9 ms·

The Genius and Tragedy of Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

252 points by lionhearted 16y ago

charliepark 16y ago
For what it's worth, on just about every well-written, thoughtful comment on HN, I look up to the byline to see if it's from Patrick.
singer 16y ago
Watch your back Patrick. I think you have a new stalker. Seriously though.. this is one of the scariest blog posts I've ever read.
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- dfranke 16y ago
  This. I would find this post mildly creepy even if it were written about someone's who's an actual public figure. Writing it about someone whose claim to fame is writing a Bingo card generator and being #4-ranked in karma on a niche internet forum is just sick.
  - ellyagg 16y ago
    It may be inappropriate on some level, but calling it sick and scary is a little bit creepy itself. He's only saying out loud what many of us have been thinking. If the suggestion is that you can't freely admire someone (and the praise was clearly served up as an extra helping to offset the criticism) based only on the quality and volume of writing that Patrick has produced, well, that's just extra creepy.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      > and the praise was clearly served up as an extra helping to offset the criticism Hitting with one hand while praising at the same time never fooled anybody.
  - dennisgorelik 16y ago
    Patrick IS a public figure. That article discusses only things that Patrick chose to share about himself. If you feel creepy about that article -- that means there is something wrong with your perception of sharp ideas, not with the article.
rick888 16y ago
You call him a genius, yet he spent 6 years promoting a product (which I might add only took him a few days to create) that is only now just breaking the $1000 or $2000/month mark. Most smart people would have cut their losses a few years ago. Especially since that market isn't very big (elementary school teachers are poor and most schools won't invest in such a product). He is looked up to on the Joel on Software board and this forum as a marketing/business genius, yet he barely makes enough money to break the poverty level for one person (I can't imagine how he affords to live in Japan). He has talent and perseverance, but he's not a model we should be following for business.
- skmurphy 16y ago
  By what finish line are you judging him? He is well respected by his peers, he writes insightfully on difficult topics. he is independent and is spending his time as he chooses. And he is not done yet.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    > And he is not done yet. That's exactly where it's at. We can not look inside another persons head and this kind of 'reading the tea leaves' is bound to get it fantastically wrong in the longer term.
  - rick888 16y ago
    "By what finish line are you judging him? He is well respected by his peers, he writes insightfully on difficult topics. he is independent and is spending his time as he chooses. And he is not done yet." This is all good. However, I have seen many articles claiming he is some sort of business genius. The numbers he has given from his products prove otherwise.
- ambiate 16y ago
  I believe his products are capitalizing quite well for his target audience. Indeed, I would go as far as saying he owns a fair share of that market and controls it quite well. You just want to work on a larger scale, but don't be ignorant of the pieces coming together with a smaller puzzle... you're both still working on the same picture. Create a product, get it out there, make your target audience turn into a loving community, and make money. No matter how much you turn business into some complex monster: the fundamentals will always remain the same.
joshuacc 16y ago
Some of the author's points are interesting, but if Patrick took the advice, he'd basically turn into a clone of every other arrogant blowhard tech entrepreneur in the world. He might make more money, but he wouldn't be the patio11 that I've come to admire.
bryanh 16y ago
I get the impression that patio11 is doing exactly what he wants to do.
- RK 16y ago
  Yes, and didn't he already say he had a post-BingoCardCreator project that he was working on?
  - DTrejo 16y ago
    Reading this article would be worth your time.
    - RK 16y ago
      Yeah I missed that he mentioned it. I pretty much started skimming when the gist of the article seemed to be that the author was karma-whoring by writing about patio11 in detail, instead of writing a general article about maximizing your potential for your own goals.
swombat 16y ago
Let's hope DHH, Jason Fried, Jason Calacanis, Michael Arrington and Tim Ferris don't all read this article and think "Damn, he's right, I need to be more self-aggrandising!"
- rokhayakebe 16y ago
  Or, let's hope they do not write about Patrick without asking him. I am not sure how he would feel about it.
kolektiv 16y ago
Or possibly, he enjoys what he does, enjoys being his own boss, likes the challenges that the types of software he works on present, and values those things higher than going and shaving seconds off for some airline. If he is, his genius is more about finding a way of being happy than software, marketing, or anything else. I know HN tends to be all about the money at times, but seriously, it's not everything.
jgrahamc 16y ago
Many people have assumed that because they think I'm smart that I am also a millionaire. If only that were true. Seriously, I don't understand the expectation that there's a correlation between genius and riches.
- adamtj 16y ago
  It's the converse that tends to be true, but many people have trouble distinguishing between converse and contrapositive. Rich people tend to be smart. There are lots of bright ideas. The few that turn into successful companies are the ones that, at a few critical points, didn't fail. A good way to fail is to make mistakes and do nothing. So, to avoid failure, one must learn from mistakes, which tends to make people smart and is something smart people tend to do. The extra axiom necessary for showing smart->rich is risk taking. Smart people who don't take a chance and do something drastic are no more likely than anybody else to get rich. There are people who pay others to be smart, but they generally don't pay much more than a normal salary.
illumin8 16y ago
He makes some good points. A guy like Patrick could easily be pulling in $200-300K a year contracting with large companies. Since he is smart and knows how to hire people, he could start his own firm and break into the 7 figures annual salary leagues. Money isn't everything, but with those type of business skills, spending a lot of time commenting on HN is most likely a waste of your considerable expertise.
pedoh 16y ago
While I agree with the praises directed towards Patrick, I don't think it's wise to make assumptions about his (or anyone else's) motivations. If Patrick wanted to, he could walk any of the paths mentioned in the OP. We just don't know that Patrick isn't exactly where he wants to be in the long run. Maybe he doesn't want the things that come along with $100k, $200k, $1MM per year. If it is his aspiration to make that kind of money, I wouldn't bet against him having a plan. Patrick's transparency about his work might give the illusion that we know what he wants in life. We don't.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Exactly. People are complicated, not two dimensional card-board cut-outs of wannabe rich guys. Whatever motivates Patrick is up to him and him alone. This to me seems like helping a person to the other side of the street with the best intentions by frog marching them there only to find out they didn't want to be there in the first place.
lhorie 16y ago
The greater tragedy, perhaps, is this game we play where we tell the world how patio11, or Zuckerberg, or Jobs or whoever should do their stuff instead of improving what we do ourselves.
- BrandonM 16y ago
  That's why I voted the submission up. Reading that post made me think of my own skills that need developed and promoted. I am a smart guy with some unique abilities; I'm confident that with some focused effort, I could be capable of providing great value and getting appropriately compensated for it. I'm sure that the blog post was intended not only to encourage and promote patio11, but to give all of us a wakeup call that we, too, are capable of providing that same level of value with a little bit of work and dedication.
jacquesm 16y ago
I think Patricks biggest contribution is that he's not a greedy person and willing to share his adventures to the betterment of all. He has one thing he's very adamant about, he wants to have 100% of the thing he built. That's pretty limiting in terms of how far you can push it, my own idea is that I'd rather have a smaller part of something much larger, but we're not all built the same. (see: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/02/new-trends-in-startup-investing-explained-for-laymen/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/02/new-trends-in-startup-in... , the last paragraph). I think this is all about having your comfort zone and learning to walk before learning how to run.
- prawn 16y ago
  What I like most about Patrick's stuff is that he is such a vocal and visible contributor even though his personal start-up is such a realistic and achievable story. He doesn't make veiled references or never disclose his project(s) - he puts it all out there to the dollar. There's no outside investment, IPO, MSM press, etc. It's just one guy and his success in moving into self-employment. It's a happy life in Hobbiton (and I don't mean that in a condescending way at all). Having read/skimmed Sebastian's article, it felt as though something ignorant and grand-standing had just trampled that.
thaumaturgy 16y ago
Yeah, different people have different personalities. They have different motivations, different strengths and weaknesses. Money and fame are not universal drivers, it's that simple. I'm not going to try to analyze Patrick. I enjoy reading most of his comments, and agree that he's valuable here, but I don't know him anywhere near well enough to think I have any insight into what makes him tick. I doubt very many other people do, either. But I can talk about me! I have "money issues". I don't understand it the way that a proper businessperson should. All I understand are problems and solutions; poor people not having equal opportunities is a problem, in my mind, so I don't charge nearly enough. That means my business is constantly hamstrung and resource-short, and I work for less than minimum wage. But, I couldn't respect myself if I doubled (or tripled) my fees and only focused on the people that could pay. It would make me far unhappier doing that, instead of struggling every month. So, yeah: business isn't always a matter of rationality. If he's happy, then leave it alone. If he isn't, but doesn't ask for advice, then still leave it alone. If he ever asks for advice, think hard about whether you know him well enough to offer any.
