Shathyan Raja

Digital Marketing Consultant

With over 9 years of experience in growth and performance marketing, I have helped various startups and established brands in e-commerce, entertainment, gaming, and IT Products / SAAS domains to achieve their business goals and scale their online presence.

My core competencies include campaign management,  marketing communications, user journey optimization, funnel analysis, A/B testing, marketing attribution, and ROI measurement. I am passionate about solving problems across the user lifecycle, leveraging analytics, tools, and best practices to deliver impactful and sustainable results. I am always eager to learn new skills and collaborate with other professionals to share insights and grow together.

Senior Digital Marketing Manager

🍍 Gabriel Jarrosson

🔩 Computer Science Engineer
💪🏻 7x founder with 3 exits (4 failures, learned some stuff). Bootstrapped to $1M ARR with 0 employees. 
🦞 VC @ Lobster Capital: Funding the best YC startups to change the world.

Chairman

Gabriel Jarrosson

🚀 YC W26 is HERE, and I just published the full breakdown you’ve been waiting for.

After weeks of 1:1s with founders and deep dives into the batch, I pulled together:

🔥 The entire YC W26 startup list
📊 Category breakdowns + % share
🤖 Theme analysis (spoiler: AI is still everywhere)
🧠 Insider look at which YC partners backed what
⭐ And our top favorite companies of the batch

If you’re an investor, founder, or just YC-curious, this is the most comprehensive look at W26 anywhere.

📩 Want to read the full analysis + download the complete list? Comment "YC" and I'll send it to you ⚡

Curious what surprised us most this batch?
Why certain founders are breaking out?
Or which categories YC partners are really leaning into?
Drop a comment!

Founder & Managing Partner @ Lobster Capital 🦞 | Investing in the Top 2% of YC Startups | Founder with 3 Exits

YC spends most of its time telling founders not to worry about competition.

Imagine if Legora (just raised 550 at 5.5B) hadn't launched because they looked at Harvey and thought "it's over."

That happens a 100x a batch.

The advice = don't worry about it, just out-execute them.

"Make something people want” does not mean "make a market map… then make something you think people might want."

Is any industry ever truly saturated?

If you can find customers and start building, don't think about who else is out there. Just go.

If you have real competition, you'll have a hard time getting customers. That's the only signal that matters.

It's easier than ever to get to $1-2M ARR without hiring anyone.

I get investor updates that used to say "we hit a million ARR with ten people."

Now it's "we hit a million ARR and haven't hired anyone."

But Series B rounds are getting bigger than ever…

Why? If you only want five engineers and your competitor has 50, why wouldn't they win?

Unless the 50 can't do anything productive with agents, having more firepower still matters.

Engineers are way more effective... But 50 effective engineers beats 5 effective engineers.

Plus, you still need salespeople…. sales headcount is still the main lever in a capacity model.

After scaling Rupa Health to $75M, Koby went back to zero. He sold his life, moved to Argentina, and started Sunflower. 

In this episode, I sat down with Koby Conrad 🌻, CEO of Sunflower 🌻(YC F25), to dissect how he built a high-growth machine in a market most VCs are too "refined" to touch: Global Addiction.

We pull back the curtain on:
- The Alpha of Stigma: Why "emotionally hard" markets offer the highest venture returns.
- The "No-Meeting" SAFE: How Koby raised $350k before a single Zoom call, and what that means for the speed of the current YC batch.
- Vibe Coding vs. Real Moats: Why your SaaS portfolio is sitting on a melting ice cube and how to pivot to "distribution + atoms."
- The Gambling Epidemic: Why the next massive healthcare crisis is happening on Robinhood and Polymarket.

If you want to know what high-conviction, mission-driven execution looks like in 2026, this is a must watch.

🔗 Link in the comment section

Second-time YC founders don't fail by repeating old mistakes.
They fail by overcorrecting for them so hard they create new ones.

Quang Hoang did YC twice…
Plato in 2016, then came back with Vybe in 2025

Same accelerator… Completely different eras…

In this episode of The Lobster Talks, we break down:
- How YC evolved
- Why batch size changes founder dynamics
- What second-time founders still underestimate
- And how AI shifts the playbook

If you’re considering applying to YC, or investing in YC companies, this is the real picture.

 🔗 Link in the comment section

I fully expect 80 out of the top 100 Midas list spots in 10-20 years will be YC alums.

YC alums as legendary investors

- Ilya Sukhar, Dan Levine at Accel,
- Yuri Sagalov running General Catalyst's seed program
- Liz Wessel at First Round Capital.
- Alexis Ohanian Sr. (Initialized Capital, 776 Capital)
- JJ Fliegelman (First Harmonic)
- Jack Altman (Benchmark)

With so many more batches since then, and the quality of YC startups and network compounding - we will see a lot more!

YC is a managed marketplace. If the supply of capital goes up, YC goes out and finds the best people. VC can 2x, 5x, 10x over the next decade. YC will meet demand with the smartest people of this generation.

Your roadmap for the next 6 months? OpenAI just shipped it last Tuesday.

And if you're a founder building on their APIs, you aren't just racing them to market; you're racing against their unlimited CapEx and $0 margin features.

So is your startup already dead?
Is your startup a "product" or just a feature waiting to be absorbed? 

In this video, I’m breaking down the new rules of AI defensibility and why 90% of what I see today is building on sand.

🔗 Link in the comment section

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Shathyan Raja

Gabriel Jarrosson

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taplio

The Battle

Shathyan Raja

Gabriel Jarrosson

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Gabriel Jarrosson's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreGabriel Jarrosson's LinkedIn Performance