Top all-time · #3416
Jamin Ball
Personal blog · cloudedjudgement.substack.combusinessai
Jamin Ball writes Clouded Judgement, a personal blog at cloudedjudgement.substack.com about business and ai. Since 2021, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 35 times, most often “Systems of Record Are Evolving”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Jamin Ball's Clouded Judgement substack covers public SaaS and tech company valuations and financials, including S-1 filings, revenue multiples against growth rates, and industry views such as 'Long Live Systems of Record'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Weekly data driven analysis of AI and software companies.
Most-linked posts?
- Systems of Record Are Evolving6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2025-12-13
- Authentication in the Age of AI Agents3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-03-14
- Authority Is the AI Bottleneck2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-01-05
- Misaligned VC incentives focused on fees and fund size2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-10-31
What Hacker News says?
Here's a good analysis of the financials in the S1: https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/gitlab-benchmarking-...
Comment linking /p/gitlab-benchmarking-the-s-1-data
on “Gitlab S-1”Submitted Is seat-based pricing dead? as a story · 11 points
HN discussionThere is a correlation analysis in Jamin Ball's "Clouded Judgement" substack [1] which shows the correlation between next twelve month ("NTM") Revenue Multiples and Revenue Annual Growth Rates for public market tech / SaaS stocks. The current Slope-Intercept is (NTM Revenue Multiple) = 36.677*(NTM Rev Growth Rate) + 2.0013. If Wiz is doubling revenue (100% Growth Rate) and they are at about $500M of revenue today [2…
Comment linking /p/clouded-judgement-31425-authentication
on “Google to buy Wiz for $32B”Submitted Systems of Record Are Evolving as a story · 9 points
HN discussionJamin Ball had a better take on Clouded Judgement https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-12... "Long Live Systems of Record"
Comment linking /p/clouded-judgement-121225-long-live
on “AI agents are starting to eat SaaS”Submitted Systems of Record Are Dead. Long Live Systems of Record as a story · 6 points
HN discussionZIRP is over and startups are back to hard mode > In 2021 and the first half of 2022 (when most of the 2022 activity happened) we essentially crammed 5 years worth of funding into an 18 month period. Series Bs and Cs were raised when companies were at the typical Series A milestones. Normal round sizes doubled or tripled. Every type of investor was broadly operating in a “risk on” mindset given the ZIRP environment,…
Comment linking /p/clouded-judgement-11224-hard-truths
on “A Growing List of Unicorns Haven't Raised Funding for 3-Plus Years”Submitted The End of Compute Scarcity? Not So Fast as a story · 3 points
HN discussionDoing post-mortems on my agent's failures over the holidays made me realize the problem isn't the model. It is the lack of a deterministic inference-time verification layer. I spent the break reading the recent Stanford/Harvard paper on agentic adaptation [1]. Their research provides mathematical proof for what I experienced in Q4: supervising only final outputs is a dead end. Agents learn to "ignore tools and impro…
Comment linking /p/clouded-judgement-1226-authority
on “The Agent Lobotomy: Inference-time verification for autonomous systems”Submitted Moats in the Age of AI as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted From Systems of Record to Systems of Intelligence as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Anthropic: Benchmarking the S-1 Data as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Time to Power as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Fourth Industrial Revolution: The Intelligence Revolution as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Bar for Going Public as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Latest Trends in Cloud Software Companies as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Neocloud Boom as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Poison of Inertia as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Authority Is the AI Bottleneck as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Long Live Systems of Record as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Clouded Judgement 12.12.25 – Long Live Systems of Record as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Long Live Systems of Record as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Authentication in the Age of AI Agents as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Authentication in the Age of AI Agents as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Clouded Judgement: Is Software Cheap or Expensive? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted ServiceTitan: Benchmarking the S-1 Data as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Market Tipping to Growth as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Clouded Judgement 10.25.24 – Misaligned Incentives as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Misaligned VC incentives focused on fees and fund size as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hard Truths as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
