Hacker News: jhylau

New comment by jhylau in "There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing"

jhylau — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 07:00:12 +0000

trump doesn't like dario given what he has said in the past.

New comment by jhylau in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

jhylau — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:10:52 +0000

trump doesn't like dario. simple as that. don't over think it.

New comment by jhylau in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

jhylau — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:10:35 +0000

trump hates dario. simple as that.

New comment by jhylau in "Misaligned VC incentives focused on fees and fund size"

jhylau — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 19:25:02 +0000

Larger VC funds create incentives to focus on fees not investing based on startup fundamentals

Misaligned VC incentives focused on fees and fund size

jhylau — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 19:25:02 +0000

Article URL: https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-102524-misaligned

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42010507

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by jhylau in "Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B"

jhylau — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 14:42:25 +0000

Track record is based on IRR mostly. See my other comment on the Lps below regarding the incentive structure and what they care about. This particular bet is almost a guaranteed markup, as Ilya will surely/likely raise another round. It’s also not a terrible bet to invest in a proven expert/founder. By the time these companies exit (if they ever) 15 years from now, the mega fund VC partner will probably be retired from all the cumulative fees and just playing golf and taking occasional board meetings. Cash on cash returns are very different to playing the IRR game. Of course they want to find real winners as well, but reality is there aren’t that many and they have so much money to allocate they will have to bet on marginal things that can at least show some paper gains.

New comment by jhylau in "Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B"

jhylau — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 14:36:57 +0000

It’s not that they don’t care, of course they want to find winners. It’s just that A) there is so much capital to allocate that they have to allocate to marginal ideas B) their priorities are to raise their next fund which means focusing on vanity metrics like IRR and paper markups C) The incentive structure in VC pushes them to invested based on motivated reasoning. Remember VC returns are cyclical, and many vintages underperform the public markets and particularly large funds do worse simply because they have too much capital to allocate and too few great ideas.

New comment by jhylau in "Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B"

jhylau — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 14:33:23 +0000

These LPs at mega funds are typically partners/associates at pension funds or endowments that can write the 8-9figure checks. They are not super sophisticated and they typically do not stay at their jobs long enough to see the cash on cash returns 15 years later. Nor are they incentivized to care either. These guys are salaried employees with MBAs and get annual bonuses based on IRR (paper gains). Hence the priority is generating IRR , which in this case is very likely as Ilya will raise a few more rounds. Of course, Lps are getting smarter and are increasingly making more demands. But there is just so much capital to allocate for these mega funds, inevitable that some ideas are half baked.

New comment by jhylau in "Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B"

jhylau — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 03:42:18 +0000

VCs at the big/mega funds make most of their money from fees, they don't actually care as much about the potential portfolio investment exits 10-15 years from now. What they care MOST about is the ability to raise another fund in 2-3 years, so they can milk more fees from LPs. i.e. 2% fee PER YEAR on a 5bn fund is a lot of guaranteed risk-free money.

To be able to achieve that is entirely dependent on two things:

1) deploying capital in the current fund on 'sexy' ideas so they can tell LPs they are doing their job

2) paper markups, which they will get, since Ilya will most definitely be able to raise another round or two at a higher valuation. even if it eventually goes bust or gets sold at cost.

With 1) and 2), they can go back to their existing fund LPs and raise more money for their next fund and milk more fees. Getting exits and carry is just the cherry on top for these megafund VCs.

New comment by jhylau in "Sohu – first specialized chip (ASIC) for transformer models"

jhylau — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 14:27:09 +0000

but can they run RAG on these things? you can't just run a pure pre-trained LLM as that will have limited use cases.

New comment by jhylau in "Macron says France will build new nuclear energy reactors"

jhylau — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 23:20:41 +0000

Vogtle nuclear delayed again due to shoddy work that needs redoing, raising cost to >$27.8 billion.

New timeline means 16 to 17 years between planning and operation, thus 16-17 years of CO2 and pollution before a single kWh

https://www.wabe.org/new-delay-for-georgia-nuclear-reactors-...

we are running out of time! the transition to WWS is faster and cheaper.

see: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/WWS-...

New comment by jhylau in "Real-Life Angel Investing Returns 2012–2016"

jhylau — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 03:16:36 +0000

They forgot about taxes

New comment by jhylau in "Real-Life Angel Investing Returns 2012–2016"

jhylau — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 03:16:04 +0000

They forgot about after tax

New comment by jhylau in "Asana S-1"

jhylau — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 22:14:38 +0000

I believe these types of trusts (without knowledge of the exact trust setup) are to limit the inheritance tax when he dies, by having the trust own the shares at an early stage (lower valuation, lower inheritance tax). It can appreciate within the trust without accumulating additional inheritance tax on the appreciation. The downside is the trust owns the shares and he can't liquidate it for his own use, which he doesn't need to cos he's already rich enough.

The world's biggest blockchain consumer protocol

jhylau — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 16:09:46 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/gifto/gifto-protocol-phase-i-ii-and-iii-c55aef970b1c

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16317141

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The Universal Gifting Protocol

jhylau — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 15:13:44 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/gifto/introducing-gifto-e8a773836d1b

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16150953

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jhylau in "Ask HN: What was it like to quit your job and focus on your successful startup?"

jhylau — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 09:43:11 +0000

one word: liberating

New comment by jhylau in "Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O."

jhylau — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 09:29:54 +0000

There is a lot of vested interest in this company - it will for sure never go down. Plenty of investors around the world who will buy in. Valuation is a different topic - but this company is here for the long haul.

New comment by jhylau in "Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?"

jhylau — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 09:58:19 +0000

international markets.

New comment by jhylau in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2017)"

jhylau — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 17:01:51 +0000

REMOTE or Boston | Senior Ruby on Rails Developer | Carriage https://www.trycarriage.com

Leading on-demand company (think UberEats, Postmates) in the Middle East looking to hire Senior Rails developer to tackle scale issues, architecture changes, and optimization challenges with our logistics platforms. Must have experience working with large apps/databases and high traffic settings. Experience with machine learning and hadoop a plus.

Profitable company with hundreds of couriers and multiple software products. Here is the job ad in full: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z9iLakBEpjLKjxzwAXDwQILg...

Send resume to jonathan@trycarriage.com