…and why one will never exist — As my long-time readers know, I’ve written dozens of data-driven blog posts on Y Combinator startups over the years, but I’m yet to answer the single most important question about YC startups from the perspective of early-stage investors — how much money do they make?? YC has published data that…

Rebel Fund is one of the largest and most prolific investors in Y Combinator startups and builds the most comprehensive database that exists of new YC startups each year to feed our proprietary Rebel Theorem 2.0 machine learning algorithm. Since we now collect and analyze hundreds of thousands of data…

ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022, and gained over one million users within five days. Now a couple of months later, it’s fully mainstream with over 100 million users — this is faster mass adoption of a technology product than I’ve ever seen. It’s easy to forget that OpenAI launched…

A few years ago, I wrote a post On the shifting landscape of YC batches to analyze statistical trends in Y Combinator startups by industry over time. Since Rebel Fund has since collected hundreds of thousands of data points on thousands of YC startups, we’re in a better position than…

I’ve written much over the years about the incredible success of Y Combinator startups, but as any experienced startup founder or investor knows, there is a dark side to technology innovation… lots of startups just don’t make it :( At Rebel Fund, our job is to invest in the top…

One of the most common complaints I hear amongst Y Combinator startup investors is their sky-high valuations. It’s not uncommon for YC startups to raise capital at 2-3 times the valuation of their non-YC peers at a similar stage, which begs the question “Are they really worth it?” Since at…

As a venture capital fund manager, one of the questions I’m asked most often by LPs is “How long will it take to get my money back?” At Rebel Fund, our job is to invest in the top 5–10% of new Y Combinator startups each year, and in doing so…

In August 2022, Y Combinator released its latest Top Companies list, now including 314 private and 16 public YC startups each valued at over $150M. YC officially reported ‘over 80’ of these startups to be valued at over $1B, but our best estimate is there are now 101 Y Combinator-backed…

A couple of years ago I published On Rebel Theorem to reveal the proprietary machine-learning algorithm we use at Rebel Fund to maximize our odds of success investing in tomorrow’s top Y Combinator startups. We’ve recently finished a complete overhaul of the algorithm and used it to influence our Y…