some1else 16y ago
Is it possible that when Patrick says he doesn't earn more than $60k/year, he's talking about his paycheck, not the business?
- mistermann 16y ago
  You're the first to mention this, it's the first thing I though. I emailed Patrick with a few SEO questions a few months back, he logged into my analytics for a looks see, and sent me two quite detailed email replies (for free) with really good ideas, but said he wouldn't be able to help me any further as he had a consulting job he was working on. I think he quoted me an hourly rate for consulting, which was not high by any means, but would provide a very nice lifestyle if he was doing it full time. So from what I know, I think this interpretation of him living a life of hardship is likely off the mark. As for this blog post, ya, its a little weird, but I think the author wrote it with his heart in the right place, I think perhaps he just isn't fully aware of patio11's real situation and it seemed unjust to him. Yes, it is probably inappropriate it many ways, but in my estimation far from the "creepiest blog post I've ever read" (as some have said). By the way, I also met Patrick at a HN meetup in Tokyo, super nice down to earth guy. I doubt this post will cause him nearly the anguish it seems to be causing others here.
- codexon 16y ago
  Why would he be angry at a teacher making $60k/year then if his business was raking in much more than that?
d0m 16y ago
Can't wait to see patio11's answer to that.
- fondue 16y ago
  I'm certain I'm not the only one who paged down looking for his comment.
Poiesis 16y ago
Wow. I don't even know where to start. I think the best answer to "time to cash in on all those skills" is to note that he now does consulting, which is the very definition of what you are describing when you talk about who he could be helping. About AppointmentReminder: you are presuming that somehow he is overlooking this huge potential goldmine that you so helpfully point out. The man in question is likely top diplomatic to say so directly, but I don't have any problem saying that this is a rather arrogant point of view. Note that there are in fact more than three possible explanations for what he earns. And, why is it your business, anyway? Do you do this with other people, too? I think this kind of analysis is best done solely with yourself; the splinter in his eye vs.the plank in yours. You are trying to help, but you aren't. And you just look bad on the process.
mquander 16y ago
This is unbelievable. If the author absolutely can't resist giving patio11 a bunch of advice about how to live his life, then write an email. If the author wants to tell us how super important it is to self-promote and make a lot of money, then don't make an example out of a dude whose mind and motivations are clearly completely fucking opaque to you.
- elbrodeur 16y ago
  I couldn't agree more. This article was extremely uncomfortable to read; if it was me being written about I would be embarrassed and probably more than a little angry.
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  - BrandonM 16y ago
    I would be like, "Wow, thanks for the advice and the ringing endorsement." The guy is obviously trying to help Patrick out in multiple ways. The author is trying to make him realize how amazing he is and tell as many people as possible how valuable he is. Personally, I might be a bit uncomfortable while reading it. But sometime down the road I'd look back on it and be very thankful.
    - awa 16y ago
      As already pointed out, if he was really thinking about Patrick he'd have emailed him the advice rather making a huge blog post about it.
      - jacquesm 16y ago
        Hey but what a way to raise your own visibility by pushing down on someone else. Tragedy indeed.
      - BrandonM 16y ago
        OK, point taken. It might have been more difficult, but it could definitely have been possible to give him a strong endorsement without the rest of the post. Then he could have sent Patrick an email with the rest, indicating that the blog post might be a good reference.
Mc_Big_G 16y ago
Making $200k at a soul-sucking corporate contracting gig, probably somewhere other than Japan, is probably not what Patrick is looking for. I have a feeling it's just a matter of a few more swings before he hits a home run. Meanwhile, he's building an impressive following which equips him with an instant audience the moment he decides to launch said home run.
Kliment 16y ago
Oh seriously, this is bullshit. A deep analysis based on a single post, taken far out of context, and completely misguided. I'm not surprised patio11 is not responding to this. Seriously, what the hell?
- davidw 16y ago
  > I'm not surprised patio11 is not responding to this. Well - it's also the middle of the night in Japan. 04:28 according to the site I glanced at.
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necrecious 16y ago
Self promotion is a tricky thing. In an ideal world, value should be recognized through the process of your work. Unfortunately, the transparency of your work is a multiplier in how people perceive your value. That's why great coders aren't valued at 10x or 100x that studies say they should be from a productivity standpoint. Self promotion is a further multiplier on your perceived value. Some people do it enough to counter act the transparency problem and some use it to mask their lack of intrinsic value. TL,DR: Perceived value = Intrinsic value * transparency of process * self promotion So self promotion isn't bad in and of itself.
krschultz 16y ago
Noticable lack of patio11 in there, what time is it in Japan right now, 2AM?
- Psyonic 16y ago
  My guess is he either won't respond, or he'll take a hell of a long time figuring out the right way to word a response to this.
  - davidw 16y ago
    > the right way to word a response to this. A restraining order?;-)
    - Psyonic 16y ago
      probably, but as always Patrick handled it with class: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721309 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721309
- jcl 16y ago
  It'll be a hell of a thing to wake up to.
il 16y ago
I know the HN community looks up to Patrick as something of a "guru", and I have a tremendous amount of respect for him, the information he shares, and his contributions to the community. But... You know, there are lots of people out there who are good at business, the details of AdWords/marketing, can write well, can recruit people, etc(I'm not one of them, but I know many who are). The only reason you're aware of Patrick and not any other one of the thousands of entrepreneurs is because he engages with the community and promotes himself. patio11 has become a brand on this site- people say things like "oh, that's a patio11 comment" or "I wonder what patio11 would say about this". I'm not trying to take anything away from what Patrick has accomplished- I'm just saying that maybe, just maybe, he's not as worthy of your adoring blog posts as you think.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  >The only reason you're aware of Patrick and not any other one of the thousands of entrepreneurs is because he engages with the community and promotes himself. Hmm. I don't have a dog in this hunt, but it sounds kind of like saying... The only reason you think the space shuttle is cool is because it's a plane that flies in space. The only reason you think a swimming pool is fun is because it's a huge bathtub where a bunch of people can swim. The only reason you think airplanes are cool is because they let people fly through the air and cross distances in a short amount of time. I mean, all of that doesn't lack unique value and power, you know?
  - il 16y ago
    I agree, but then you have to make a distinction: Do you think Patrick is cool because of his exceptional SEO/business knowledge, or do you think Patrick is cool because he is active in the community? Two very different things.
- jakevoytko 16y ago
  Great marketing is a skill that is completely underrated. If you can convince an entire Internet community that you're a great guy, you probably deserve most of the accolades you get. There are tons of people with a large surface area on this site, and many posters are well-respected, but he's actually universally adored. In fact, your post may be the first ad hominem attack I've seen directed at Patrick.
maxklein 16y ago
Patrick is doing business in theory, but what he actually seems to enjoy is education. He likes teaching people with his comments and teaching with his blog posts. He focuses a lot on that, and less on the actual business and the money.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Great teachers are really, really valuable. Tim Robins makes more than 600k/year.
  - jonpaul 16y ago
    The actor? Or do you mean Tony Robins?
danilocampos 16y ago
If Patrick is genuinely having fun, he may be tragic like a fox. As soon as people are giving you money in exchange for your time and services, you're obliged to do a bunch of things you may not care about. Your time has been bought. I don't know Patrick, but if you can go from working for the man 70 hours a week to doing your own thing entirely, that strikes me as quite an upgrade. Assuming cost of living is taken care of, that's a huge win. Your time is your own. I admire Patrick's humble approach and I can't presume to know how his income tradeoffs affect his happiness. Still, in my hypothetical I'd take paying the bills on my own to living large while in the service of clients that are less than fun. The case for Patrick's talent is well stated, though – I should think his skill would let him be selective with his clients if he chose. Talking about someone I don't know but whose comments I like is so weird. Especially the income thing. Okay. I'm done now.
- melvinram 16y ago
  I think the big assumption (that is incorrect) is that his Bingo Card software is the only income for Patrick. There is no reason you can't balance the "fun" work with other work that would brings in capital to continue building your vision. I'm doing that with my company. I'm building something that could be massive but right now I'm doing lots of web design projects to pay for the next business. I also disagree that his Appointment Reminder software will be a small success. Patrick's bingo software is naturally a smaller venture. The market isn't gigantic. His Appointment Reminder software has a much larger market. If the average client pays $79/month, it would take ~1100 clients for him to be making a million a year. With his market, word of mouth will likely play a big role. I wouldn't be surprised if he had 1000+ clients at the end of 2 years.
