings: 45% of millennials use TikTok over Google for search
“I saw an unbelievable stat, which is like, 45% of millennials use TikTok instead of Google as their primary search engine.”
Harry Stebbings Jan 16, 2023 ▶ 14:26 a16z GP Jeff Jordan: The Ultimate Guide to Two-Sided Marketplaces | 20VC #966 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Contradicted
Emil Michael: Uber grew faster than any company in history, including Google
“We grew faster than any company in the world, both geographically And revenue wise, including Google.”
Emil Michael Oct 25, 2022 ▶ 1:05:26 Emil Michael: How I Negotiated the $4B Uber-China Deal, Why DoorDash Caught Up to Uber | 20VC #941 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Emil Michael: Uber's acquisition of Otto destroyed its relationship with Google
“I'd say that the deal that Was under my watch. I didn't like it at the time, but I, you know, it got done was Uber acquiring auto, which was the autonomous car division that that gets started out of Google guys. It was, and I didn't like it for different reaso…”
Emil Michael Oct 25, 2022 ▶ 28:53 Emil Michael: How I Negotiated the $4B Uber-China Deal, Why DoorDash Caught Up to Uber | 20VC #941 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Every digital ad platform update makes user acquisition more expensive
“There's never been a single update in digital advertising that has made buying cheaper. The advertising algorithms on these major platforms like Facebook and Google are getting hyper-efficient, and every update just makes them more expensive.”
Josh Buckley Nov 25, 2019 ▶ 19:10 20VC: Why The Best Entrepreneurs Are Cockroaches, What Everyone Underestimates About Customer Acquisition & What You Don't But Need To Know About Payback Periods with Josh Buckley, Founder & Chairman @ Mino Games
Assertion Contradicted
Digital advertising CPMs compound at approximately 40% per year
“The second force at play is essentially the market-wide, the CPMs are just compounding. The number we've seen is about 40% a year, and that's just because of a number of factors around the algorithms of new competitors coming into the market.”
Josh Buckley Nov 25, 2019 ▶ 16:35 20VC: Why The Best Entrepreneurs Are Cockroaches, What Everyone Underestimates About Customer Acquisition & What You Don't But Need To Know About Payback Periods with Josh Buckley, Founder & Chairman @ Mino Games
Assertion Supported
Loftus: Big Tech Buyer Softening Has Kept Startup Acquisition Prices Moderate
“So I haven't seen a ton of price increase, but I do think that's because in my view, even though you've seen new entrants into the market, There's been softening at the other end of the market from the Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon end.”
James Loftus Mar 26, 2018 ▶ 10:10 20VC: How Great VCs Handle Themselves In An M&A Process, Why M&A Has Become The Primary Method of Exit & How The Best M&A Teams Operationalise Their Process with James Loftus, Corporate Development Lead @ Square
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Chad Byers Predicts Facebook or Amazon Will Hit $1 Trillion First
“So I think it's Facebook. You know, my second answer, although this is kind of cheating, would probably be Amazon. So Facebook or Amazon, I don't think it's Apple. I don't think it's Google. I think it's going to be one of those two.”
Chad Byers Aug 24, 2016 ▶ 21:25 20VC: Why Raising A Fund Is Like Raising A $25m Seed Round with No Product & Why Not All LP Money Is Equal with Chad Byers, General Partner @ Susa Ventures
Assertion Contradicted
Only Google has an AI dataset comparable to Diffbot
“I think the only other company in the world that has that kind of data set is Google.”
Aydin Senkut Apr 11, 2016 ▶ 28:22 20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differently and Why Being A VC Is Like A Jamaican Bobsled Team!
Assertion Partly supported
Lemkin: GrokBot violates Google's terms of service to deliver answers
“GrokBot uses Google, which is not allowed, which is prohibited by the term of service to Google things and then give you answers.”
Jason Lemkin Sep 10, 2026 ▶ 2:00 Jensen Huang Declares AGI Has Arrived | Tesla Launches Cybercabs | Index Pulls Out of Town
Assertion Supported
O'Driscoll: Apple pays Google $1B for Gemini while receiving $20B for search
“I think, to some extent, they're giving in the sense that they're paying Google a billion dollars to use their model as the default model, but reminder, Google pays them, I think, 12 or 20, I used to know the number, twenty billion dollars to be the default se…”
Rory O'Driscoll Jun 11, 2026 ▶ 21:46 SpaceX Launches Largest Ever IPO | OpenAI Files to Go Public | Uber Cuts 23% of HR · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
O'Driscoll: Anthropic deal makes up 40% of Google's future backlog
“I think now the anthropic rev commit is about 40% of Google's total future backlog.”
Rory O'Driscoll May 14, 2026 ▶ 13:19 Anthropic Buys Compute From Elon & Commits $200BN to Google | Cerebras IPO | Ramp Raises at $40BN · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Stebbings: Anthropic committed $200B to Google Cloud over five years
“They also did a deal committing two hundred billion to Google over, I believe it was a five-year period.”
