Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

I work for the Internet, at , mostly on accelerating startups. Opinions here are my own.

東京都 Tokyo
Joined February 2009

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  1. 10 hours ago

    If your situation is also complicated I think the best current option is Interactive Brokers, which is simultaneously wonderful, but it is definitely the C of discount brokerages. "If you shoot your own foot off, that's on you. You knew what you were getting into."

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  2. 10 hours ago

    "Complicated how?" Major curve ball thrown at essentially all financial institutions: "How comfortable are you with someone who is a US citizen but lives in Japan, with tax obligations in both countries, who is keenly sensitive to your exchange rate and margin rates?"

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  3. 10 hours ago

    "How are they as a brokerage?" My favorite discount brokerage, largely because they abstract away orders from the user. (You put in your desired allocations and they Figure It Out.) My financial situation is complicated so I will probably not use them for more than funny money.

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  4. 10 hours ago

    It both should make people marginally more likely to interact with the promotion and should decrease the rate of karma burned with non-interested users, since you do the calculation "OK, you think this is actually plausibly in my interest since I can see people like it."

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  5. 10 hours ago

    I like this social proof (from M1 Finance, a discount brokerage) that the promotion they are emailing about frequently has seen good uptake from other users:

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  6. Feb 2

    Increasingly, there's just... more professional competence early? The SaaS model is thoroughly proven and widely distributed. There are multiple overlapping ecosystems for supporting the company. The engineers are highly likely to have worked on a similar system before.

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  7. Feb 2

    "Planning for how?" Like, shareware was mostly written by software professionals who were business amateurs. ("Bookkeeping? What's that?") Many early SaaS companies, including successful ones, were largely the same; making it up as they went along.

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  8. Feb 2

    The new system increasingly contemplates "If by year N it is a profitable SaaS cash machine, *someone wants to own it.* Possibly it remains the founders, but if not, stick your hand up and PE will happily take you out." And there are people planning for that 3~5+ years out.

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  9. Feb 2

    The exit opportunities for traditionally backed VC companies are generally heavily bespoke: companies are bought not sold, acquihire is (despite the reputation) generally not a planned-for outcome, and IPOs are difficult to predict by nature.

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  10. Feb 2

    These days increasingly I'm seeing persistent networks across firms in the same way that there appear (to this outsider) to be persistent networks in e.g. real estate or Hollywood. Products increasingly derisked, sometimes by expertise and sometimes by network, prior to code.

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  11. Feb 2

    Previously there were a few geographical markets which had some pipeline to take one particular type of company (venture-backed startups) through several rounds of professional money and then exit opportunities, but the intake process for that was "a little YOLO."

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  12. Feb 2

    One of the biggest themes in software right now is the increasing professionalization of the software *company* supply chain.

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  13. Feb 2

    I love that MicroConf put all of my talks in one place, but Jason Cohen's one (the first one linked) is probably the single best use of an hour if you're thinking of bootstrapping a SaaS business. It might be the best talk at MicroConf ever in sheer instrumental utility.

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  14. Feb 2

    That is probably the best habit I've picked up from Superhuman, incidentally: I don't know if it is my sometimes limited ability to focus through task switches or something more widely applicable, but I get *much more done* when processing email by genre versus by timestamp.

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  15. Feb 2

    Similarly, when I do something which generates a standing wave of email (e.g. blog post or similar), I often make a temporary split to corral that out of my inbox so that I can be in the right headspace for a solid hour rather than interleaving with work or other commitments.

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  16. Feb 2

    A thing which has been saving my bacon in Superhuman: making a special split (tab) for upcoming meetings (identified by tagging them "meeting", which takes two keystrokes). I love how customizable it is to "However you work *right now*."

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  17. Feb 1

    I do not think that YC will be the last or largest success built off that (or similar) insights.

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  18. Feb 1

    YC is a staggeringly successful business and I would attribute at least tens of percent of it to the market consensus in Silicon Valley previously being "If you can't find an intro to me you're not worth my time to talk to" and pg et al saying "Any geek any time any way."

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  19. Feb 1

    I apologize for sounding mercenary about this. Call it a lens to bring to the table. It feels obvious to me, at a primal level, that of course one would welcome questions from people getting started, but many folks do not share this intuition, so maybe the sketched math helps.

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  20. Feb 1

    There are very few future world states in which I will regret the trade "I spent ~2 hours on email in 2020 answering a question which is a bit below my paygrade. Now, in 2030, 250 geeks walk around every day attributing of their salary to me. The are not in first job anymore."

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