  - euroclydon 16y ago
    Not only that, but he'll have inroads into law, accounting, and other professional markets that pay big. There's almost no limit to how big he can get, and he has the skills to do it, if he chooses.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  > I should think his skill would let him be selective with his clients if he chose. I would assume he gets multiple job offers every month and he may even honor one or two, so he is already selective, otherwise he'd be employed at a large figure instead of pushing forward on his own agenda. His major asset at this point in time is his reputation, which he has been very careful to build up, if he wanted to take the 'easy money' route out I'm sure he'd be clever enough to do so. The fact that he doesn't and that he's a smart fellow to me says that there will be lots more to come, but on Patricks time-table and nobody else's. Incidentally, I did a poll earlier today about the possible downsides of openness I never saw a post like this one coming, all this is possible because Patrick chose to be frank with the world instead of miserly with the information about his business. No good deed goes unpunished.
jw84 16y ago
We should start a collection for him. Poor guy.
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InfinityX0 16y ago
This reminds me of PG's essay "Mind the Gap" - why can't we just settle with the fact that some people know how to make money and others don't? It's a real skill, beyond coding, A/B testing, and all that - & it seems that it's one patio11 definitely lacks. http://paulgraham.com/gap.html http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
- benatkin 16y ago
  Some people know how to make wealth but aren't the best at getting money. http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html Fortunately, once you have a vision, you can often get others on board who better understand how to make sales and get paid.
keeptrying 16y ago
Partick you magnificent ba$tard - you have guys willing to write and analyze your work. You've made it bro. Congrats!
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ww520 16y ago
Patrick builds what Patrick knows. It's often forgot that it takes in-depth domain knowledge to build a good product. Many highly paid products require arcane knowledge about a niche. Many software people are good generalists but lack domain knowledge. The good news is that it's not hard to learn domain knowledge. Comparing to dealing with complex abstract CS concepts, domain knowledge learning is often a cakewalk. I would encourage people to look into different non-CS areas from time to time, just to learn about their nuts and bolts. Edit: I have great admiration for Patrick. I've followed him since the BOS days.
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jdietrich 16y ago
I kind of concur. I am egotistical enough to maintain a list of people who I know to be unquestionably smarter than me. Patrick is one of the few names on that list. I think Patrick is a Woz and he needs to find his Jobs. Patrick can optimise and refine to an almost incomprehensible degree. I think largely as a consequence of the precision and detail of this mindset, he lacks the grandiosity to attack a really big, difficult problem. Without Jobs, Woz would probably still be designing calculators for HP - beautiful, legendary calculators, with circuits that get used as engineering case studies, but calculators all the same. If you're reading this Patrick, I hope you don't take this as an insult, I intend it as the opposite - I consider you to be a world-class thinker and hope you end up working on problems befitting that.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Think of everything that went before as a training exercise. > I think Patrick is a Woz and he needs to find his Jobs. I would rather see it the opposite way, Patricks business skills and insights far outpace his technical capacity to implement at this point in time, I would not dream of presuming who he should work with but if that person had him do a/b testing or coding that would be an utter waste of talent.
  - Psyonic 16y ago
    Agreed. Not to argue with his accomplishments, but none of his actual coding has been legendary. Sure, he wrote a bingo card creator and a library that has a decent amount of use, but we're not talking Linus Torvalds here. Business wise, though, he's got a gift, no question.
  - mattmanser 16y ago
    Seriously, what business skills? In 5 years he's managed to build a $30k business. That is it. $30k. That's less than a self-employed plumber. That's far less than a doctor or a pharmacist (5 years training). While we can all read Patrick's writings and think 'hey that's pretty good', all it means is that he's a good writer. He's a good writer, but a terrible businessman, he has the business sense of a dead ferret. Clear evidence of dead ferret like business skills: 1. He builds BCC in 1 week then spends 5 years gradually improving it instead of just building more products. 2. It took him 5 years to make another product. 3. He entered an extremely small niche and then instead of building another product he spent 5 years attacking that niche. 4. He'll gleefully take a 10% increase in sales in 6 months for a product he built in 1 week, not realizing that perhaps, just perhaps, he should spend another week BUILDING ANOTHER PRODUCT. Yeah, they're all the damn same point. The point is that the internet's exploded in the last 4/5 years (whenever he started). It's exploded and 50% of his growth can be put down to just that. The internet growing. The rest of it was largely wasted time if you look at it from a business perspective. He was an SEO expert and totally failed to capitalize on it when it would have been worth millions. He spotted and knows how great small web apps do years ago and yet only just gave up his day job. He missed so many massive first mover advantages reading his blog is like watching a slow motion car crash. That's why, when reading his stuff I get so angry. I can see it, plain as day on my face. He's done it, he can do it so much better, so much bigger, and yet there he is, tweaking his blog posts, A/B testing BCC, his crutch. This guy's no business genius, he's totally clueless at business. 10 seconds looking at his tiny market vs. his potential reward for entering ANY other market would make him realize he should make another gad-damn product. He's got the experience, he's done it before! What's he afraid of? He missed every single web opportunity that's been going. Worse he even knows, knows, that if he switched his product to a subscription based thing he'd probably be rolling in it. And he hasn't even tried. He's even letting people still use the desktop client. Why? WHY? Because he's NOT got the business skills. I'm not saying I'm better, in many, many ways I'm a lot worse. I can't get my first product out the door yet and I've not got some crazy salary. But to call Patrick's first skill business is to do a great disservice to all those people who were in the same position he was 5 years ago and are now millionaires or multimillionaires while he's small time apart from some kudos on hacker news and Spolsky's forums. I am so glad he's finally making another product. I really wish him well. But he let so many pitches sail by it makes me angry just thinking about it.
plinkplonk 16y ago
Does anyone else find this kind of "analysis" of a fellow HN member creepy? I don't know if this is a cultural thing, (not a US citizen, the majority of HN's readership seems to be) but I found the whole blog post weird and highly distasteful. The author comes across as a borderline stalker/psychopath. From the blog comments. "> You are making a number of strong assumptions about him from a few comments on HN. If you really wanted to help this would have worked better as a personal e-mail. I went back and forth on that. In the end, I think doing it this way is going to produce the best outcomes – a couple of my popular posts have brought me a great amount of attention from cool people lately. " This is just sick. He does a drive by creepy "analysis" of someone else so he could get "attention from cool people". Shudder.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  > Does anyone else find this kind of "analysis" of a fellow HN member creepy? Yep. If it were me I'd feel highly uncomfortable. It seems to come with the territory though, the more visible you are the more stuff like this you can expect. > I don't know if this is a cultural thing, (not a US citizen, the majority of HN's readership seems to be) but I found the whole blog post weird and highly distasteful. The author comes across as a borderline stalker. Slimy. I think the post is actually with the best of intentions but completely fails in two important aspects: (1) I don't get the impression Patrick was asked if this was ok with him (2) It is a huge post based on a single line in a comment which talks about Patricks achievements to date, and talks about him as though that's going to be his lot in life.
  - xelipe 16y ago
    Completely agree. I don't imagine anyone here would like to be analysed by a blogger to such degree, especially based on one of hand comment. The article reads like a hit piece and the sort of outing that caused _why to remove all of his projects and writings from the net. The fallacy the author committed was trying to compare apples and oranges to dollars and cents, comparing a salary amount to a life choice, comparing success to revenue.
- rwhitman 16y ago
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antidaily 16y ago
Embarrassed for whoever took the time to write this.
faramarz 16y ago
I find it absurd that the author has written an entire life and career analysis for Patrick based on this single sentence: “I have not enjoyed getting teachers who make $60k explain to me why I need to subsidize them (haven’t hit $60k in my entire life).” That's unfair to Partick, and frankly, kind of a rude thing to do so publicly. Good job though, you got a comment out of me!
throwaway1000 16y ago
I think you could turn "The Genius and Tragedy of..." into a recurring series of articles. I believe there are several people here on Hacker News who are getting drastically underpaid (relative to their talent). Anyone brazen enough to nominate others?
- throwaway800 16y ago
  Hey! Copycat.
qw12qw 16y ago
I had to go and check out the author's "about" page and skimmed over a few "just-got-a-bath-and-haircut" posts. Idle nonsense. The "about" page is that of a bored, spoiled psychopath.
rewind 16y ago
You know you've made it when people you don't know start publicly criticizing you. Props, Patrick ;-)
euroclydon 16y ago
Hey, at least the author held his punches. If he really wanted to bash Patrick, he could have mentioned how he doesn't unit test.
camperman 16y ago