Harry Stebbings May 14, 2026 ▶ 12:22 Anthropic Buys Compute From Elon & Commits $200BN to Google | Cerebras IPO | Ramp Raises at $40BN · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Contradicted
Midha: Google operates 12 to 15 gigawatts of compute infrastructure
“I think Google Is roughly at 12 to 15 gigawatts of that I'm aware of infrastructure for internal and external deployed needs.”
Anjney Midha Apr 14, 2026 ▶ 33:43 The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Rejected It | The Four Bottlenecks in AI | Anj Midha · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
O'Driscoll: Serving free ChatGPT users costs more than Google or Facebook
“And the cost to serve a free ChatGPT customer is higher than either Facebook or Google.”
Rory O'Driscoll Jan 22, 2026 ▶ 45:21 Elon Musk vs Sam Altman | The Implosion of Thinking Machines | Can VC Survive Public Pricing? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Cognition learned of Windsurf's Google deal at the same time as the public
“We found out, honestly, on Friday, the same time everyone else did, that all of this was happening, and that this was the split, and that it was Google”
Scott Wu Jul 18, 2025 ▶ 1:20 Cognition CEO Scott Wu on Acquiring Windsurf: The Process, The Deal, The Rationale · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Contradicted
Flanagan: AI Overviews now appear in over 35% of Google searches
“That's on over, like, 35% of all searches today have some sort of AI overviews experience, and so that's rolling out much more rapidly.”
Kieran Flanagan Jul 11, 2025 ▶ 26:00 20Growth: The Death of Growth Teams? | How Hubspot Use AI to Triple Email Conversion | The Future of AI SEO | Why Prompt Engineering is the New Coding | What Every CMO Needs to Know About AI in 2025
Prediction Held up
O'Driscoll: Sundar Pichai won't leave Google, but won't solve AI threat
“So my guess is by far the prior, the most likely outcome is not leave, just continue to manage what you've got reasonably well without ever solving the existential problem.”
Rory O'Driscoll Jun 12, 2025 ▶ 1:13:22 Elon’s Empire: SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink After the Storm & Anduril’s $2.6BN Power Move · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Contradicted
Ramaswamy: Google Paid AOL Over 100% Revenue Share in Early Deal
“If I remember correctly, the, we paid AOL more money than we made. This was like a hundred plus percent ref share.”
Sridhar Ramaswamy Feb 10, 2025 ▶ 48:28 Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO @Snowflake: Deepseek is Not a Threat to OpenAI & OpenAI Beats Anthropic|E1258 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Uber manually onboarded its first million drivers without major digital ad spend
“For probably the first million drivers that we onboarded, a lot of our processes were manual, right? So we weren't doing a lot of like paid spend on Facebook. We were doing a little bit on Craigslist. We weren't doing a ton on Google, but it was really the ope…”
Scott Gorlick Aug 30, 2024 ▶ 7:19 Scott Gorlick: How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers & The Uber’s Expansion Playbook | E1196 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Cahn: The $250B Cloud Infrastructure Market Equals the Entire SaaS Sector
“This cloud business today is a two hundred and fifty billion dollar business. So the cloud business today is the same size as the SaaS sector. That's the business that Azure, Google and AWS control is the same size as the entire SaaS sector.”
David Cahn Aug 5, 2024 ▶ 11:47 David Cahn: Why Servers, Steel and Power Are the Pillars Powering the Future of AI | E1186 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Levie: AI context windows grew 500x in 18 months
“The token context window was more or less, I think, 4000 tokens. So you kind of give it like a blog post to analyze just in the past, you know, week at Google IO Sundar announced a two million token window model or version of Gemini. So think about that. That'…”
Aaron Levie May 22, 2024 ▶ 8:00 Aaron Levie: How the Business Model of SaaS Changes Forever & Startups vs Incumbents:Who Wins?|E1155 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Held up
Söderström: Spotify will not build general frontier AI models to compete
“So that's why, you know, there's no point in trying to compete with them for us because we don't even have the same goal. So we're trying to build exactly the things that we don't think they will build. And we would buy the things that they will build or someo…”
Gustav Söderström Dec 20, 2023 ▶ 27:17 Roundtable #7: Spotify, Adobe and Linkedin on How AI Changes The Future of Product & Design | E1097 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Socher: Google generates $500M per day from search advertisements
“They make five hundred million dollars a day With privacy invading advertisements on that page.”
Richard Socher Nov 24, 2023 ▶ 28:19 The Ultimate AI Roundtable: What Happens Now in AI, Why Google are Vulnerable | E1085 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Mostaque: Google's Med-PaLM 2 AI model exceeds doctor performance levels
“Now we have MedPOM-II that exceeds doctor levels. So that was a Google announcement yesterday.”
Emad Mostaque May 17, 2023 ▶ 5:08 Emad Mostaque: These 5 Companies Will Win the AI War; Why We Need National Data Sets | E1015 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Held up
Mostaque: Google will spend $20 billion annually on AI
“Google will spend twenty billion dollars a year on AI.”
Emad Mostaque May 17, 2023 ▶ 46:20 Emad Mostaque: These 5 Companies Will Win the AI War; Why We Need National Data Sets | E1015 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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