The Lobster Talks Podcast by Lobster Capital

The standard view in enterprise tech is that hospitals are an impossible sell. The sales cycles take years, legacy systems are hopelessly entrenched, and bureaucracy kills early-stage companies. But there is a massive structural loophole. Insurance giants are intentionally creating artificial friction, using mandatory 40 minute phone holds to run out the clock on hospital billing cycles. In this e...

Silicon Valley loves software, but the massive gains of the next decade belong to atoms. Fleetzero founder Steven Henderson joined YC to solve a multi-billion dollar problem: decarbonizing ocean freight without crushing the global economy. By redesigning cargo ships from scratch, eliminating onboard crew infrastructure, and deploying massive battery hybrids, Fleetzero is undercutting diesel on pur...

The boots on the ground download from YC P26 Demo Day in San Francisco shows the macro venture market is shifting fast. We sit down right after talking to founders on the floor to analyze the wild valuation spikes, the hardware renaissance, and the new breed of post revenue companies utilizing the accelerator. Learn why the traditional boundaries of seed and Series A are completely dissolving. Wha...

Most founders think they need to monetize on day one, but this YC breakout grew to 2 million weekly downloads by giving everything away for free, and now they power ChatGPT. In this episode of The Lobster Talks, we sit down with Bereket, the founder of BetterAuth, to dissect the ultimate open-source distribution playbook. Moving directly from Ethiopia to Silicon Valley, Bereket built an authentica...

The consensus view is that early-stage investing is entirely about a gut feeling on game day. The reality? By the time the first founder steps on stage at Y Combinator’s Demo Day, the best deals are already effectively closed.   In this episode of The Lobster Talks , we sit down with David, founder of Fondo and a seasoned YC alum who has navigated the Demo Day trenches for over a decade as both a...

Big tech is staring down a multi-year bottleneck. and it isn't chips... it's power. While hyperscalers are waiting up to a decade just to hook new AI data centers to the traditional grid, ex-Tesla engineers are bypassing the system entirely. In this episode, Casey, founder of Voxel Energy, breaks down how they are deploying independent, solar-and-battery-powered data centers in just 150 days. By u...

Most investors think VR is a dead gaming gimmick. Nathan from Vinci Games proved them entirely wrong by building a multi-million dollar studio right out of Y Combinator. In this episode of The Lobster Talks, I sit down with Nathan, the CEO of Vinci Games, one of the few breakout VR studios backed by YC.  They dive deep into how Vinci Games launched the 11th highest-rated Quest game of all time, th...

The bottleneck for space isn't rockets anymore, it’s real estate. In this episode, we sit down with Skyler, the founder of GRU Space (YC W26), the company building the first hotel on the moon. We dive deep into why the "hotel" is actually a strategic wedge for lunar infrastructure, how they plan to manufacture bricks using moon dust (Regolith), and why NASA is pivoting its $20B budget toward off-w...

Most founders think they need a perfect product to launch. Zach from Adam proved that virality is a choice, but it comes with a price tag you might not be ready to pay. In this episode of The Lobster Talk, we sit down with Zach, the founder of Adam (YC W25), an AI-native CAD platform. We go behind the scenes of his multiple viral launches, why he regrets using a waitlist, and the terrifying realiz...

The growth bar for YC just hit the stratosphere. In this episode, we dive into the staggering metrics of the latest Y Combinator batch (P26), where startups are hitting $11M ARR before Demo Day and hardware is making a massive comeback. We break down the "Request for Startups," the future of SaaS in an AGI world, and why the most "defensible" companies are now escaping the screen. In this episode,...

Hollywood is about to hit a "James Cameron" moment where $200M visions no longer require $200M budgets. In this episode, I sit down with Mehul, the 24-year-old founder of Koyal (YC), who is building the platform that generated the first full-length Bollywood film entirely with AI. We dive into why traditional experience is becoming a liability in Silicon Valley, the "Film Arena" benchmarking the w...

Most developers are still coding in the past.   While the world is obsessed with AI autocomplete, a new breed of YC founders is building a future where one developer manages ten AI agents in parallel. In this episode, I sit down with Kiet, co-founder of Superset (YC P26), to discuss the massive shift from writing code to orchestrating swarms of agents. We dive into why traditional IDEs like Cursor...

There is a dangerous "founder aura" in Silicon Valley… the idea that you must be a 22-year-old Ivy League dropout with a perfect linear trajectory to win. It’s a myth that keeps great founders from starting. Conor and Manu didn’t check a single "consensus" box: they were in their 30s, didn't come from FAANG, and were rejected by YC multiple times. Yet, Connor became the "star" of his batch by doin...