Amazingly talented and erudite programmer with multiple aptitudes, a generous spirit and strong signs of being well-adjusted is probably not that interested in money? Sounds incredibly normal to me. Hustler baffled by this attitude to the point of almost tearing his hair out? Also normal. Sad but normal.
awa 16y ago
I would love to make $60K while living in an country/place of my choice
frossie 16y ago
Zeus's beard. Saw the headline and thought it was an obituary. (At least until my brain kicked and thought "he can't be dead, he's posting". But sheesh.)
- jacquesm 16y ago
  It's definitely written as though he's not going to achieve anything further in life.
barrkel 16y ago
How dare you judge someone else's value system on nothing more than your own value system, in particular over such a trivial metric as salary? The market determines the score (price, profit, salary, whatever you want to call it); that which is both scarce and in demand is rewarded most. But a man's highest motivations, his identity, is not determined by the market, and should never be, for any hope of sanity and healthy self-image. It is thus offensive to me that someone should judge someone else on the basis that their motivations, their identity, are insufficiently market-oriented. I think I detect a hint of a repulsive assumption underlying this article: that you value the worth of a person, at least in part, on the basis of how much money they make. I hope that's not true.
jan_g 16y ago
I understand the genius part. I don't understand the tradegy. Where's the tradegy in that story ?
eli 16y ago
Who asked you?
alexyim 16y ago
Who knows, maybe Patrick's contributions on here are making untold millions for HN.
zackattack 16y ago
Sebastian Marshall is one of the great geniuses of our time. I feel privileged to have the opportunity to visit the same forum that he frequents. Thank you, Sebastian. It means a lot to all of us.
naner 16y ago
Linkbait, pandering, superficial, too long, empty, dumb. How in the holy hell does this have 162 points? God lets hope the patio11 guy doesn't take any of this advice. I mean jesus christ: ...rose to international celebrity... This is so stupid. Look at this guy's own about page. It is a billion words about how he tries to be disciplined and travels. Oh, and he's interested in "strategy". That's it. Is this a guy you want to emulate? Or is this a guy who avoids work, has accomplished nothing, and expects to be commended for it?
davidw 16y ago
That was a little bit weird. No, a lot weird. Calling someone the 'best contributor' on a site like this is odd too. There are plenty of people who make valuable contributions. YC and this site are all a big PG experiment, for starters. Gmail paul did some pretty impressive stuff hither and thither. When legal matters are discussed, grellas often has insightful stuff to say. And so on and so forth...
invalidOrTaken 16y ago
I'm newer to the HN community, and I haven't seen enough of patio's posts to instantly equate the username with the BCC creator. So it's not at all personal to me, and the sense of moral outrage or whatever came a bit slower. Which gave me time to appreciate the actual post. Patrick, whoever you are (I know better now), I'm sorry you've been made a weird pariah/celebrity/whatever, but I learned from the article about you.
benatkin 16y ago
This guy doesn't understand Patrick and he doesn't understand Paul Graham either.
- jcl 16y ago
  Heh... I, too, found it funny that he used pg as an example of what Patrick should be doing. There was probably a time when someone could have written similar article about how much more money pg could be making as a consultant rather than mucking about with online catalogs.
  - benatkin 16y ago
    That's just one example. There have been plenty of years where pg sacrificed making big bucks in the short term in order to work on a bigger plan. In fact, I think 2010 has been one of them. Maybe it's been every year, except the year Yahoo! bought Viaweb. Perhaps that could thought of as sacrificing short-term money for time and attention, too. If they waited a year to sell Viaweb, maybe they could have sold it for even more. Also, the mere mention of Grad School would make this article explode.
w1ntermute 16y ago
Here are mirrors/copies/backups (trying to hit all the keywords people might browser search the page for later) for if/when Sebastian pulls the post: http://ompldr.org/vNW1pMw/the_genius_and_tragedy_of_patrick_mckenzie.png http://ompldr.org/vNW1pMw/the_genius_and_tragedy_of_patrick_... https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1506151/img/screenshots/the_genius_and_tragedy_of_patrick_mckenzie.png https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1506151/img/screenshots/the_genius_... And of the HTML: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1506151/html/the_genius_and_tragedy_of_patrick_mckenzie.html https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1506151/html/the_genius_and_tragedy...
- slackenerny 16y ago
  I downvoted you without second thought, as I believe people change and holding them accountable for everything they've ever done forever is cruel. However, now that I recall this lionhearted guy better, I think he should be held to his own standards. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366721 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366721
gigafemtonano 16y ago
Sebastian, you seem like a nice enough guy, but have you ever considered turning this microscope on yourself? There's a really high chance that if I see a huge nuanced argument on HN it's coming from you. Why not put that time and energy into something more valuable than karma?
deleted 16y ago
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patio11 16y ago
Well, I'm happy that people like me and are invested in my success. I'm also a little discomfited by the psychoanalysis. I'm pretty happy with where I am in life, have a pretty decent career trajectory at the moment, and life is improving in non-career ways which matter more to me anyhow. That's about all I think I need to say.
- dfranke 16y ago
  That's a lot more of a response than you owed to anyone, and also a lot more graceful than the one that would have come from me had I been the object of this debacle.
- chaostheory 16y ago
  All I can say is that your writing and insight makes my life a lot better. Thanks. You should drop by Silicon Valley so I can get you a beer.
- grellas 16y ago
  I don't know anything whatever about the person behind patio11 but, from everything I know about patio11, I sure would want to know that person. Thanks for your always-perceptive and intelligent contributions to this site.
- todayiamme 16y ago
  I'm happy for you. Seriously. Extrinsic objects like money can't replace the hollowness inside most of us. It can't fill our lives with some sort of magical glow that makes everything go away. Nothing can do that. Not people. Not cats. Not computers. Not even code. It's just who you are and how you actualize yourself that truly matters. Personally, I don't care how deep your pockets are. I would still love to spend hours upon hours learning from you. Yet again I already have. :) (trust me your comments are worth an entire book alone).
jacquesm 16y ago
I can't seem to get the sentence 'with friends like this who needs enemies' out of my head. I accept this is all with the best of intentions but I honestly wished that this article and the corresponding post would just go away because they serve no purpose.
Mz 16y ago
But! Realize I have good motives. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don't need to read any further.
newobj 16y ago
The Genius and Tragedy of HN Linkbait.
wglb 16y ago
Have you ever heard of Travis McGee? John D. MacDonald wrote about him. Quite a bit. Travis worked in "marine salvage", recovering lost or stolen property for a commission. His life plan was to take his retirement in small batches, as his life went along. Rather than waiting till later to take it all at once. Kind of an odd set of ideas about what is important in life. Prior to going full time (such as it is) for BCC, Patrick worked at a big freaking enterprise working sixty hours each week. Often more. He built BCC on five hours per week. So now his life has improved in measurable ways, and looks to keep on improving. The thing that might be easy to miss about Patrick is that he is very intentional. You might call it goal-directed. Disciplined. I think it might be fair to say that he knows what direction to take his life in, what will make him happy. And one thing that he is unlikely to do is to confuse what works for him and what others think should work for him. It took me quite a few years (more than Patrick has so far) that being smart is not all it cracked up to be. Being smart works when it brings you wealth. There is a common confusion that money and wealth are essentially the same thing. To my way of thinking, wealth includes to work on what you enjoy or love, to have choices how you spend your time, not having to agonize about having a roof over your head, to have family and friends to cherish and that cherish you, to have the respect of peers. It would appear to me that Patrick is on the road to wealth. The fact that Patrick's version of success doesn't seem to include feverish addictions to money and fame has apparently made the author of this blog post "violently ill". Were I to look to choose an example of how to live, I would be more likely to recommend Patrick, and I would recommend that the author of the blog post take a second look at his take on this topic.
firebones 16y ago
This whole thread disappeared quickly from the front page (meta-moderation?). I, too, found the original post a little uncomfortable, but I think Sebastian's intentions, as unconsciously self-serving as they were (link-bait title plus unsolicited advice) likely fell into the blind spot commonly found in well-intentioned do-gooders. Unsolicited advice, particularly of a personal nature (speculating about his Catholicism? Really?), is often not well-received, regardless of the proximity of the originator and target. What I find especially interesting is that Sebastian himself was on the road to becoming an HN darling with his "How Do I Write So Much?" post receiving rave reviews earlier in the month. At the risk of offering my own unsolicited advice, adopting a more generically helpful and modest tone more like patio11 might have served Sebastian well in this case.
wittgenstein 16y ago
I am fairly new to HN, and I was not aware of patio's 11 fame. I read quite a few posts of Sebastian Marshall's blog when I first came across it. I think the most important lesson from Marshall's blog and the point he attempts to make in this particular post is the following: You cannot judge a person's abilities by their writing, no matter how good it is (or seems to be). This lesson may apply particularly well to Marshall himself.

