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patio11's profile
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11

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Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

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

東京都 Tokyo
kalzumeus.com
Joined February 2009

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    1. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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      Everyone in Silicon Valley uses equity, and not debt, to fuel their growth because debt is not available in sufficient quantities to poorly capitalized companies without a strong history of adequate cash flows to service debt.

      6 replies 86 retweets 613 likes
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    2. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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      Investors in venture-back companies are purchasing a product. It is critically important to understand that that product is growth. The reason tech is favored as an asset class that it appears to be one of few sources of growth available on the market at the moment at any price.

      5 replies 140 retweets 839 likes
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    3. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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      The explosive growth of the tech sector keeps average age down and depresses average wages. Compared to industries which existed in materially the same form in 1970, we have a stupidly compressed experience spectrum: 5+ years rounds to "senior." This is not a joke.

      14 replies 148 retweets 870 likes
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    4. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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      The tech industry is fundamentally unserious about how it recruits, hires, and retains candidates. About which I have a lot more to say than could fit in a tweet, but, a good thing to know.

      10 replies 149 retweets 925 likes
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    5. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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      If you are attempting to hire for an engineering position, greater than 50% of people who apply for the job and whose resume you select as "facially plausible" will be entirely unable to program, at all. The search term for learning more about this is FizzBuzz.

      13 replies 135 retweets 850 likes
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    6. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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      Software companies in B2B which aspire to growing quickly will eventually spend more on sales and marketing than they do on engineering. You can read S-1s of successful IPOs and calculate the ratio; it is sometimes 2X++.

      3 replies 131 retweets 673 likes
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    7. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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      The chief products of the tech industry are (in B2C) developing new habits among consumers and (in B2B) taking a business process which exists in many places and markedly decreasing the total cost of people required to implement it.

      4 replies 246 retweets 1,150 likes
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    8. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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      There is no hidden reserve of smart people who know what they're doing, anywhere. Not in government, not in science, not in tech, not at AppAmaGooBookSoft, nowhere. The world exists in the same glorious imperfection that it presents with.

      11 replies 445 retweets 1,648 likes
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    9. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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      Significant advances shipped by the tech industry in the last 20 years include putting the majority of human knowledge in the hands of 40%++ of the world's population, available on-demand, for "coffee money" not "university money."

      4 replies 196 retweets 1,046 likes
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    10. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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      Weak-form efficients market hypothesis is a good heuristic for evaluating the public markets but a really, really bad heuristic for evaluating either technical or economic facts about tech companies, startups, your career, etc etc. Optimizations are possible; fruit hangs low.

      5 replies 52 retweets 460 likes
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      Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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      Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are done by specialists. People underestimate how deep specialties can run. These are simultaneously true.

      8:10 AM - 1 Dec 2017
      • 1,060 Retweets
      • 3,414 Likes
      • Eric Johan Kruger Kanav Kariya ʰ Federico Pértile guillermo torti jagguie Anders Jonathon G Storms
      15 replies 1,060 retweets 3,414 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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          Most open source software is written by programmers who are full-time employed by companies which directly consume the software, at the explicit or implicit blessing of their employers. It is not charity work, any more than they charitably file taxes.

          6 replies 145 retweets 819 likes
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        3. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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          The amount of money flowing through capitalism would astound you. The number and variety of firms participating in the economy would astound you. We don't see most of it every day for the same reason abstractions protect us from having to care about metallurgy while programming.

          6 replies 125 retweets 916 likes
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        4. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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          CS programs have, in the main, not decided that the primary path to becoming a programmer should involve doing material actual programming. There are some exceptions: Waterloo, for example. This is the point where I joke "That's an exhaustive list" but not sure that a joke.

          22 replies 91 retweets 548 likes
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        5. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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          Technical literacy in the broader population can be approximated with the Thanksgiving test: what sort of questions do you get at Thanksgiving? That's the ambient level of literacy. Serious people in positions of power eat Thanksgiving dinners, too. Guess what they ask at them.

          3 replies 80 retweets 530 likes
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        6. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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          Salaries in the tech industry are up *a lot* in the last few years, caused by: a tight labor market, collapse of a cartel organized against the interests of workers, increasing returns to scale at AppAmaGooBookSoft, and the like. Investor money *does not* pay most salaries.

          3 replies 45 retweets 435 likes
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        7. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017
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          This concludes, for the moment, an off-the-cuff list of things which would otherwise be too obvious to bring up in conversation. Meta thought: you radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it.

          42 replies 208 retweets 1,587 likes
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        8. End of conversation
        1. Reddy‏ @reddytragumna 2 Dec 2017
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          Replying to @patio11 @milof

          It is important to bear in mind that specialists are useless outside their furrow. A good leader is a generalist prepared to accept any task in the absence of a proven specialist, handing over their work to the specialist when identified.

          0 replies 4 retweets 9 likes
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        2. Seth Verrinder‏ @sethev 1 Dec 2017
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          Replying to @patio11

          what's an incorrigible generalist to do?

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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        1. Peter Vee‏ @PeterVeep 3 Dec 2017
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          Replying to @patio11

          One specialty every effective large company has are people who know how to get things done in THAT company. Not a skill outsiders or recent recruits have, and not to be sneezed at.

          0 replies 0 retweets 6 likes
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