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I'll start off — for most startups, partnerships are worth 0.

When is this not true? I could imagine some cases where you get exclusive or first access to proprietary datasets or content

Cite an example of where this added material value to the startup?

Google yahoo probably the most significant. openai microsoft. Microsoft and Apple with basic (before Microsoft’s ipo). Netscape yahoo

The partnership killed Yahoo. Google would have been fine without it.

OpenAI + Microsoft is a customer arrangement (compute for equity).

Microsoft / Apple were both public companies and was purely for anti-trust case.

None of them created meaningful value as a partnership.

Sorry misread the Apple / Microsoft one (I thought you referring to the late 90s bail out).

I guess we have a different reading of the history + anecdotes I've heard from people involved in all of those companies from that era.

The fact that we're talking about partnerships from 20+ years ago is probably telling. :)

Disagree on the Google side. Provided data they weren’t getting from their users and solidified the brand for search. 

Msoft wasn’t public yet for the basic deal and gave them developer traction for the windows launch. 

Msoft’s compute is a commodity vs aws goog. The collaboration w/ msoft is a differentiator