Lobster Capital

@benvspak no

@LobsterCapVC Do you invest in anyone outside YC?

A YC company closed a ~$200M valuation at Demo Day (Highest I've seen in six years of tracking every batch) Prev. record was $100M. They doubled it. The company has great revenue and strong traction for a seed-stage company. But… Most seed funds make 30-100 investments. To return your fund, each investment needs to return 60x if you're making 60 bets. At $200M entry, you need a $12B exit just to return 1x. Wild? Impossible? Well… Coinbase turned a $300K Demo Day check into $2.5B at peak. Elsewhere, SpaceX will go public at $1T prove (30,000x for Seed)... and they also prove that pure hardware companies can reach these outcomes. Maybe this founder is the next Elon Musk? Let’s hope so! But valuations like this assume best-case scenarios…. Every investor at Demo Day is underwriting the same billion-dollar outcome. Most will be wrong. American dynamism is driving capital into hardware and investors see deeptech and think about massive government contracts and category dominance. That narrative might be right… If so, Hardware companies with real traction DO deserve premium valuations compared to 2023. But $200M at seed stage compresses all future upside into the exit!! (How many years, and how much dilution!?) Margin for error disappears completely at that entry price.

Lobster Capital (@LobsterCapVC) just got its 10th markup on our portfolio of 36 companies 🥂

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?

One YC founder took 15 minutes out of his day to help. He rewrote our entire go-to-market strategy — and gave me a list of warm intros. That call turned into a walk, an hour of pure mentorship. And it completely changed the direction of our company. Sometimes, the smallest act of generosity shifts everything.

How French investor Gabriel Jarrosson grew from posting on YouTube to raising a fund that backs YC companies exclusively. techcrunch.com/2025/09/29/thi…

🚀 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!

Should the tagline for @LobsterCapVC be "backing things people want" ?

💡 Most founders don’t fail because of bad ideas — they fail because they never find real traction. In this week’s episode of Ignite VC, we sit down with @GJarrosson, a 7x founder with 3 exits and now GP at @LobsterCapVC, a fund investing exclusively in the top 2% of YC startups. Gabriel shares what he’s learned from building, failing, and backing over $25M in early-stage companies — including: 🔥 The truth about product-market fit (and why most founders misunderstand it) 🚀 How to recognize traction that actually matters 💰 Why great investors learn to say “no” more often than “yes” 🤖 The role of AI in the future of venture and entrepreneurship This conversation is a masterclass in traction-driven investing, founder grit, and disciplined growth — straight from someone who’s lived both sides of the startup journey. 👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: buff.ly/4tHLSAe 🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: buff.ly/vp0dRz1

Thanks to our investors: @garrytan from @ycombinator @GJarrosson from @LobsterCapVC @MichaelandMa from @Liquid2V @karrwinn and @AlexBangash from @transposevc @topherc from @svangel @JdotJdotF from @firstharmonic @taro_f , @kul , @saisrirampur , @JLHenriod , @algergawi , @ooshma , @ElizabethTurner