Still, there’s something about Hy that’s striking a chord. His fans “are real people who follow and interact,” says  Rich Rosenblum, former global head of oil-derivatives trading at Goldman Sachs and a onetime energy trader at Elliott Management Corp. “He puts a lot of sweat into his position as a hub of information with no clear avenue for self profit.”

Dismissing Critics

Among Hy’s products is a Saturday e-mail in which he shares links to five articles from publications as diverse as 99U and the Oxford Handbook of Motivation that captured his attention. Rishi Ganti, founding partner of Orthogon Partners, says Hy’s curating is so valuable he forwards at least one article every week to friends and colleagues.

Some, though, say they tune in just because they they find his posts so bizarre, like his Facebook Live meditation video, which was 22 minutes of what pretty much looked like him sleeping.

Those people, Hy says, don’t bother him. He’s used to “passive-aggressive patronizing” from a crowd that takes a dim view because “what I’m doing is a mix of blogging and writing and not a company that’s making money.”

Money may not be the end-all for him, but having a fair amount made his break possible. He saved enough so he and his wife, an artist, and their 2-year-old daughter could live for at least three years of his not being fully employed without major lifestyle alterations. It helps that the family owns their Brooklyn apartment. Hy cites Nike Air Max sneakers and $70 James Pearse T-shirts as among his few vices.

‘Uncomfortable Introspection’

What spurred his departure from BlackRock was a desire to “maximize productivity at life” (rough translation: live life to the fullest). Also, he might have been bored. “After 12 years, I’m like, hey, fixed-income strategies or statistical arbitrage don’t change that much. Once the money hit a certain point, I just wanted to do something different.”

Raised in New York City by a French teacher and a United Nations official from Cambodia, Hy earned a computer science-degree from Yale University. Next was a stint in investment banking with Broadview International, then a move to Treesdale Partners. BlackRock came in 2007, just before the chaos of the financial crisis. Group reshuffles led to battlefield promotions, shaving years off his path to managing director, which he achieved at 31.

But Hy says the magic was in his productivity tricks and networking skills. He researched the most-used words in English with more than four letters and created a BlackBerry shorthand alphabet, enabling him to type faster. He devised a relationship-management system to catalog thousands of people he met. At the moment, he says, 42 percent of the names in his database are “non-bros,” meaning women or racial or ethnic minorities underrepresented in finance and tech.