The Genius and Tragedy of Patrick McKenzie (patio11)
sebastianmarshall.com
sebastianmarshall.com
That's about all I think I need to say.
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).
You should drop by Silicon Valley so I can get you a beer.
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.
Well part of the post was telling the public that Patrick would be a bargain to hire at a $200,000 salary. That specific part works better in a public post.
I still hope this is just parody?
i'd love to read a psychoanalysis of this character type.
1) His words are watched
2) He inspires conversations and entire, lengthy blog posts
I completely disagree with the author's position and assumptions (as I've detailed in another comment) but this is hardly bad news for Patrick. We're all sitting here debating how much more money he should be making. This submission is the second-most popular story on HN right now.
This is an extraordinary win for Patrick's personal branding efforts, even if it comes with a pretty uncomfortable smell to it. It's unbelievable, inasmuch as Patrick has hacked a non-computer system for personal gain.
Bravo, patio11.
There was two other things I wanted to do - increase Patrick's profile in a positive way, and also make the point at the very bottom especially to young people in technology who are underpaid because they don't value/price their skills enough.
> 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.
He was saying he was upset when a public school teacher wanted wanted a discount because the teacher only made $60k - and he said he'd never made $60k.
Anyways, it looks like this has been popular with a lot of people and hopefully helpful, but also drawn some really strong negative reactions. I guess that's okay - ideally some good things comes out of this, I think it's quite possible. We'll see.
Beyond the fact that I consider it extremely rude to write something like this about a private person without permission, I am strongly negative about this piece because it reinforces the bizarre idea that making money is somehow a really good and important value to have. If you have a particular passion that requires a lot of money, like running a huge business, or helping a ton of people through charity, then great -- make some money and do it! But most things that humans like don't require a lot of money!
Imagine I wrote this post:
The Genius and Tragedy of Sebastian
Sebastian is a multi-faceted genius. He’s amazingly talented, I can’t even explain how talented he is. But all is not rosy... His story thus far is a story of tragedy and wasted potential. I assumed he was a successful chessplayer. He's very smart, and has a good memory. Then I read this comment Sebastian wrote earlier today:
"I like chess, but I wish my dad would stop bragging when he beats me (I'm not even a C-class player.)"
WTF? Sebastian, dude, with your focus and brains, you could be an international master. Even if you don't fully appreciate the beauty of chess, your tournament games would entertain hundreds of players online, and help educate and inspire young players. Anyone who says "I don't care about competitive chess" clearly hasn't thought about it very much.
[insert ten pages of chess advice]
I find that to be totally identical to your post about why he should try to make a lot of money.
It's a little different than that - there's some smart and accomplished people who read my site, and I was hoping to introduce them and connect them with Patrick, maybe creating some opportunities. If you posted on a Chess blog and told all your readers to go look the person up if they wanted an exceptional Chess student, and I was looking to be apprenticed, then I'd appreciate that.
I don't know how it'll go over, we'll see what Patrick says. If he's displeased or this brings ill on him, I can edit or delete the post as suits him. I wrote it with good intentions, we'll see how it goes.
I'm sure that if that was your true goal that there would have been better ways of going about it.
The latter you could have done without using patio11's real name.
The former - you are misguided. I accept that you didn't intend it, but the thing reads like "this guy is too dumb to make money from his assets".
Well, way to mess it up. Suppose he wanted to take your advice -- you've just undermined him in any future negotiations.
Negotiating with sharks is not the same as friendly banter with your hacker friends.
Idiotic!
Young people who have built up a skillset similar to Patrick's are willing to sacrifice 60-120k paying jobs in their early years in favor of going out an learning how to build a company. It takes a lot of trial and error to get it right.
While Patrick may be making less at the beginning of his career, I guarantee he'll be making more than the average bay-area developer once he really begins to nail down how to build profitable companies.
- Why it is massively upvoted anyway and
- Why people don't feel that it is equally inappropriate to personally attack the author and accuse him of all kinds of bad intentions, when an honest misjudgement is the more likely explanation.