252 points by lionhearted 16y ago

For what it's worth, on just about every well-written, thoughtful comment on HN, I look up to the byline to see if it's from Patrick.

singer 16y ago

Watch your back Patrick. I think you have a new stalker. Seriously though.. this is one of the scariest blog posts I've ever read.

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dfranke 16y ago
This. I would find this post mildly creepy even if it were written about someone's who's an actual public figure. Writing it about someone whose claim to fame is writing a Bingo card generator and being #4-ranked in karma on a niche internet forum is just sick.
- ellyagg 16y ago
  It may be inappropriate on some level, but calling it sick and scary is a little bit creepy itself. He's only saying out loud what many of us have been thinking. If the suggestion is that you can't freely admire someone (and the praise was clearly served up as an extra helping to offset the criticism) based only on the quality and volume of writing that Patrick has produced, well, that's just extra creepy.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    > and the praise was clearly served up as an extra helping to offset the criticism Hitting with one hand while praising at the same time never fooled anybody.
- dennisgorelik 16y ago
  Patrick IS a public figure. That article discusses only things that Patrick chose to share about himself. If you feel creepy about that article -- that means there is something wrong with your perception of sharp ideas, not with the article.

rick888 16y ago

You call him a genius, yet he spent 6 years promoting a product (which I might add only took him a few days to create) that is only now just breaking the $1000 or $2000/month mark. Most smart people would have cut their losses a few years ago. Especially since that market isn't very big (elementary school teachers are poor and most schools won't invest in such a product). He is looked up to on the Joel on Software board and this forum as a marketing/business genius, yet he barely makes enough money to break the poverty level for one person (I can't imagine how he affords to live in Japan). He has talent and perseverance, but he's not a model we should be following for business.

skmurphy 16y ago
By what finish line are you judging him? He is well respected by his peers, he writes insightfully on difficult topics. he is independent and is spending his time as he chooses. And he is not done yet.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  > And he is not done yet. That's exactly where it's at. We can not look inside another persons head and this kind of 'reading the tea leaves' is bound to get it fantastically wrong in the longer term.
- rick888 16y ago
  "By what finish line are you judging him? He is well respected by his peers, he writes insightfully on difficult topics. he is independent and is spending his time as he chooses. And he is not done yet." This is all good. However, I have seen many articles claiming he is some sort of business genius. The numbers he has given from his products prove otherwise.
ambiate 16y ago
I believe his products are capitalizing quite well for his target audience. Indeed, I would go as far as saying he owns a fair share of that market and controls it quite well. You just want to work on a larger scale, but don't be ignorant of the pieces coming together with a smaller puzzle... you're both still working on the same picture. Create a product, get it out there, make your target audience turn into a loving community, and make money. No matter how much you turn business into some complex monster: the fundamentals will always remain the same.

joshuacc 16y ago

Some of the author's points are interesting, but if Patrick took the advice, he'd basically turn into a clone of every other arrogant blowhard tech entrepreneur in the world. He might make more money, but he wouldn't be the patio11 that I've come to admire.

bryanh 16y ago

I get the impression that patio11 is doing exactly what he wants to do.

RK 16y ago
Yes, and didn't he already say he had a post-BingoCardCreator project that he was working on?
- DTrejo 16y ago
  Reading this article would be worth your time.
  - RK 16y ago
    Yeah I missed that he mentioned it. I pretty much started skimming when the gist of the article seemed to be that the author was karma-whoring by writing about patio11 in detail, instead of writing a general article about maximizing your potential for your own goals.

swombat 16y ago

Let's hope DHH, Jason Fried, Jason Calacanis, Michael Arrington and Tim Ferris don't all read this article and think "Damn, he's right, I need to be more self-aggrandising!"

rokhayakebe 16y ago
Or, let's hope they do not write about Patrick without asking him. I am not sure how he would feel about it.

kolektiv 16y ago

Or possibly, he enjoys what he does, enjoys being his own boss, likes the challenges that the types of software he works on present, and values those things higher than going and shaving seconds off for some airline. If he is, his genius is more about finding a way of being happy than software, marketing, or anything else. I know HN tends to be all about the money at times, but seriously, it's not everything.

jgrahamc 16y ago

Many people have assumed that because they think I'm smart that I am also a millionaire. If only that were true. Seriously, I don't understand the expectation that there's a correlation between genius and riches.

adamtj 16y ago
It's the converse that tends to be true, but many people have trouble distinguishing between converse and contrapositive. Rich people tend to be smart. There are lots of bright ideas. The few that turn into successful companies are the ones that, at a few critical points, didn't fail. A good way to fail is to make mistakes and do nothing. So, to avoid failure, one must learn from mistakes, which tends to make people smart and is something smart people tend to do. The extra axiom necessary for showing smart->rich is risk taking. Smart people who don't take a chance and do something drastic are no more likely than anybody else to get rich. There are people who pay others to be smart, but they generally don't pay much more than a normal salary.

illumin8 16y ago

He makes some good points. A guy like Patrick could easily be pulling in $200-300K a year contracting with large companies. Since he is smart and knows how to hire people, he could start his own firm and break into the 7 figures annual salary leagues. Money isn't everything, but with those type of business skills, spending a lot of time commenting on HN is most likely a waste of your considerable expertise.

pedoh 16y ago

While I agree with the praises directed towards Patrick, I don't think it's wise to make assumptions about his (or anyone else's) motivations. If Patrick wanted to, he could walk any of the paths mentioned in the OP. We just don't know that Patrick isn't exactly where he wants to be in the long run. Maybe he doesn't want the things that come along with $100k, $200k, $1MM per year. If it is his aspiration to make that kind of money, I wouldn't bet against him having a plan. Patrick's transparency about his work might give the illusion that we know what he wants in life. We don't.

jacquesm 16y ago
Exactly. People are complicated, not two dimensional card-board cut-outs of wannabe rich guys. Whatever motivates Patrick is up to him and him alone. This to me seems like helping a person to the other side of the street with the best intentions by frog marching them there only to find out they didn't want to be there in the first place.

lhorie 16y ago

The greater tragedy, perhaps, is this game we play where we tell the world how patio11, or Zuckerberg, or Jobs or whoever should do their stuff instead of improving what we do ourselves.

BrandonM 16y ago
That's why I voted the submission up. Reading that post made me think of my own skills that need developed and promoted. I am a smart guy with some unique abilities; I'm confident that with some focused effort, I could be capable of providing great value and getting appropriately compensated for it. I'm sure that the blog post was intended not only to encourage and promote patio11, but to give all of us a wakeup call that we, too, are capable of providing that same level of value with a little bit of work and dedication.

jacquesm 16y ago

I think Patricks biggest contribution is that he's not a greedy person and willing to share his adventures to the betterment of all. He has one thing he's very adamant about, he wants to have 100% of the thing he built. That's pretty limiting in terms of how far you can push it, my own idea is that I'd rather have a smaller part of something much larger, but we're not all built the same. (see: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/02/new-trends-in-startup-investing-explained-for-laymen/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/02/new-trends-in-startup-in... , the last paragraph). I think this is all about having your comfort zone and learning to walk before learning how to run.

prawn 16y ago
What I like most about Patrick's stuff is that he is such a vocal and visible contributor even though his personal start-up is such a realistic and achievable story. He doesn't make veiled references or never disclose his project(s) - he puts it all out there to the dollar. There's no outside investment, IPO, MSM press, etc. It's just one guy and his success in moving into self-employment. It's a happy life in Hobbiton (and I don't mean that in a condescending way at all). Having read/skimmed Sebastian's article, it felt as though something ignorant and grand-standing had just trampled that.

thaumaturgy 16y ago

Yeah, different people have different personalities. They have different motivations, different strengths and weaknesses. Money and fame are not universal drivers, it's that simple. I'm not going to try to analyze Patrick. I enjoy reading most of his comments, and agree that he's valuable here, but I don't know him anywhere near well enough to think I have any insight into what makes him tick. I doubt very many other people do, either. But I can talk about me! I have "money issues". I don't understand it the way that a proper businessperson should. All I understand are problems and solutions; poor people not having equal opportunities is a problem, in my mind, so I don't charge nearly enough. That means my business is constantly hamstrung and resource-short, and I work for less than minimum wage. But, I couldn't respect myself if I doubled (or tripled) my fees and only focused on the people that could pay. It would make me far unhappier doing that, instead of struggling every month. So, yeah: business isn't always a matter of rationality. If he's happy, then leave it alone. If he isn't, but doesn't ask for advice, then still leave it alone. If he ever asks for advice, think hard about whether you know him well enough to offer any.

