Assessment of the prediction
Friedberg’s advice (March 19, 2020) was that startups should do everything possible to extend cash so they had roughly 18 months of runway, implying that the COVID‑19 downturn and funding constraints could last long enough that companies needing to raise sooner would face serious risk.

What actually happened in venture markets

• There was a clear but relatively brief slowdown in venture activity in early 2020, especially at seed and early stage. Seed deals to VC‑backed companies in Q1 2020 dropped 27% vs. Q4 2019 and 43% vs. Q1 2019.(cbinsights.com)
• In Q2 2020, US venture deal count fell materially (e.g., about a 23% decline in total US deal count vs. Q1; North American seed/early/late‑stage deals and dollars were all down vs. Q2 2019), confirming a temporary funding crunch.(prnewswire.com)
• However, by late 2020 overall VC funding was very strong: global 2020 VC investment (~$300.5B) was actually higher than 2019 and the second‑largest year on record; the US hit a record annual VC total.(businesswire.com)
• In 2021 the market moved into an outright boom: global venture funding hit a record ~$621B, with six consecutive quarters of growth and unprecedented numbers of new unicorns.(siliconangle.com)

Runway guidance and risk

• Early in the pandemic, many investors and advisors independently urged startups to extend runway to 18–24+ months because raising in the near term was expected to be very difficult; Gartner, for example, recommended that tech startups with more than six months of cash should extend their runway to at least 18 months to ensure survival.(gartner.com)
• This shows Friedberg’s advice was mainstream risk‑management guidance at the time, but it doesn’t by itself prove that startups without 18 months’ runway were in fact doomed or even generally faced catastrophic failure rates.

Why the outcome is hard to score cleanly

• On one hand, there was a non‑trivial funding crunch in Q2 2020; startups that needed to raise in mid‑2020 with only a short runway did face elevated risk. On the other hand, venture markets recovered quickly and then entered a historic boom in 2021, which undercuts the idea of a prolonged, 18‑month‑plus funding freeze.(ey.com)
• The prediction is phrased in terms of “serious risk of failure” for startups with less than ~18 months of runway—a qualitative condition that is not directly measurable in aggregate data, and for which we lack clear statistics linking 18‑month runway shortfalls in early 2020 to actual failure outcomes.

Because (a) there was a meaningful but relatively short funding shock, (b) capital then became plentiful well before 18 months had elapsed, and (c) the claim hinges on a vague, hard‑to‑verify threshold of “serious risk,” the evidence does not allow a clean true/false judgment. Hence the prediction is best scored as ambiguous rather than clearly right or clearly wrong.