20VC's Big Fat Quiz of the Year: Founder, Fund and Breakout Company of 2025 | Predictions for 2026: The Company to Buy, The Biggest Short | Why Salesforce Could Win 2026 and The Tailwinds NVIDIA Will Face artwork

20VC's Big Fat Quiz of the Year: Founder, Fund and Breakout Company of 2025 | Predictions for 2026: The Company to Buy, The Biggest Short | Why Salesforce Could Win 2026 and The Tailwinds NVIDIA Will Face

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

December 22, 2025

AGENDA: 03:48 Founder of the Year 2025 06:58 Product of the Year 10:05 Fund of the Year 20:52 Breakout Companies of 2025: Who Made the Biggest Impact?
Speakers: Jason, Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
**Jason** (0:00)
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, but it's burning too much. There's no ceiling on venture, which changes all the math and calculations. We haven't missed the boat as investors, because what agents can do, we just started.

**Rory O'Driscoll** (0:24)
If unemployment rises up even two or three points, regardless of the reason, could just be the business cycle, you'll see a tech lash that makes what we're dealing with now an understatement.

**Jason** (0:34)
Society will be terrified of AI.

**Rory O'Driscoll** (0:36)
If the robots are going to take over society, I want to be sure that I own the robots.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:41)
This is 20VC, and the new show of the year for us has been our weekly show with Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll. It's been incredible to see the response that it's got. And for the final episode, we are doing a big fat quiz of the year. What does that mean? It means we are giving out awards to Best Fund of 2025, Best Founder of 2025, Best Product of 2025 And then we do a look forward, and we make some predictions. Which public stock is the stock to buy, stock to sell, which companies will go public in 2025, and so much more. This was great fun to do. And I always want your feedback, Harry, at 20vc.com. Let me know what we can do to make these better for you.
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**Rory O'Driscoll** (4:38)
You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (4:41)
Boys, it is the big fat quiz of the year. I don't know if you have this in America. The big fat quiz of the year is like a comedy show with Jack Whitehall, where they do like a review of what's happened and then they do your predictions for next year. I thought that, you know, I could be the Jack Whitehall in this scenario and we could do a review of what happened last in the last 12 months and then look forward on 2026 and some predictions. And so we're going to start with number one, the most important part of all of our ecosystem, the founders. Founder of the year for 2025, who would you have as your founder of the year?

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