some1else 16y ago

Is it possible that when Patrick says he doesn't earn more than $60k/year, he's talking about his paycheck, not the business?

mistermann 16y ago
You're the first to mention this, it's the first thing I though. I emailed Patrick with a few SEO questions a few months back, he logged into my analytics for a looks see, and sent me two quite detailed email replies (for free) with really good ideas, but said he wouldn't be able to help me any further as he had a consulting job he was working on. I think he quoted me an hourly rate for consulting, which was not high by any means, but would provide a very nice lifestyle if he was doing it full time. So from what I know, I think this interpretation of him living a life of hardship is likely off the mark. As for this blog post, ya, its a little weird, but I think the author wrote it with his heart in the right place, I think perhaps he just isn't fully aware of patio11's real situation and it seemed unjust to him. Yes, it is probably inappropriate it many ways, but in my estimation far from the "creepiest blog post I've ever read" (as some have said). By the way, I also met Patrick at a HN meetup in Tokyo, super nice down to earth guy. I doubt this post will cause him nearly the anguish it seems to be causing others here.
codexon 16y ago
Why would he be angry at a teacher making $60k/year then if his business was raking in much more than that?

d0m 16y ago

Can't wait to see patio11's answer to that.

fondue 16y ago
I'm certain I'm not the only one who paged down looking for his comment.

Poiesis 16y ago

Wow. I don't even know where to start. I think the best answer to "time to cash in on all those skills" is to note that he now does consulting, which is the very definition of what you are describing when you talk about who he could be helping. About AppointmentReminder: you are presuming that somehow he is overlooking this huge potential goldmine that you so helpfully point out. The man in question is likely top diplomatic to say so directly, but I don't have any problem saying that this is a rather arrogant point of view. Note that there are in fact more than three possible explanations for what he earns. And, why is it your business, anyway? Do you do this with other people, too? I think this kind of analysis is best done solely with yourself; the splinter in his eye vs.the plank in yours. You are trying to help, but you aren't. And you just look bad on the process.

mquander 16y ago

This is unbelievable. If the author absolutely can't resist giving patio11 a bunch of advice about how to live his life, then write an email. If the author wants to tell us how super important it is to self-promote and make a lot of money, then don't make an example out of a dude whose mind and motivations are clearly completely fucking opaque to you.

elbrodeur 16y ago
I couldn't agree more. This article was extremely uncomfortable to read; if it was me being written about I would be embarrassed and probably more than a little angry.
- deleted 16y ago
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- BrandonM 16y ago
  I would be like, "Wow, thanks for the advice and the ringing endorsement." The guy is obviously trying to help Patrick out in multiple ways. The author is trying to make him realize how amazing he is and tell as many people as possible how valuable he is. Personally, I might be a bit uncomfortable while reading it. But sometime down the road I'd look back on it and be very thankful.
  - awa 16y ago
    As already pointed out, if he was really thinking about Patrick he'd have emailed him the advice rather making a huge blog post about it.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      Hey but what a way to raise your own visibility by pushing down on someone else. Tragedy indeed.
    - BrandonM 16y ago
      OK, point taken. It might have been more difficult, but it could definitely have been possible to give him a strong endorsement without the rest of the post. Then he could have sent Patrick an email with the rest, indicating that the blog post might be a good reference.

Mc_Big_G 16y ago

Making $200k at a soul-sucking corporate contracting gig, probably somewhere other than Japan, is probably not what Patrick is looking for. I have a feeling it's just a matter of a few more swings before he hits a home run. Meanwhile, he's building an impressive following which equips him with an instant audience the moment he decides to launch said home run.

Kliment 16y ago

Oh seriously, this is bullshit. A deep analysis based on a single post, taken far out of context, and completely misguided. I'm not surprised patio11 is not responding to this. Seriously, what the hell?

davidw 16y ago
> I'm not surprised patio11 is not responding to this. Well - it's also the middle of the night in Japan. 04:28 according to the site I glanced at.

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necrecious 16y ago

Self promotion is a tricky thing. In an ideal world, value should be recognized through the process of your work. Unfortunately, the transparency of your work is a multiplier in how people perceive your value. That's why great coders aren't valued at 10x or 100x that studies say they should be from a productivity standpoint. Self promotion is a further multiplier on your perceived value. Some people do it enough to counter act the transparency problem and some use it to mask their lack of intrinsic value. TL,DR: Perceived value = Intrinsic value * transparency of process * self promotion So self promotion isn't bad in and of itself.

krschultz 16y ago

Noticable lack of patio11 in there, what time is it in Japan right now, 2AM?

Psyonic 16y ago
My guess is he either won't respond, or he'll take a hell of a long time figuring out the right way to word a response to this.
- davidw 16y ago
  > the right way to word a response to this. A restraining order?;-)
  - Psyonic 16y ago
    probably, but as always Patrick handled it with class: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721309 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721309
jcl 16y ago
It'll be a hell of a thing to wake up to.

il 16y ago

I know the HN community looks up to Patrick as something of a "guru", and I have a tremendous amount of respect for him, the information he shares, and his contributions to the community. But... You know, there are lots of people out there who are good at business, the details of AdWords/marketing, can write well, can recruit people, etc(I'm not one of them, but I know many who are). The only reason you're aware of Patrick and not any other one of the thousands of entrepreneurs is because he engages with the community and promotes himself. patio11 has become a brand on this site- people say things like "oh, that's a patio11 comment" or "I wonder what patio11 would say about this". I'm not trying to take anything away from what Patrick has accomplished- I'm just saying that maybe, just maybe, he's not as worthy of your adoring blog posts as you think.

danilocampos 16y ago
>The only reason you're aware of Patrick and not any other one of the thousands of entrepreneurs is because he engages with the community and promotes himself. Hmm. I don't have a dog in this hunt, but it sounds kind of like saying... The only reason you think the space shuttle is cool is because it's a plane that flies in space. The only reason you think a swimming pool is fun is because it's a huge bathtub where a bunch of people can swim. The only reason you think airplanes are cool is because they let people fly through the air and cross distances in a short amount of time. I mean, all of that doesn't lack unique value and power, you know?
- il 16y ago
  I agree, but then you have to make a distinction: Do you think Patrick is cool because of his exceptional SEO/business knowledge, or do you think Patrick is cool because he is active in the community? Two very different things.
jakevoytko 16y ago
Great marketing is a skill that is completely underrated. If you can convince an entire Internet community that you're a great guy, you probably deserve most of the accolades you get. There are tons of people with a large surface area on this site, and many posters are well-respected, but he's actually universally adored. In fact, your post may be the first ad hominem attack I've seen directed at Patrick.

maxklein 16y ago

Patrick is doing business in theory, but what he actually seems to enjoy is education. He likes teaching people with his comments and teaching with his blog posts. He focuses a lot on that, and less on the actual business and the money.

tomjen3 16y ago
Great teachers are really, really valuable. Tim Robins makes more than 600k/year.
- jonpaul 16y ago
  The actor? Or do you mean Tony Robins?

danilocampos 16y ago

If Patrick is genuinely having fun, he may be tragic like a fox. As soon as people are giving you money in exchange for your time and services, you're obliged to do a bunch of things you may not care about. Your time has been bought. I don't know Patrick, but if you can go from working for the man 70 hours a week to doing your own thing entirely, that strikes me as quite an upgrade. Assuming cost of living is taken care of, that's a huge win. Your time is your own. I admire Patrick's humble approach and I can't presume to know how his income tradeoffs affect his happiness. Still, in my hypothetical I'd take paying the bills on my own to living large while in the service of clients that are less than fun. The case for Patrick's talent is well stated, though – I should think his skill would let him be selective with his clients if he chose. Talking about someone I don't know but whose comments I like is so weird. Especially the income thing. Okay. I'm done now.

melvinram 16y ago
I think the big assumption (that is incorrect) is that his Bingo Card software is the only income for Patrick. There is no reason you can't balance the "fun" work with other work that would brings in capital to continue building your vision. I'm doing that with my company. I'm building something that could be massive but right now I'm doing lots of web design projects to pay for the next business. I also disagree that his Appointment Reminder software will be a small success. Patrick's bingo software is naturally a smaller venture. The market isn't gigantic. His Appointment Reminder software has a much larger market. If the average client pays $79/month, it would take ~1100 clients for him to be making a million a year. With his market, word of mouth will likely play a big role. I wouldn't be surprised if he had 1000+ clients at the end of 2 years.
- euroclydon 16y ago
  Not only that, but he'll have inroads into law, accounting, and other professional markets that pay big. There's almost no limit to how big he can get, and he has the skills to do it, if he chooses.
jacquesm 16y ago
> I should think his skill would let him be selective with his clients if he chose. I would assume he gets multiple job offers every month and he may even honor one or two, so he is already selective, otherwise he'd be employed at a large figure instead of pushing forward on his own agenda. His major asset at this point in time is his reputation, which he has been very careful to build up, if he wanted to take the 'easy money' route out I'm sure he'd be clever enough to do so. The fact that he doesn't and that he's a smart fellow to me says that there will be lots more to come, but on Patricks time-table and nobody else's. Incidentally, I did a poll earlier today about the possible downsides of openness I never saw a post like this one coming, all this is possible because Patrick chose to be frank with the world instead of miserly with the information about his business. No good deed goes unpunished.