Bain Capital just bet $5.6 billion on legacy EdTech. Noah and the Scout team are betting on its extinction. Most founders are told to avoid the Student Information System (SIS) market because it's "too sticky" and dominated by giants like PowerSchool. In this episode, Noah (Founder of Scout, YC W25) explains how they are using AI-native compliance to wedge into the "School OS" market and why the f...

The YC Winter 2026 batch just broke every record in the book.   We’re seeing valuations hit $100M before founders even finish their slide decks. Is this a peak or just the new baseline? In this episode of The Lobster Talks, we debrief the W26 Demo Day. We go behind the scenes on the "Agentic" boom, why hardware is suddenly the hottest play in the valley, and the real math behind why YC startups ar...

He did YC in 2016 from France with a Slack bot nobody had heard of.  9 years later, he came back… second company, second batch, $10M seed closed in 3 days. Dalton told him: "Don't overlearn." Quang is the founder of Vybe, a YC W25 company building the internal app layer for the AI era. Before that: Plato, a mentorship platform for engineers he grew to 70 people, raised $22M for, and sold to Coda,...

The recovery market is broken, and most VCs are too scared to touch it. Koby Conrad (CEO of Sunflower) joins the show to discuss why he’s betting his career on solving addiction using AI.  After a successful exit at Rupa Health, Koby moved to Buenos Aires with nothing but a backpack to "vibe code" the future of sobriety.  In this episode, we dive into the "no-meeting" SAFE phenomenon, why SaaS moa...

The US government spends $2.7 trillion a year on everything from water bottles to fighter jets, yet the entire process is held together by Microsoft Word and tribal knowledge. In this episode, we sit down with August Chen, founder of Hazel (YC W24), to discuss why he left Palantir to tackle the antiquated world of government procurement. We dive into the "missionary vs. mercenary" mindset, the rea...

The most successful YC companies aren't always the loudest. They're the ones that survive the "Valley of Death" to become indispensable infrastructure. In this episode, I sit down with Grant Shaddick, founder of Tella (YC W20), the video tool that has quietly taken over the YC ecosystem. We dive into the grit required to build a category leader, why they chose to stay lean while others over-raised...

YC just added one question that quietly changes what it means to be a founder. And it’s not about your TAM. It’s not about your pitch. It’s about how you use AI to build. In this episode of Lobster Talks, we break down YC’s newest application change, the rise of coding agents like Claude Code, and what this signals about where startup building, and venture capital is heading next. We also go deep...

Most people treat their bodies like a car they only fix after it crashes. Max Berthelot and Lucis are rewriting that script by turning longitudinal blood data into a high-margin, preventive software play. In this episode, we sit down with Max Berthelot, founder of Lucis (YC S25), to discuss why "Function Health for Europe" is one of the most compelling arbitrage opportunities in the venture world....

Factories don’t buy hype. They buy uptime. In this episode, YC-backed Cerrion CEO Karim Saleh explains why industrial computer vision is one of YC’s most underrated AI wedges, and why it can beat flashier “copilot” markets on sheer dollar-weight and defensibility. Karim breaks down how Cerrion deploys camera-based AI agents to detect production issues in real time, why manufacturing is a $20T oppo...

Lawyers hate tracking time. PointOne turned that universal pain into an AI wedge, and used the YC playbook to move fast in one of the most conservative, high-ARPU markets on earth. In this episode of Lobster Talks, Katon Luaces (YC ’24) breaks down how PointOne built an “AI time platform” for law firms, why “hard thing first” compounds, and what investors routinely misread about early traction vs....

Focus groups used to take 6–8 weeks and cost around $30–50k. Motives is a YC Summer ’25 company that does it in a day, and is doing it the hard way: with real humans, not synthetic personas. In this episode of Lobster Talks, we sit down with Sean (Motives, YC S25) to unpack how AI-native companies are replacing legacy services, why YC is doubling down on agents, and the real tradeoffs of building...

A seed-stage fund gets 10 markups… and a YC company hits a 4.5x in 9 months. That’s the vibe heading into 2026. Speed is up, liquidity is thawing, and AI is compressing timelines across YC and the broader venture market. In this episode of The Lobster Talks, we recap Lobster Capital’s breakout 2025, unpack why seed → Series A is getting cut in half, and lay out the sharpest 2026 prediction: the li...