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

Lobster Capital

Managing Partner

Leonis Investissement

Investing in YC startups. $36M deployed since 2020.

Chairman

Founder & CEO

Piña Colada

US stocks recommendation newsletter
Company sold in 2023 (acquired by Agora France)

Founder & CEO [acquired by Agora France]

albert académie

Online e-learning platform. 
Company sold in 2023 (acquired by P2KR)

Co-Founder & CEO [acquired by P2KR]

Le Vin de France

Marketplace for french wine growers.
Company sold in 2016 (acquired by Les Grappes).

Founder & CEO [acquired by Les Grappes]

🔩 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.

Gabriel Jarrosson

🚀 YC F25 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 F25 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 F25 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 cycle?
Why certain founders are breaking out?
Or which categories YC partners are really leaning into?
Drop a comment!

VC @ Lobster Capital 🦞🧢 Investing in the top 2% of YC startups | Founder with 3 exits

Does YC's fastest unicorn prove domain expertise is overrated? 

Legora went from YC Winter 2024 to $1.8B valuation in 13 months. 

(Btw that’s the fastest unicorn in YC history raised $80M from Iconiq and General Catalyst).

Max Junestrand was 23 when he started it, he’s an ex-VC and none of the other founding team were lawyers.

Instead they interviewed 100 lawyers over lunch, offered to pay their hourly rates (couldn't actually afford it but the lawyers didn't charge them anyway), and learned the industry from scratch.

The company builds AI workspace software for lawyers doing contract review, legal research, and due diligence. Stuff that used to take days now takes minutes.

The traditional legal tech companies had decades of customer relationships and massive engineering teams. That moat disappeared in 18 months because foundation models changed everything.

Max explained… "Our ability to outship teams of thousands of engineers with just 30 is insane."

OpenAI, Anthropic + other foundation labs dropped the cost of building legal AI by 100x, so small teams suddenly had the same capabilities as companies with billions in revenue.

Legora now serves 10,000+ lawyers daily across the EU/US. They're beating companies 100x their size because they ship faster. The old players spent years building workflow tools for specific tasks while Legora built an entire workspace in a year.

They also hold true to one of the main reasons I believe the YC batches we are seeing now will be very successful…

Since foundation models made it trivial for startups to compete with incumbents who spent decades building moats around complexity.

Small technical teams using foundation models to rebuild entire software categories like legal tech, medical diagnostics, financial planning, and tax prep. Any industry where the moat was complexity instead of network effects is vulnerable.

So if YC's fastest unicorn came from a 23-year-old non-lawyer building legal software.

Can technical talent with access to foundation models can now compete with anyone?

YC used to invest across multiple rounds. Seed, Series A, later stages through their Continuity Fund... But they shut it down.

As accelerators scale, the logic shifts from founder advocacy to capital deployment optimization.

YC's Continuity Fund created two problems:

1) Negative signalling :

•  YC follow-on \= validation signal  
•  No YC follow-on \= implied rejection from your own accelerator  
• Market interpreted this as meaningful information asymmetry

2) Incentive misalignment :

• Group partners operated on 3-month cycles (batch start to Demo Day)  
• Continuity team operated on multi-year investment cycles 
• Result: handoff friction and compartmentalization

Garry Tan restructured YC around Group partners being an equal investing partnership like Benchmark but with 15 people. That's the core of what YC is, supported by world-class media and software teams.

Now YC does what they uniquely do best… the initial batch.

The new approach = 

• Partners commit to founders for company lifetime  
• YC invests only at inception (seed stage)  
• Later-stage VCs become partners, not competitors

This resolves the trust problem. Trust matters more than capital for founders. You don't really know who to trust when you're starting. Having one person at YC committed to you for the life of the company is better than 90% of founder situations.

The returns evidence supports this… YC portfolio value grew from $300B to $800B after shutting down Continuity, not despite it.

Why?...

... Small funds (YC at batch level) generate alpha through idiosyncratic bets on nascent companies.

... Large funds (Continuity-style) generate beta through momentum exposure to validated companies.

It is impossible to optimize for both simultaneously. The incentive structures are fundamentally opposed.

YC’s comparative advantage is in company formation, not capital deployment.

Do what you uniquely do best. Partner with others for the rest.

Are these the BEST companies in YC? 

Before demo day, we choose our favourites from the F25 batch.

We went through the entire YC F25 batch and chose the standouts.

These are the YC startups we’d bet on before Demo Day:
 • Sorce (YC F25) (Drew Houston literally Venmoed them $200K)
 • SellRaze (YC F25)(AI-native eBay energy)
 • Sunflower 🌻 (AI addiction companion saving real people)
 • Selfin (YC F25), Fernstone (YC F25), Exonic, LunaBill (YC F25), Waffer (YC F25), Axial Composites Industries
 • And Zephyr Fusion trying to ignite fusion in space

Our most unfiltered YC breakdown yet.

🔗 Links in the comment section

I started Lobster Capital by investing in France knowing nobody in VC and nothing about how VC works.

Built an SPV investing in French startups by creating content, having conversations, and being helpful to founders. That SPV deployed millions across Europe before I'd ever been to the US.

Used the same playbook to break into Silicon Valley networks. Made content about YC, showed up consistently, built relationships with founders + partners.

Now we run a fund investing in the top 2% of YC companies and I'm always striving to get great feedback from the YC founders in the ecosystem.

imo… the best deals are still in YC. The concentration of talent, the selection process, the network effects - nothing else comes close at scale. That's why we built the fund around it.

