jihyun

building agents that do real $ work 🧠 ML @ Cornell. Prev built money products at hedge fund, fintech, Goldman Sachs. in between 🌁🗽🇸🇬🇰🇷

[Zomma @ZommaLabs]

2 days till our #nytechweek event 🙌 we are very oversubscribed but if you want in dm and we will try our best to make space!

[jihyun @jihprobs]

@Kaz_Khadem because no agentic workflows getting built when you have this view + nyc summer

[jihyun @jihprobs]

@swang_co cute - any good spots to host smaller events? would love recs!

[jihyun @jihprobs]

the aggro energy RLHF result:

[jihyun @jihprobs]

Being a founder = being so good at getting rejected/ghosted its not cute ✨ but you keep asking anyways

[Clara Gold @Clara_Gold]

I realized fundraising was the first time in my life I got rejected at scale. And honestly, as a woman, I was not emotionally trained for it.

Before the feminists come for me, let me make my point.

I think the first real arena where most people experience power, desire, status, and rejection is dating.

And dating trains men brutally.

A lot of men learn very early that if they want someone, they have to walk across the room, risk looking stupid, get rejected, survive it, and do it again. They learn that rejection is volume, timing, targeting. It’s a numbers game.

A lot of women are trained very differently.

Especially if you’re a pretty girl, you don’t usually walk into a bar looking at a guy thinking: “Can I have him?” You only think: “Do I want him?”.

You don’t build your identity around shooting your shot 100 times and surviving 99 no’s. You don’t get trained to ask directly, get rejected publicly, and act normal 5 minutes later.

You get trained to be “chosen”. To be impressive enough that the opportunity comes to you.

And then you start building a company.

And the whole paradigm changes. Suddenly, everyone can say no to you. Investors say no. Candidates say no. Customers say no.

And when your rejection muscle is weak, your brain does the dumbest thing possible: it makes the “no” mean something about you. That you’re not smart enough. Not compelling enough.

I think this is one of the most underrated gender differences in fundraising.

Not that men are inherently better at it. But a lot of them have built thicker rejection scar tissue earlier. They know how to hear no and keep moving. They know how to make it less personal. They know how to treat it like volume, timing, targeting, iteration.

I didn’t.

I’ve raised 3 rounds. On the surface, the story looks great: I raised with Sequoia, OpenAI, Khosla. Woohoo.

The real story is less sexy: every round wrecked me. I lost 5kg each time. I probably donated a few years of life expectancy to the cap table.

Because every round, I only got 1 term sheet. One. EVERYONE else said no. And when almost everyone says no, your body does not care about the intellectually correct explanation. It only hears: Maybe they’re right. Maybe you’re not that compelling. Maybe you’re not the founder you thought you were.

For a long time, I thought confidence meant learning not to take the no personally. I don’t believe that anymore. Maybe some people are built like that. I’m not.

30 years of being trained to be chosen does not turn into resilience because someone in a Patagonia vest says fundraising is a numbers game.

So now I think confidence is something less glamorous.

Confidence is taking the no very personally. Letting it ruin your day, losing your appetite, spiraling for hours… And still taking the next meeting.

Confidence is just being bothered as f*** and not letting it make you smaller.

I still don’t fully believe my own BS as I’m writing this, but I guess that’s the point. Can’t wait for the next round to find out.

[jihyun @jihprobs]

@Clara_Gold Thanks for sharing this 🌟 as someone wise told me the only way to get good at rejection is to just get rejected 100 times

[jihyun @jihprobs]

@DarrelFrater Should be open now :)

[jihyun @jihprobs]

@everlife_one Congrats!!!

[jihyun @jihprobs]

@ShahRathin awesome write up rathin 🙌

[jihyun @jihprobs]

@tmhammer @a16z @speedrun @Techweek_ would love to hear some hot takes 👀 excited to host NY @Techweek_ event too 🔥

[jihyun @jihprobs]

What does the future of Operations look like with AI Agents? Super excited to host a AI Agent workshop for Operations teams in Finance at NY @Techweek_ with @ZommaLabs ty @a16z for the support!
RSVP -> https://t.co/MUJSAWYbs9

[Vercel @vercel]

This year's AI Accelerator winners shipped agents for finance teams, application security, and real estate.

They built with $8M in credits and hands-on mentorship from Vercel, @awscloud, @OpenAI, @AnthropicAI, and other partners.

https://t.co/C8wV2CYK9a

[jihyun @jihprobs]

@morgantepell @cognition 🔥 congrats!

[jihyun @jihprobs]

@dunkhippo33 also the culture of wanting each other to succeed and helping out. so unique and takes a community

[Harrison Chase @hwchase17]

https://t.co/aZnKZ1SVXB

[jihyun @jihprobs]

@RampLabs for harder reasoning questions based on many docs, what'd be the best compaction? 2 distinct phases of light summarization -> heavy compaction?

[jihyun @jihprobs]

@harjtaggar And at one point you just end up using the same CC session to do the thing openclaw was told to do 🫠

[jihyun @jihprobs]

@andrewchen myapp_v5_finalfinal.git

[jihyun @jihprobs]

model routing works well for us (outperforms any single model) but big labs could also step into this space e.g. Codex plugin for Claude Code. startups edge will still be in how quickly we can eval and route to the best possible outcome, which is why I believe ML research as founder role is a must for application companies