Patrick McKenzie

I feel like “Would you bank a shell corporation fronting for a Bitcoin exchange?” should be easiest audit question in history.https://twitter.com/bitfinexed/status/1048812561536360449 …

I changed my mind about Bitcoin.https://twitter.com/spookymaterial/status/1047884739426885633 …

"Wait you'd spend $160k and 4 years of your life just to listen to a bored professor drone in front of a room full of idiots who are generally either absent or hungover?" "Yeah, that does seem odd. Remind me why I did it the first time? Was it much cheaper or shorter? I forget."

A thing I have often thought about is how everyone professes to love education and says universities are good at it but if I told my friends or family that I'm taking 4 years to do another undergrad degree (at age 36) for personal enrichment they'd question my sanity.https://twitter.com/webdevMason/status/1048193848554348545 …

So what I’m saying is basically I love it.

My childhood memories were directionally accurate.

Fetch quest at level two with four characters; had a random encounter with two greater water elementals. “Now it has been a while since I played D&D”, said I, “But I recall those having at least 8 hit dice, and they can probably one shot every member of my party.”

Pathfinder: Kingmaker has a difficulty curve approaching C except the segfaults are competently optimized NPC mages who understand how crowd control, AoE, and party composition work. Does it feel unfair at times? No. It simply *is* unfair at times.

“Liquidity?” The frothy nature of the hiring market and expectation that a 2 year tenure at an employer isn’t disqualifyingly short means that a much higher percentage of folks doing X can be convinced to actually join you than in, say, Tokyo.

There are a lot of problems you can solve by just taking smart and hungry generalists and throwing it at them. In fact, I think that number is radically underestimated. But when you want a specialist, SF has depth and liquidity in the talent markets relevant to your interests.

Are your CS teams dying under the load? Need someone who went from 10 reps to 100 three times? SF has plausibly forty folks you could interview tomorrow. What specialist do you need on your growth team? Drip email copywriter? Specializing in B2B SaaS? No worries, have twenty.

This is a good thread. A particular subgenre of talent is folks who specialize in companies at their scaling stages: execs, middle managers, and specialized individual contributors.https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/1047258266646933504 …

I think that was maybe my second biggest message board hobby during a ~3 year period where I was also full-time employed and managing a WoW guild.

A random thing I know relatively well: consumer credit reporting regulations and consumer credit underwriting. (c.f. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-reports/ … ) A lawyer at a bank once asked me where I had studied it. The Internet, of course. (The CRAs said I owed $200k+ so I was motivated.)

Quoted for endorsement, and you'd be surprised how impactful some of the things in that set are.https://twitter.com/webdevMason/status/1047136454952943616 …

"Move fast and make decisions consistent with your values and the relative risks of the situation, potential upside, and whether it can be reversed easily if you turn out to have made a mistake" just doesn't have the same ring to it, though.

Also while I yield to no one with my desire to do data driven rigorous decisions where possible there are tradeoffs against ability to move quickly and ability to move boldly, and there are a lot of margins where being bold biweekly beats being absolutely positively right yearly.

See also, big businesses. You've got lots of data but not 100% of time. You're playing a poker game where you can see your cards and past hands but you're playing it against the future. Sometimes you'll have a lot of confidence when your chips go into the middle; sometimes less.https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1047129038941249536 …

Not legal advice: companies don’t have an Undo button and you probably shouldn’t make one on any given Tuesday for the heck of it... but you totally could form a real, honest-to-Delaware company on any given Tuesday, and there are a lot of things that company could then do.

There are so many interesting opportunities in product space where you take something expensive/hard/slow/high-commitment and replace it with something which is equivalently capable, easy to experiment with, but not much more of a commitment than anything with an Undo button.