I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that no one could have predicted the success of Google simply by looking at the founders and what they had at the time.

It was their 2nd invention---highly relevant advertisement that made them an explosively profitable company.

But some people did - Andy Bechtolsheim, David Sheriton, Ram Shriram, Ron Conway, Sequoia & KPCB. And given their track record on other investments, I don't think this was due to pure chance.

I'd posit that people like the investors mentioned above have a highly intuitive "pattern matching" system for finding promising startups. The lack of any one quality won't disqualify a startup; rather, they can unconsciously evaluate the whole startup as a package and decide whether it's likely to be a winner.

Hence, the win of probabilistic AI systems over rule-based ones.

I think you overestimate the prescience of these investors. They are probably very good at increasing their chances by investing in a lot of stuff and letting the winners run.

All you had to do was use it, and you were hooked. As to the eventual size of Google, maybe not. As to the product, yes.

(And that might be a lesson to those guestimating future valuations.)