Reasoning summary

• What he said (paraphrased): because of record amounts of capital raised, there would be more cash that needs to be deployed in the following 12–36 months (2023–2026) than has ever been deployed in the history of venture – if current fundraising/mandate structures held.
• Your normalized version preserves that as: record dry powder would have to be deployed in 2023–2026 “unless fundraising/mandates change materially.”

1. What actually happened to deployment?

Global VC investment (actual dollars deployed into deals) has not set new records in the 2023–2025 period:

• 2021 remains the clear peak year, with about $751.5B in global VC investments. (starthub.asia)
• After the downturn, global VC investment fell to roughly $349–346B in 2023 and only recovered modestly to about $368B in 2024—still roughly 50% below 2021’s peak. (starthub.asia)
• As of late 2025, industry reports describe 2024 as a “slight recovery” from a five‑year low, not a new high, and 2025 deal value is expected to grow from that subdued base, not surpass the 2021 boom on a rolling 12–36 month basis. (rothschildandco.com)

So if you interpret the prediction as “we will actually see record VC capital deployed in that 12–36 month window,” evidence to date points strongly against it: deployment has been far below the 2021–2022 peak levels.

2. What happened to dry powder and mandates?

On the dry‑powder side, his premise of “a lot more cash” was correct:

• Combined private equity + venture capital dry powder hit record highs in 2023 (~$2.59T) and again in mid‑2024 (~$2.62T). (spglobal.com)
• VC‑specific dry powder was about $317B at the end of Q1 2024—over 5× the ~$60B level in 2015—and still above $310B in 2025, i.e., not yet drawn down aggressively. (eisneramper.com)
• A growing share of this capital is “aging”: funds four years and older accounted for a larger share of uncalled capital, indicating capital not being forced out quickly. (forbes.com)

Crucially, fundraising and mandates did change materially, which is exactly the escape clause baked into the normalized prediction:

• Fundraising collapsed after 2021’s mega‑boom. Global VC fundraising dropped from about $404B in 2021 to roughly $214B in 2023 and $170B in 2024, and the number of VC funds fell by about a quarter. (rothschildandco.com)
• LPs became far more cautious, often pressuring GPs to slow the pace of capital calls and deployment rather than rush to deploy dry powder. (eu.vc)
• In response to the downturn, GPs have more frequently extended investment periods and fund terms, or at least drafted new funds with longer deployment windows; LPs have been more willing to grant such extensions in bad markets. (loyensloeff.com)
  • Articles explicitly note GPs “holding on to this capital a bit longer and really squeezing that investment period” rather than deploying on the old timetable. (spglobal.com)

Those changes mean that a large chunk of the record dry powder was not required to be pushed into deals within his 12–36 month window; instead, timelines were stretched and deployment stayed depressed even while dry powder remained at records.

3. Why this is classified as ambiguous

There are two overlapping interpretations:

1. Unconditional forecast about realized deployment
   If you read him as saying “VC will deploy record amounts in 2023–2026,” that is likely wrong, given clearly lower deal values vs. 2021–2022 and persistent record dry powder.

2. Conditional statement about what would need to happen if mandates didn’t change
   Your normalized version includes: “unless fundraising/mandates change materially.” In reality, fundraising, fund sizes, and deployment mandates did change in a major way (fundraising collapse, end of the megafund era, widespread extensions of investment periods), exactly the carve‑out he allowed. (rothschildandco.com)
   In that sense, we ended up in the exception case he explicitly set aside, so we can’t directly observe whether his statement about record deployment in the no‑change world would have been correct.

Because the prediction is explicitly conditional and the condition (no material change in fundraising/mandates) clearly failed, the realized world doesn’t provide a clean test of his “if that holds true” scenario. At the same time, the unconditional reading conflicts with observed deployment data.

Given that tension, and the difficulty of cleanly measuring “needs to be deployed” versus “actually deployed,” the fairest classification is “ambiguous” rather than definitively right or wrong.