jw84 16y ago

We should start a collection for him. Poor guy.

deleted 16y ago
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InfinityX0 16y ago

This reminds me of PG's essay "Mind the Gap" - why can't we just settle with the fact that some people know how to make money and others don't? It's a real skill, beyond coding, A/B testing, and all that - & it seems that it's one patio11 definitely lacks. http://paulgraham.com/gap.html http://paulgraham.com/gap.html

benatkin 16y ago
Some people know how to make wealth but aren't the best at getting money. http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html Fortunately, once you have a vision, you can often get others on board who better understand how to make sales and get paid.

keeptrying 16y ago

Partick you magnificent ba$tard - you have guys willing to write and analyze your work. You've made it bro. Congrats!

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ww520 16y ago

Patrick builds what Patrick knows. It's often forgot that it takes in-depth domain knowledge to build a good product. Many highly paid products require arcane knowledge about a niche. Many software people are good generalists but lack domain knowledge. The good news is that it's not hard to learn domain knowledge. Comparing to dealing with complex abstract CS concepts, domain knowledge learning is often a cakewalk. I would encourage people to look into different non-CS areas from time to time, just to learn about their nuts and bolts. Edit: I have great admiration for Patrick. I've followed him since the BOS days.

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jdietrich 16y ago

I kind of concur. I am egotistical enough to maintain a list of people who I know to be unquestionably smarter than me. Patrick is one of the few names on that list. I think Patrick is a Woz and he needs to find his Jobs. Patrick can optimise and refine to an almost incomprehensible degree. I think largely as a consequence of the precision and detail of this mindset, he lacks the grandiosity to attack a really big, difficult problem. Without Jobs, Woz would probably still be designing calculators for HP - beautiful, legendary calculators, with circuits that get used as engineering case studies, but calculators all the same. If you're reading this Patrick, I hope you don't take this as an insult, I intend it as the opposite - I consider you to be a world-class thinker and hope you end up working on problems befitting that.

jacquesm 16y ago
Think of everything that went before as a training exercise. > I think Patrick is a Woz and he needs to find his Jobs. I would rather see it the opposite way, Patricks business skills and insights far outpace his technical capacity to implement at this point in time, I would not dream of presuming who he should work with but if that person had him do a/b testing or coding that would be an utter waste of talent.
- Psyonic 16y ago
  Agreed. Not to argue with his accomplishments, but none of his actual coding has been legendary. Sure, he wrote a bingo card creator and a library that has a decent amount of use, but we're not talking Linus Torvalds here. Business wise, though, he's got a gift, no question.
- mattmanser 16y ago
  Seriously, what business skills? In 5 years he's managed to build a $30k business. That is it. $30k. That's less than a self-employed plumber. That's far less than a doctor or a pharmacist (5 years training). While we can all read Patrick's writings and think 'hey that's pretty good', all it means is that he's a good writer. He's a good writer, but a terrible businessman, he has the business sense of a dead ferret. Clear evidence of dead ferret like business skills: 1. He builds BCC in 1 week then spends 5 years gradually improving it instead of just building more products. 2. It took him 5 years to make another product. 3. He entered an extremely small niche and then instead of building another product he spent 5 years attacking that niche. 4. He'll gleefully take a 10% increase in sales in 6 months for a product he built in 1 week, not realizing that perhaps, just perhaps, he should spend another week BUILDING ANOTHER PRODUCT. Yeah, they're all the damn same point. The point is that the internet's exploded in the last 4/5 years (whenever he started). It's exploded and 50% of his growth can be put down to just that. The internet growing. The rest of it was largely wasted time if you look at it from a business perspective. He was an SEO expert and totally failed to capitalize on it when it would have been worth millions. He spotted and knows how great small web apps do years ago and yet only just gave up his day job. He missed so many massive first mover advantages reading his blog is like watching a slow motion car crash. That's why, when reading his stuff I get so angry. I can see it, plain as day on my face. He's done it, he can do it so much better, so much bigger, and yet there he is, tweaking his blog posts, A/B testing BCC, his crutch. This guy's no business genius, he's totally clueless at business. 10 seconds looking at his tiny market vs. his potential reward for entering ANY other market would make him realize he should make another gad-damn product. He's got the experience, he's done it before! What's he afraid of? He missed every single web opportunity that's been going. Worse he even knows, knows, that if he switched his product to a subscription based thing he'd probably be rolling in it. And he hasn't even tried. He's even letting people still use the desktop client. Why? WHY? Because he's NOT got the business skills. I'm not saying I'm better, in many, many ways I'm a lot worse. I can't get my first product out the door yet and I've not got some crazy salary. But to call Patrick's first skill business is to do a great disservice to all those people who were in the same position he was 5 years ago and are now millionaires or multimillionaires while he's small time apart from some kudos on hacker news and Spolsky's forums. I am so glad he's finally making another product. I really wish him well. But he let so many pitches sail by it makes me angry just thinking about it.

plinkplonk 16y ago

Does anyone else find this kind of "analysis" of a fellow HN member creepy? I don't know if this is a cultural thing, (not a US citizen, the majority of HN's readership seems to be) but I found the whole blog post weird and highly distasteful. The author comes across as a borderline stalker/psychopath. From the blog comments. "> You are making a number of strong assumptions about him from a few comments on HN. If you really wanted to help this would have worked better as a personal e-mail. I went back and forth on that. In the end, I think doing it this way is going to produce the best outcomes – a couple of my popular posts have brought me a great amount of attention from cool people lately. " This is just sick. He does a drive by creepy "analysis" of someone else so he could get "attention from cool people". Shudder.

jacquesm 16y ago
> Does anyone else find this kind of "analysis" of a fellow HN member creepy? Yep. If it were me I'd feel highly uncomfortable. It seems to come with the territory though, the more visible you are the more stuff like this you can expect. > I don't know if this is a cultural thing, (not a US citizen, the majority of HN's readership seems to be) but I found the whole blog post weird and highly distasteful. The author comes across as a borderline stalker. Slimy. I think the post is actually with the best of intentions but completely fails in two important aspects: (1) I don't get the impression Patrick was asked if this was ok with him (2) It is a huge post based on a single line in a comment which talks about Patricks achievements to date, and talks about him as though that's going to be his lot in life.
- xelipe 16y ago
  Completely agree. I don't imagine anyone here would like to be analysed by a blogger to such degree, especially based on one of hand comment. The article reads like a hit piece and the sort of outing that caused _why to remove all of his projects and writings from the net. The fallacy the author committed was trying to compare apples and oranges to dollars and cents, comparing a salary amount to a life choice, comparing success to revenue.
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antidaily 16y ago

Embarrassed for whoever took the time to write this.

faramarz 16y ago

I find it absurd that the author has written an entire life and career analysis for Patrick based on this single sentence: “I have not enjoyed getting teachers who make $60k explain to me why I need to subsidize them (haven’t hit $60k in my entire life).” That's unfair to Partick, and frankly, kind of a rude thing to do so publicly. Good job though, you got a comment out of me!

throwaway1000 16y ago

I think you could turn "The Genius and Tragedy of..." into a recurring series of articles. I believe there are several people here on Hacker News who are getting drastically underpaid (relative to their talent). Anyone brazen enough to nominate others?

throwaway800 16y ago
Hey! Copycat.

qw12qw 16y ago

I had to go and check out the author's "about" page and skimmed over a few "just-got-a-bath-and-haircut" posts. Idle nonsense. The "about" page is that of a bored, spoiled psychopath.

rewind 16y ago

You know you've made it when people you don't know start publicly criticizing you. Props, Patrick ;-)

euroclydon 16y ago

Hey, at least the author held his punches. If he really wanted to bash Patrick, he could have mentioned how he doesn't unit test.

camperman 16y ago

Amazingly talented and erudite programmer with multiple aptitudes, a generous spirit and strong signs of being well-adjusted is probably not that interested in money? Sounds incredibly normal to me. Hustler baffled by this attitude to the point of almost tearing his hair out? Also normal. Sad but normal.

