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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

      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.

      5 replies 86 retweets 571 likes
      Show this thread
    2. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

      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 138 retweets 741 likes
      Show this thread
    3. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

      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.

      13 replies 150 retweets 813 likes
      Show this thread
    4. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

      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.

      8 replies 154 retweets 871 likes
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    5. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

      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.

      12 replies 138 retweets 800 likes
      Show this thread
    6. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

      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++.

      4 replies 128 retweets 623 likes
      Show this thread
    7. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

      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.

      3 replies 239 retweets 1,013 likes
      Show this thread
    8. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

      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.

      10 replies 411 retweets 1,475 likes
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    9. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

      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 197 retweets 965 likes
      Show this thread
    10. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

      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 49 retweets 405 likes
      Show this thread
      Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

      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
      • 1,021 Retweets
      • 3,130 Likes
      • Ghost.code Ovi Bejinariu Edward Czech Wiza J. jürgen bonito🔌 A D A 🙃 ayo. Wale Eseyin justin spratt 🚗
      15 replies 1,021 retweets 3,130 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

          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.

          5 replies 143 retweets 767 likes
          Show this thread
        3. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

          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.

          5 replies 122 retweets 842 likes
          Show this thread
        4. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

          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 90 retweets 507 likes
          Show this thread
        5. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

          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 78 retweets 483 likes
          Show this thread
        6. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

          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 43 retweets 408 likes
          Show this thread
        7. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 1 Dec 2017

          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.

          37 replies 208 retweets 1,452 likes
          Show this thread
        8. End of conversation
        1. Reddy‏ @reddytragumna 2 Dec 2017
          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 3 retweets 8 likes
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        1. New conversation
        2. Seth Verrinder‏ @sethev 1 Dec 2017
          Replying to @patio11

          what's an incorrigible generalist to do?

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
        3. David W. Locke‏ @DavidWLocke 1 Dec 2017
          Replying to @sethev @patio11

          Become a writer. Do not subject yourself to employment. Every time you get paid, buy income, not junk, not experience, not fun. If you're living of your earnings from work, you're making a mistake. Life off your dividend income alone.

          1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
        4. Steve :D‏ @stevetovali 1 Dec 2017
          Replying to @DavidWLocke @sethev @patio11

          "Buy income"; have any references?

          3 replies 0 retweets 1 like
        5. David W. Locke‏ @DavidWLocke 1 Dec 2017
          Replying to @stevetovali @sethev @patio11

          That means buy stock for dividend purposes. The bigger the dividend the more the risk, but avoiding that all is well. Don't monitor. Don't worry about the stock price. Did it stop paying a dividend? But nothing is gained and much is lost by selling, paying another commission.

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
        6. Richard Copperwaite‏ @richcopperwaite 1 Dec 2017
          Replying to @DavidWLocke @stevetovali and

          How much can one expect to make from dividends over time, relative to what they paid for the stock?

          4 replies 0 retweets 1 like
        7. David W. Locke‏ @DavidWLocke 1 Dec 2017
          Replying to @richcopperwaite @stevetovali and

          And, you never sell, so your family gets the stock and never sells. Forever compounding works pretty well.

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
        8. Richard Copperwaite‏ @richcopperwaite 1 Dec 2017
          Replying to @DavidWLocke @stevetovali and

          Sounds like there are loss outcomes though... A) the company fails and then nobody buys their stock B) for whatever reason, the company stops paying dividends and yield drops to zero C) for whatever reason, the company gets delisted

          2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
        9. David W. Locke‏ @DavidWLocke 1 Dec 2017
          Replying to @richcopperwaite @stevetovali and

          And, you're paying taxes on your income. I'm not.

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
        10. 4 more replies
        1. Peter Vee‏ @PeterVeep 3 Dec 2017
          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 5 likes
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        1. Paul Matthew Massell‏ @PaulMassell 2 Dec 2017
          Replying to @patio11

          Software/AI replaces specialists before generalists.

          0 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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        1. tac‏ @thanconnolly 1 Dec 2017
          Replying to @patio11

          any tips for getting a foot in the door as a generalist?

          0 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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        1. mike bayer‏ @zzzeek 1 Dec 2017
          Replying to @patio11 @__mharrison__

          dealing with angry beginner users who complain about use cases that have absolutely no value to my employer are still charity cases

          0 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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        1. John Clover  🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍🌈‏ @radiofreejohn 6 Jan 2018
          Replying to @patio11 @richgel999

          As a self described generalist for 20 years who’s building a team at a growing company, this only recently dawned on me, they can totally compliment each other as well.

          0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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