The statement is more of an investing heuristic than a concrete, time‑bounded prediction. It doesn’t specify:

• Which exact companies qualify (what counts as “adjacent features” or “turning expense lines into revenue lines”),
• How much outperformance counts as “significant,” or
• What time horizon “compound forever” / “many years” actually means.

Because of that, it’s impossible to cleanly test it, and the evidence since 2021 is mixed:

Evidence against the idea as a near‑universal “sure bet” rule

• In the episode, this logic is applied explicitly to Square/Block: “If Square can continue to acquire adjacent features, the stock market will reward these guys.”(metapodcast.net) But Block’s stock fell from an all‑time high around $289 in early August 2021 to roughly the mid‑$80s by early 2025, a ~70% drawdown, while the S&P 500 index rose from about 4,500 in August 2021 to the high‑6,000s by late 2025, a gain of roughly 50%.(stockscan.io) That’s massive underperformance from a flagship example of the pattern.
• Salesforce is a textbook serial acquirer of adjacent capabilities (e.g., Slack, Tableau, MuleSoft, now Informatica) intended to broaden its platform.(salesforce.com) Yet its stock is down over the past five years and has underperformed the S&P 500 by more than 90 percentage points in that span.(barrons.com) This contradicts the idea that such strategies are “sure bets” for market‑beating compounding.
• Sector vehicles full of exactly these kinds of “adjacent feature” fintech names have also lagged: the Global X FinTech ETF (FINX) shows a 5‑year average annual return of about –4.2%, versus +14–15% annually for an S&P 500 tracker over the same period.(assetsanalyzer.com) That’s substantial underperformance across a basket of companies pursuing these strategies.

Evidence that the pattern sometimes aligns with big long‑term winners

• Alphabet (Google) expanded aggressively into adjacent products (email, maps, video via YouTube, mobile via Android, cloud, etc.) and has delivered ~19% annualized returns over 20 years versus about 10.8% for the S&P 500, creating over $1 trillion in shareholder value.(kiplinger.com)
• Apple has repeatedly turned internal capabilities and services into major revenue lines (custom silicon, services ecosystem, accessories) and produced roughly a 590% total return over 10 years, versus ~220% for the S&P 500.(marketwatch.com)

These mixed outcomes show that the pattern can describe some great compounders but is far from a “sure bet,” and many companies that fit it have badly lagged the market. Because the claim is qualitative, absolute (“sure bet,” “forever”), and lacks a precisely testable universe and timeframe, we can’t cleanly call it right or wrong using post‑2021 data.

So, while subsequent performance of high‑profile examples (especially Block and fintech more broadly) undercuts the strength of Chamath’s claim, the prediction as phrased remains ambiguous rather than definitively right or wrong.