Since Rebel Fund invests exclusively in Y Combinator startups (with 80 YC startup investments to date) I’m often asked by other investors what I think about YC’s quickly growing batch sizes. Since I’ve been at every YC Demo Day since my own batch’s in Winter 2013, I’ve watched batch sizes…

In my previous post On $600B of Y Combinator Startup Success I discussed our analysis of the 271 companies on Y Combinator’s latest Top Companies list, which now total over $600B in value. A recurring theme in our studies of YC startups is just how ‘winners take all’ value creation…

Last year I published a popular blog post On $300B of Y Combinator Startup Success that analyzed YC’s Top Companies list that year, which included 137 portfolio startups with a combined valuation of over $300B. YC recently published an updated Top Companies list including 271 companies with a combined official…

The big news today in the Y Combinator ecosystem is that YC announced a new “standard deal” of $500k for each new startup. This will be structured as a $125k check for 7% equity + $375k check on an uncapped SAFE with an MFN. For the unitiated, you can learn…

At Rebel Fund, our job is to invest in the top 3–4% startups in each new Y Combinator (YC) batch. To accomplish this, we build what we believe to be the most comprehensive database that exists of YC startups — including over 60,000 data points on ~400 startups in just…

Y Combinator recently published their latest Top Companies list online, listing the top 137 YC portfolio startups in descending order of valuation. The headline statistics are impressively shocking: $300B+ combined valuation 125+ companies valued at $150 million+ 60K+ jobs created Since Rebel Fund’s job is to select and invest in…

When I moved to San Francisco in 2012, it was the place to start a venture-backed technology startup. Everyone knew that Silicon Valley attracted the best software developers, the best entrepreneurs, the best venture capitalists, and all the other A-players necessary for a thriving startup ecosystem. Getting accepted into Y…

At Rebel Fund, one of our ‘unfair advantages’ when it comes to investing in seed-stage Y Combinator startups is a proprietary machine learning algorithm we developed called Rebel Theorem. Developed for Rebel by the brilliant MIT-trained computer scientist Ajay Saini, this algorithm uses machine learning techniques to score and screen…

As anyone who has read my previous posts knows, I try to think like a scientist, analyzing data on everything from COVID-19 vs seasonal flu fatality rates to the factors predicting how early-stage venture capital will fare in a time of crisis. My background in statistics and market research coupled…