On the Y Combinator Summer 2021 batch
jaredheyman.medium.com
jaredheyman.medium.com
I’d rather work with a fund that had managers who understood due diligence, market analysis, and truly desired finding the best idea, not just pushing their own preconceived biases through pseudo-technical analysis.
I'm sure their fund probably does okay though. It's the same set of biases as traditional VC.
Not very rebellious, though.
Most VC firms lose money.
The universities they list aren't all in the same league.
> I’d rather work with a fund that had managers who understood due diligence, market analysis, and truly desired finding the best idea, not just pushing their own preconceived biases through pseudo-technical analysis.
These investors won't blog about how they do it! But they sure exist.
Even if they could select them, how do they propose to invest? These are competitive processes; sophomoric Medium posts are unlikely to make them stand out.
I immediately closed the article after reading that.
Perhaps it comes across as a little uppity.
Do any VCs strive to invest in, say, the second quartile of YC batches?
It’s such a dumb thing to say because it’s what everyone would love.
As a lottery player, I only strive to pick the winning numbers.
Rebel's use of ML to predict future winners is odd to me, since it completely relies on interpolating within the set of past winners. I guess it might work, but it's not creative and seems highly correlated with the rest of the VC 'market'.
> At Rebel Fund, our job is to invest in the top 3–4% startups in each new Y Combinator (YC) batch
They're spewing bullshit. That opening line alone tells me they're copying every other VC (and most VCs lose money) while simultaneously portraying themselves as being better than every other VC.
YC succeeded by completely subverting what everybody thought VC had to be. You can't expect to be better by doing the same thing as everyone else.
Yes. That's true. It might not work. And you're probably even correct. But that's always true, and the most valuable cases are those that work when most people don't expect them to. http://paulgraham.com/swan.html
You say that every other VC does this. But if other VCs are training ML models, they don't seem to be publishing their results, so I'm inclined to say that this is new.
Is it going to work? Well, we'll have to see. But as with most startups, the answer is "probably not, but the chance may be significantly better than random."
If they are looking for swans that work when people don't expect them to, they should probably be looking for those swans somewhere else*, not the top 3% of an incubator that probably graduates proportionately more successful startups than any university.
The issue that everyone is calling out here is that they name themselves "Rebel" when they're doing exactly the same thing that every other VC firm is, but (apparently) not even as well -- at least they should say "Founder Friendly", etc.
* Generally startups that might become unexpected swans will be found outside of startup hubs like silicon valley.