About Kaiyu Hsu
Hello world. You can call me Kai since we're pretty much friends now. I'm an engineer, designer and investor based in San Francisco, and kyh.io is my corner of the web — the durable version of a business card, a portfolio and a lab notebook rolled into one.
I've spent my career in the space between design and infrastructure: making interfaces that feel obvious, and making the systems underneath them fast enough that the interface stays obvious under load. That has looked like frontend framework work at Amazon, design engineering at Google, developer experience at Vercel, and now technical work alongside founders at Sequoia Capital.
Today I'm Technical Staff at Sequoia Capital, where I work with founders on the technical side of company building — architecture reviews, early hiring, prototyping, and the unglamorous work of turning a demo into something that survives its first thousand users. Before that I was a software engineer at Vercel, a design engineer at Google, and a software engineer at Amazon, where I helped build the frontend framework behind the retail experience used by the world's largest retailer.
Earlier
I've taken startups through the full range of outcomes: an acquisition at Cardiogram, where I was a design engineer and co-authored published research on growth and retention; a public listing at Slyce; and a shutdown at Atrium. The failures taught more than the exits did. I'm also a contributing member of the U.S. Digital Response and the OpenJS Foundation.
Outside of work I ship small things constantly: a game studio for agents, a letter-writing site that erases itself, a component library, a compensation calculator, a realtime trading game, and a pile of forkable AI-native Next.js templates. Most of them are live, most of them are open, and all of them are listed on the showcase.
Beyond software I read about economics, psychology and business, draw things badly, and design games. But honestly, I spend most of my days procrastinating.