awa 16y ago

I would love to make $60K while living in an country/place of my choice

frossie 16y ago

Zeus's beard. Saw the headline and thought it was an obituary. (At least until my brain kicked and thought "he can't be dead, he's posting". But sheesh.)

jacquesm 16y ago
It's definitely written as though he's not going to achieve anything further in life.

barrkel 16y ago

How dare you judge someone else's value system on nothing more than your own value system, in particular over such a trivial metric as salary? The market determines the score (price, profit, salary, whatever you want to call it); that which is both scarce and in demand is rewarded most. But a man's highest motivations, his identity, is not determined by the market, and should never be, for any hope of sanity and healthy self-image. It is thus offensive to me that someone should judge someone else on the basis that their motivations, their identity, are insufficiently market-oriented. I think I detect a hint of a repulsive assumption underlying this article: that you value the worth of a person, at least in part, on the basis of how much money they make. I hope that's not true.

jan_g 16y ago

I understand the genius part. I don't understand the tradegy. Where's the tradegy in that story ?

eli 16y ago

Who asked you?

alexyim 16y ago

Who knows, maybe Patrick's contributions on here are making untold millions for HN.

zackattack 16y ago

Sebastian Marshall is one of the great geniuses of our time. I feel privileged to have the opportunity to visit the same forum that he frequents. Thank you, Sebastian. It means a lot to all of us.

naner 16y ago

Linkbait, pandering, superficial, too long, empty, dumb. How in the holy hell does this have 162 points? God lets hope the patio11 guy doesn't take any of this advice. I mean jesus christ: ...rose to international celebrity... This is so stupid. Look at this guy's own about page. It is a billion words about how he tries to be disciplined and travels. Oh, and he's interested in "strategy". That's it. Is this a guy you want to emulate? Or is this a guy who avoids work, has accomplished nothing, and expects to be commended for it?

davidw 16y ago

That was a little bit weird. No, a lot weird. Calling someone the 'best contributor' on a site like this is odd too. There are plenty of people who make valuable contributions. YC and this site are all a big PG experiment, for starters. Gmail paul did some pretty impressive stuff hither and thither. When legal matters are discussed, grellas often has insightful stuff to say. And so on and so forth...

invalidOrTaken 16y ago

I'm newer to the HN community, and I haven't seen enough of patio's posts to instantly equate the username with the BCC creator. So it's not at all personal to me, and the sense of moral outrage or whatever came a bit slower. Which gave me time to appreciate the actual post. Patrick, whoever you are (I know better now), I'm sorry you've been made a weird pariah/celebrity/whatever, but I learned from the article about you.

benatkin 16y ago

This guy doesn't understand Patrick and he doesn't understand Paul Graham either.

jcl 16y ago
Heh... I, too, found it funny that he used pg as an example of what Patrick should be doing. There was probably a time when someone could have written similar article about how much more money pg could be making as a consultant rather than mucking about with online catalogs.
- benatkin 16y ago
  That's just one example. There have been plenty of years where pg sacrificed making big bucks in the short term in order to work on a bigger plan. In fact, I think 2010 has been one of them. Maybe it's been every year, except the year Yahoo! bought Viaweb. Perhaps that could thought of as sacrificing short-term money for time and attention, too. If they waited a year to sell Viaweb, maybe they could have sold it for even more. Also, the mere mention of Grad School would make this article explode.

w1ntermute 16y ago

Here are mirrors/copies/backups (trying to hit all the keywords people might browser search the page for later) for if/when Sebastian pulls the post: http://ompldr.org/vNW1pMw/the_genius_and_tragedy_of_patrick_mckenzie.png http://ompldr.org/vNW1pMw/the_genius_and_tragedy_of_patrick_... https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1506151/img/screenshots/the_genius_and_tragedy_of_patrick_mckenzie.png https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1506151/img/screenshots/the_genius_... And of the HTML: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1506151/html/the_genius_and_tragedy_of_patrick_mckenzie.html https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1506151/html/the_genius_and_tragedy...

slackenerny 16y ago
I downvoted you without second thought, as I believe people change and holding them accountable for everything they've ever done forever is cruel. However, now that I recall this lionhearted guy better, I think he should be held to his own standards. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366721 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366721

gigafemtonano 16y ago

Sebastian, you seem like a nice enough guy, but have you ever considered turning this microscope on yourself? There's a really high chance that if I see a huge nuanced argument on HN it's coming from you. Why not put that time and energy into something more valuable than karma?

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patio11 16y ago

Well, I'm happy that people like me and are invested in my success. I'm also a little discomfited by the psychoanalysis. I'm pretty happy with where I am in life, have a pretty decent career trajectory at the moment, and life is improving in non-career ways which matter more to me anyhow. That's about all I think I need to say.

dfranke 16y ago
That's a lot more of a response than you owed to anyone, and also a lot more graceful than the one that would have come from me had I been the object of this debacle.
chaostheory 16y ago
All I can say is that your writing and insight makes my life a lot better. Thanks. You should drop by Silicon Valley so I can get you a beer.
grellas 16y ago
I don't know anything whatever about the person behind patio11 but, from everything I know about patio11, I sure would want to know that person. Thanks for your always-perceptive and intelligent contributions to this site.
todayiamme 16y ago
I'm happy for you. Seriously. Extrinsic objects like money can't replace the hollowness inside most of us. It can't fill our lives with some sort of magical glow that makes everything go away. Nothing can do that. Not people. Not cats. Not computers. Not even code. It's just who you are and how you actualize yourself that truly matters. Personally, I don't care how deep your pockets are. I would still love to spend hours upon hours learning from you. Yet again I already have. :) (trust me your comments are worth an entire book alone).

jacquesm 16y ago

I can't seem to get the sentence 'with friends like this who needs enemies' out of my head. I accept this is all with the best of intentions but I honestly wished that this article and the corresponding post would just go away because they serve no purpose.

Mz 16y ago

But! Realize I have good motives. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don't need to read any further.

newobj 16y ago

The Genius and Tragedy of HN Linkbait.

wglb 16y ago

Have you ever heard of Travis McGee? John D. MacDonald wrote about him. Quite a bit. Travis worked in "marine salvage", recovering lost or stolen property for a commission. His life plan was to take his retirement in small batches, as his life went along. Rather than waiting till later to take it all at once. Kind of an odd set of ideas about what is important in life. Prior to going full time (such as it is) for BCC, Patrick worked at a big freaking enterprise working sixty hours each week. Often more. He built BCC on five hours per week. So now his life has improved in measurable ways, and looks to keep on improving. The thing that might be easy to miss about Patrick is that he is very intentional. You might call it goal-directed. Disciplined. I think it might be fair to say that he knows what direction to take his life in, what will make him happy. And one thing that he is unlikely to do is to confuse what works for him and what others think should work for him. It took me quite a few years (more than Patrick has so far) that being smart is not all it cracked up to be. Being smart works when it brings you wealth. There is a common confusion that money and wealth are essentially the same thing. To my way of thinking, wealth includes to work on what you enjoy or love, to have choices how you spend your time, not having to agonize about having a roof over your head, to have family and friends to cherish and that cherish you, to have the respect of peers. It would appear to me that Patrick is on the road to wealth. The fact that Patrick's version of success doesn't seem to include feverish addictions to money and fame has apparently made the author of this blog post "violently ill". Were I to look to choose an example of how to live, I would be more likely to recommend Patrick, and I would recommend that the author of the blog post take a second look at his take on this topic.

firebones 16y ago

This whole thread disappeared quickly from the front page (meta-moderation?). I, too, found the original post a little uncomfortable, but I think Sebastian's intentions, as unconsciously self-serving as they were (link-bait title plus unsolicited advice) likely fell into the blind spot commonly found in well-intentioned do-gooders. Unsolicited advice, particularly of a personal nature (speculating about his Catholicism? Really?), is often not well-received, regardless of the proximity of the originator and target. What I find especially interesting is that Sebastian himself was on the road to becoming an HN darling with his "How Do I Write So Much?" post receiving rave reviews earlier in the month. At the risk of offering my own unsolicited advice, adopting a more generically helpful and modest tone more like patio11 might have served Sebastian well in this case.

wittgenstein 16y ago

I am fairly new to HN, and I was not aware of patio's 11 fame. I read quite a few posts of Sebastian Marshall's blog when I first came across it. I think the most important lesson from Marshall's blog and the point he attempts to make in this particular post is the following: You cannot judge a person's abilities by their writing, no matter how good it is (or seems to be). This lesson may apply particularly well to Marshall himself.