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Comment by alright2565 | Hacker News Reader

That's not it at all. The problem is that Voleon is being dishonest around their non-compete agreements.

A Voleon spokesman:

> Those who sign it will receive a paid garden leave.

Voleon ex-employees:

> Voleon ex-employees who spoke to Insider said their noncompete agreements did not provide paid leave. Ex-employees and other sources close to the firm said the unpaid noncompetes have been applied broadly — including to people who say they had little exposure to the firm's secret sauce.

According to a Voleon ex-employee, which also matches my understanding of this industry:

> They will defend that noncompete by saying more and more firms have two years. The trick is: And yes, they pay you something when they make you sit out of your career.

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You've missed my point. I'm not commenting on Voleon's non competes. I'm commenting on the fact that CA's noncompete laws make it challenging to run a business like Voleon.

I personally don't really believe this kind of business is good for society so to me this is a more feature than a bug. Obsessive guarding of IP secrets seems to be correlated with paranoid and selfish antisocial behavior, which is essentially how the financial industry appears from the outside in spite of their lofty rhetoric about their contributions to society.

The largest stream of charitable donations in California come from the most IP-paranoid hedge fund I know of.

If you have negative opinions of the finance industry in general, I can't do much but remind you that it's a large and varied industry and that your opinions are priors you should expose to relevant data.

Maybe the reason that the most IP-paranoid hedge fund makes the largest charitable donations in California is to proactively secure favorable publicity in case they become embroiled in a scandal that could impact their financial standing.

Moreover, it raises the question of who truly benefits from these charitable contributions. For example, Ikea is owned by a charity for tax optimization purposes. The mission of the charity is to promote interior design and architecture. Essentially, strategic investments that will ultimately benefit Ikea itself in the long run.

Interestingly, it's the opposite. They made the donations anonymously and were outed by a charity reporter. Likewise, the charities were things like the Sierra Club, various disease research foundations, and the ACLU.

I see your point, though respectfully disagree. Voleon gets some real advantages from being "the only game in town" by being the only remotely large quant fund right next door to Berkeley, and Jon McAuliffe has his pick of good students from Berkeley. I don't think Voleon should be able to reap all of those advantages but not play by California's rules.

I wonder how this article is going down in the Berkeley stat department...

Voleon is competing with the local unicorn population. Unless their returns are amazing, you can get comparable lifetime returns at higher sharpe as a big tech employee.

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