Wannabe French YouTuber, Now VC Raises $12M For YC Startups

Gabriel Jarrosson reached an audience explaining venture capital on YouTube in French. Now he runs Lobster Capital, which has more than $12 million in its first fund and a single mandate that raises eyebrows among Silicon Valley investors and his counterparts in Paris alike: invest only in startups that come out of Y Combinator.

From creator to capitalist: Jarrosson’s path to Lobster Capital

Jarrosson studied as an engineer and began uploading videos in 2017 to demystify startup investing for a Francophone audience. The channel turned into a conduit for an angel syndicate that has swelled in size and since 2020 has invested $36 million, with most of the money going to YC alumni. This momentum — as well as a rising tide of founders eager to back others — paved the way for Lobster Capital’s initial institutional vehicle, which closed at $12 million after catching fire and hitting twice its target close, according to an SEC filing.

The fund’s pitch is disarmingly simple: YC acts as the filter. And rather than cast the net wide, Lobster Capital is doubling down on founders who clear Y Combinator’s bar, and where speed, product quality and early distribution are exceptional.

Why only bet on YC? The probability case and performance data

The argument for YC focus is a probability game. Work shared by Rebel Fund and compiled on Crunchbase in industry analyses has found that a mid-single-digit percent share of YC-backed companies go on to become unicorns; the rate for an average seed-stage startup is a low single digit. YC’s own public portfolio disclosures indicate 90-plus unicorns, with a significant portion now decacorns.

Another yardstick is graduating to a Series A. For years, PitchBook and other venture data firms have been reporting that YC graduates go from seed to Series A at multiples of the broader market’s low-30% average. For a seed investor, those deltas are stacked up into better fund math even if paying a premium.

And premiums are real. Carta’s seed valuation data and founder surveys have always revealed that YC startups get higher prices at Demo Day, and shortly after. Jarrosson takes the position that a premium may be defensible if the pipeline consistently delivers outliers — especially in respect of companies demonstrating traction early and keeping down the cost of customer acquisition.

Access as the edge in crowded YC Demo Day allocations

Choosing YC startups is simple; winning allocations are not. Demo Days attract hundreds of funds chasing the same dozen breakouts. Jarrosson’s solution has been to turn access into an operating discipline. He relies on founder referrals, a podcast featuring YC companies and visibility on LinkedIn to a network of tens of thousands, where he often shares postmortems and investment themes.

Reputation within YC’s own network counts, even more so. Founders rate investors on Bookface, the accelerator’s internal platform, and enough high marks can have a meaningful impact on one’s ability to get into competitive rounds. Jarrosson also points to his operator background as a differentiator in a market where many seed checks are written by non-builders.

Riding the AI cohorts: traction, ARR quality, and retention

Lobster Capital has been the most bullish on YC cohorts that do skew AI-first. A few previous cohorts included startups doing millions of dollars in annualized revenue within months of launching and, yes, that dynamic has been relentlessly highlighted through founder updates and investor notes spread throughout the accelerator. Skeptics warn that early ARR may be flattering given pilots and aggressive annual contracts; company-level diligence now spends more time on net dollar retention and logo churn than headline ARR. Jarrosson’s comment: The first revenue is always the most challenging hill to climb, and retention can be designed with product velocity and customer success.

Portfolio and early signals from Lobster Capital’s strategy

The Lobster Capital portfolio and the prior syndicate combined have backed more than 100 checks in B2B SaaS, fintech infrastructure and AI tooling. The fund, which was started in 2023, has invested in almost 30 startups to date. Examples include companies like Jeeves, Baubap, FlutterFlow, Metriport, Alinea and Jiga — names that suggest a preference for software with more obvious distribution and monetization paths.

It’s still early to draw definitive results, but several of these companies have already raised significant follow-on rounds and expanded internationally. The fund is constructed to explicitly skew towards ownership that can move the needle on returns if two or three of its positions break out, a familiar power-law approach suited to YC’s pipeline.

The content-led VC playbook shaping modern deal flow

He’s part of a generation of managers whose profile in the media is almost intertwined with their deal flow. Jarrosson is one member of a cohort of managers who are as known for doing deals as they are for being covered by the media. Envision that same moment happening to anyone else except these people and you immediately know just how unhappy this situation makes me. He cites as evidence Harry Stebbings, who turned the 20VC podcast into a multi-hundred-million-dollar vehicle, and Garry Tan. “My content and community building has been just as core to my journey from investor to YC CEO.” Funds like Pioneer Fund and Rebel Fund have also concentrated on YC as a repeatable investment strategy (not one-off).

For limited partners, the benefits of a content-led fund are clear: opera companies, for example (yes, that’s really a thing), will have clearer sourcing advantages than they do today; audience feedback loops will be shorter and less reliant on luck (a win in designing an app isn’t necessarily an indicator of success when producing long-form video content); and investors can view our track record along with the same transparency associated with VC investments. Lobster Capital is one example: “Everything started to fall into place,” Hynes says, when the firm began sharing visual content with potential LPs in video or podcast form first, and waited for them to ask for a deck.

What to watch next for Lobster Capital and its YC focus

The YC-only mandate is a strength and a risk. It helps zero in on what we should be focusing more attention on, but does the opposite with less vibrant markets. The bigger test for Lobster Capital will be keeping access to oversubscribed winners, while holding the line when it comes to valuations as they rise and fall in seed stage.

If YC keeps churning out outsized companies at anywhere near its historical rate, Jarrosson’s thesis holds. The bet, in its most naked form, lies in whether a curated pipeline plus a visible brand can displace spray-and-pray seed strategies — that the next generation of unicorns will continue to walk out of the same door in Mountain View and San Francisco.