Venture capital, startups and investing, on tape.

Every prediction, opinion and bold claim from the Y Combinator Startup Podcast: extracted from the transcript, verified against the tape, checked against cited public sources, playable at the exact moment it was said.

Star Treatment Does prominence change the questions? Every guest, plotted. prominence vs. host pushback Supercuts Didn’t hold up · Held up · Said with certainty exact-quote reels The Argument Index Debate potential by speaker, and the companies with the most bearish calls. debate potential, ranked The Numbers Museum Every figure ever claimed, checked where possible. 872 figures Entities Every company, fund and idea the show has opinions about, sources attached. 7,596 on the record The Calls Dated predictions and their status, on one timeline. 18 open The Pulse What the Valley talks about, year by year, since 2013. who said it first Straight Answers Who answers the question asked, measured. Every moment timestamped and playable. 8 questions not answered directly The Wisdom Wall The lessons worth keeping. No fortune cookies. 2,573 insights The Graph 13 years of people, companies and ideas as one map. explore connections Changed Positions Same person, opposite position. Both tapes, side by side. 0 on record Speaking Style Measured from raw, unedited recordings only. 0 speakers scored

Recently on the ledger full ledger →

Prediction Open · timeframe Mar 2031

Chollet: AGI Codebase Will Be Under 10,000 Lines on 1980s Compute

“I do believe that, you know, when you create a GI retrospectively, it will turn out that it's a code base that's less than 10,000 lines of code. And that if you had known about it back in the 19 eighties, you could have done a GI back then using the computer r…”

François Chollet Mar 27, 2026 ▶ 36:09 François Chollet: Why Scaling Alone Isn’t Enough for AGI · Y Combinator

Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2026

Musk: Digital superintelligence will arrive by 2026 for sure

“Like, I think we're quite close to digital superintelligence. It may happen this year, and if it doesn't happen this year, next year for sure. Digital superintelligence is defined as smarter than any human at anything.”

Elon Musk Jun 19, 2025 ▶ 42:04 Elon Musk: Digital Superintelligence, Multiplanetary Life, How to Be Useful · Y Combinator

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Tom Blomfield says today's software engineering jobs will vanish within 10 years

“But the conclusion of all of that, I think, is that software engineering jobs of today, I think, will not exist in five or 10 years.”

Tom Blomfield May 9, 2025 ▶ 9:22 How AI Coding Agents Will Change Your Job · Y Combinator

Opinion

Conrad: David Sacks' PR campaign drove Zenefits into the ground

“David really sort of He hired a sort of a comms person that he works with a lot, this guy named Lanny Davis, and they just focused on like attacking me, like over and over and over again for like six months, and it became this huge thing. And David, well, he w…”

Parker Conrad Jan 10, 2025 ▶ 21:46 How To Build The Future: Parker Conrad · Y Combinator

Opinion

Khosla: 90% of VCs add no value, 70% add negative value

“I think, 90% of investors add no value. In my assessment, 70% of investors add negative value to a company.”

Vinod Khosla Jan 9, 2019 ▶ 3:59 Vinod Khosla : How to Build the Future · Y Combinator

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Wang: Meta Agent Swarms Outperform Teams of 100 Engineers

“Like, I think we've seen, internally in meta cases where if you can develop the right agentic loop and you have the right eval or the right metric for the agents to optimize, you can have a swarm of agents accomplish more than, like, a team of a hundred engine…”

Alexandr Wang Jul 29, 2026 ▶ 28:09 Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity” · Y Combinator

How the calls resolved the full record →

Assertion Supported

Susskind: Quantum teleportation cannot enable faster-than-light communication

“In order to do quantum teleportation, you cannot do quantum teleportation without at the same time sending classical information from one place to another. Classical information means, you know, The dots and dashes, Morse code dots and dashes. You can have two…”

Leonard Susskind Dec 6, 2018 ▶ 56:16 Leonard Susskind on Richard Feynman, the Holographic Principle, and Unanswered Questions in Physics · Y Combinator

Prediction Didn’t hold up

Akinlade in 2018: Nigeria's population will exceed the US in five years

“Like in the next five years, I think Nigeria is going to be even more than the US.”

Shola Akinlade Oct 16, 2018 ▶ 40:15 Helping African Businesses Get Paid, Shola Akinlade of Paystack · Y Combinator

Assertion Supported

Aaronson: Busy Beaver grows faster than any computable function

“The amazing thing about this function is that it increases more rapidly than any function that could be calculated by any computer program. This is provable, right? So you know, it is a ridiculously quickly growing function.”

Scott Aaronson Jun 29, 2018 ▶ 55:45 Scott Aaronson on Computational Complexity Theory and Quantum Computers · Y Combinator

Assertion Contradicted

Capturing 20% of global freight makes a company bigger than Saudi Aramco

“Our goal is to get to 20 or 40% market share. If you do that, you're the biggest company on planet earth. Like full stop, like bigger than Saudi Aramco.”

Ryan Petersen Aug 30, 2018 ▶ 45:21 Ryan Petersen on Building Flexport, a Modern Freight Forwarder · Y Combinator

Open predictions the full timeline →

109days Musk: Digital superintelligence will arrive by 2026 for sure Elon Musk · prediction date: 2026-12-31 318days Scholl: Boom will deliver its first natural gas turbine within 12 months Blake Scholl · prediction date: 2027-07-28 364days Masad: Developers will reliably run 1,000 concurrent AI agents within two years Amjad Masad · prediction date: 2027-09-12 541days Buchheit: Commercial supersonic flights will reach Tokyo in six hours by 2028 Paul Buchheit · prediction date: 2028-03-07

Track records all people →

Ordered by full support rate, then by supported count. Minimum three resolved. Partly supported claims count as resolved but not as fully supported, same as everywhere on the ledger.

Person	Eps	Statements	Supported	Full support rate
Simon Benjamin	1	26	14	100%
Rana Adhikari	1	18	12	100%
Stuart (Stu)	1	8	7	100%
Leonard Susskind	1	30	7	100%
Carolynn Levy	4	25	7	100%
Ryan Hoover	2	45	6	100%
Dylan Field	2	40	5	100%
Chelsea Finn	1	29	5	100%

From the Wisdom Wall all quotes →

“If they're completely failing, that's probably a good sign. If they're kind of able to do some of it, but not very well, That's maybe not a great sign because that's probably a sign that the…”

Jeff Dean, Jul 30, 2026 · ▶ 28:26

“I mean, I really think, I think we're at this, like, amazing moment in the world where the bottleneck is not the progress of the AI models. The bottleneck is diffusing that through the rest of the…”

Alexandr Wang, Jul 29, 2026 · ▶ 9:38

“Like all of a sudden the scarce resource isn't gonna be Intelligence or agency. I really think it's going to be vision and ambition.”