But… I'm meeting equally talented builders at other programs now (A16z's Speedrun, HF0 AI Grant for example)

If the goal has always been finding the top 1% of deals wherever they are. YC makes that easy because the filtering already happened.

But if exceptional founders are gathering somewhere else, we should be there too.

Most YC-focused funds have one advantage - in the network, maybe they even went through YC themselves. That's valuable but it's not transferable. When they find a great deal outside the ecosystem, they're starting from zero.

My method to win works anywhere.

YC isn’t necessarily where we stop… We just figure out how to find the top 1% within any ecosystem and the opportunities are starting to show up elsewhere.

Now we're in a position to replicate that anywhere exceptional founders gather, because of our content and 1M+ views a month

That's the bet. Not that YC stops being the best source of deals, but that our method of finding and winning deals works beyond one ecosystem.

I think my YouTube channel is a YC startup 😅

YC renamed group partners to general partners..

Because that's what they actually are. Investors in the company for life. 

This moves YC partners away from the old narrative about YC as summer camp, with camp counselors who you never see again after demo day. 

YC partners will understand each business deeply, who their customers are and then they are able to ask the right questions, as a sounding board outside your day to day. 

The other piece is the batch itself. 150 companies per batch, all top 1% founders who went through the same selection process. They help each other constantly.

Garry's actually given the example of when he went through YC with Posterous, they became friends with the Heroku founders. Heroku helped them raise their seed round and gave advice on scaling.

Six months later, Heroku had a problem. They thought Posterous's codebase might not run on their platform and asked for GitHub access to debug it.

Posterous gave it to them…! Can you imagine meeting someone at a regular vc conference and giving them your codebase lol.

A lot of relationships between YC batch mates is built on so much mutual trust that help is always there.

While I am primarily an investor in YC companies I still hear+see tons of other deals from other accelerators / ecosystems and I don’t see the same compounding network anywhere else but YC… it’s much closer to something like a permanent support structure where your batch mates and partner stay with you indefinitely. 

I think this is another reason why we are seeing post-PMF companies willing to take the dilution.

$1M to $1B isn't just "keep doing what got you here", but 1,000x more.

Early-stage founders (and investors) get excited when a startup hits $1M in revenue. It feels like validation or proof the business works... but it's barely the beginning

The gap between $1M and $1B is hard to visualise until you see it like this.

It's a completely different game at every stage:

• $1M → $10M: Product-market fit and early sales motion  
• $10M → $100M: Building repeatable systems and scaling the team  
• $100M → $1B: Entire go-to-market transformation, new markets, operational complexity

Each jump requires reinventing the company. The skills that got you to $10M won't get you to $100M just like a team that got you to $100M probably can't take you to $1B without significant evolution.

This visualization shows why so few companies make it all the way. The distance between early traction and category dominance is orders of magnitude larger than it feels when you're celebrating that first $1M.

Growth is exponential in distance, not just numbers.

Patience matters so much for investors, especially now with AI startups growing incredibly quickly - have to stay level headed…. Any exciting early traction? It's just the beginning of a very long road.

YC F25: Investment Insights for Family Offices — live webinar with Lobster Capital.  ￼

The Fall ’25 YC batch is a sharp signal for where tech is actually going next — especially in AI, infrastructure, and the new shape of early-stage company building.  ￼

For family offices, this cycle is less about chasing hype and more about positioning for asymmetric upside in a market that’s reset on pricing, burn, and time-to-signal.  ￼

In this session we’ll unpack what we’re seeing across the YC F25 cohort, and what it implies for family office venture strategy.

What you’ll get from the webinar:
	•	Key themes emerging from YC F25 — and why they matter for allocators now.  ￼
	•	How leading family offices are recalibrating early-stage exposure in a capital-constrained cycle.  ￼
	•	Where the most compelling risk/reward is forming across the batch (including AI outliers).  ￼
	•	Practical paths to access top YC deals efficiently — without building a massive sourcing machine.  ￼

📅 Date: December 2nd
🕒 Time: 11am PST
🎙️ Host: Lobster Capital  ￼
🔗 Register: https://luma.com/lerdx9r6 

If you invest (or plan to invest) in venture from a family office seat, this will be a high-signal, no-fluff readout of the YC F25 landscape.

Open article: YC F25: Investment Insights for Family Offices · Luma by luma.com

YC F25: Investment Insights for Family Offices · Luma

Few investors have shaped Silicon Valley like Marc Andreessen.

From betting on impossible ideas to redefining what “venture conviction” looks like, his playbook is the blueprint for every modern VC. 

Here's how Marc Andreessen turned five bold bets into billions.

The inside story behind:
- The $250K check that became $78M
- The “Do not sell” call that saved Facebook
- Oculus’s 7x exit in one year
- The crypto conviction that built A16Z’s empire
- What early Twitter taught about social media power 

Every founder and investor should study these five moves — it’s a masterclass in timing, conviction, and founder loyalty.

🔗 Link in the comment section

AI just hit $25B in funding this quarter. A record-breaking frenzy indeed!

But here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud:
We’re pouring $600B into AI infrastructure… with almost no revenue to match.

In this new video, I break down:
- Why only 1 in 20 enterprise AI pilots work
- The burn-rate trap killing early AI startups
- Why NVIDIA wins no matter what
- The coming correction almost no one is prepared for

If you actually want to understand what’s happening behind the hype, watch this.

🔗 Link in the comment section

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The Battle

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Gabriel Jarrosson

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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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