It feels like a room full of amateur psychologists diagnosing a person in public.
It was massively upvoted because many, many people agree with a lot of the content of the article. If this was lesswrong or reddit, the post might have a negative score, it would certainly be controversial.
Personally attacking the author is okay because
(a) He's not remotely as active, committed or useful a commenter as Patrick.
(b) Obvious self-promotion is taboo among technical people and among their broader cultural peers, nerds, geeks, whatever. Demonstration of talent in the course of something else is the way to go. lsc has some great comments on this, and makes the point that business people are just not like this, at all. Sebastian is much, much more like them in this regard than Patrick.
But many people probably agree with him among the lurkers because not all of his comments on this thread are negative, they're hovering around 1 or 2.
Now personally I too think this was inappropriate, but if he had run it by Patrick, it'd have been fine. It's not like I, and the no doubt many other, habitual patio11 comment stalkers, couldn't have writted this or something like it<1>.
That said, this post probably wrecked Patrick's day. I felt uncomfortable reading it and I'm way less territorial or private than normal. It will probably occasion an Xing of his consulting rate though, which will leave Patrick more time for leisure or working on his own stuff, so distasteful as even I find it, it may in the long run turn out to be a _small_ favour. Maybe it accelerated his consulting trajectory a year. Whether that's worth what was no doubt a punch to the gut I don't know.
<1> also yummyfajitas, lsc, pg, tpatecek, tokenadult, cperciva, RiderOfGiraffes, ErrantX, btilly, moultano and nostrademons
Patio is a public figure here, should unfortunately have some expectation of the glory that comes with pseudo-celeb status for better or for worse given that good comments likely see similar numbers of eyeballs.
For biz guys exposing talent to your network is about the biggest way to give back.
Maybe it's just linkbait for HN, but seems to me like it's written genuinely from the standpoint of exposing a guy that's providing a lot of value to a wider community.
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.
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.
Agree completely. Reading the article, I couldn't help but imagine how Patrick would be perceived if he followed the OP's well-intentioned advice.
IMO, his humble persona, generosity/openness and consistent work ethic have made him the popular and approachable figure that he is today. It wouldn't be surprising if much of Patrick's inspiration came from Balsamiq's Peldi.
It's true, yet this ends up pointing to the old trope about there being no such thing as bad press. Uncomfortable or no, you can't ask for better visibility than a story like this.
Being public means public conversation. It's not always fun but it's a cost of doing business.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had the other day with a friend. This guy is very senior and has been around the bay for 25 years. His kids went to school with Steve Jobs' kids.
At a graduation, my friend observed all these people coming up to Steve Jobs, introducing themselves, and otherwise being a nuisance during a family event. Jobs' body language clearly communicated how little he enjoyed this.
This is a cost of doing business.
The other side of it is that Apple gets millions of dollars of free press attention every single year, thanks to this one guy's personality and visibility. Their buzz is tremendous every single time they launch a product. Jobs pays the price of this.
Clearly a more extreme example, but this is what comes of successful visibility. Some of it is great.
Some of it is posts like this.
But it points to one thing: patio11 is doing it right.
That was all good as long as it was positive. But then I got the other side of the equation, the cranks and the attacks. I could have definitely done without those, as well as all the armchair generals telling you how to run your business for you.
The problem is that this is an extreme version of damning with praise, and it portrays Patrick as a smart guy that should not be near a business decision because 'he obviously can't do it'. It totally misses the point that Patrick has his own timetable, that he spent a metric ton of effort on getting out of situations where others determine his timetable and he's only just begun.
Stupid posts like these can damage your reputation, no doubt about it and if I were Patrick I would completely ignore the whole thing to stay above it.
It's not worthy of a reply by him, that would do it too much justice. I also think that you should not attack someone in such a veiled way to increase your own stature, because by implication the author tells you he knows better and so places himself above Patrick in his business abilities. That may very well be true, but I see no proof of that.
It's not like Steve Jobs wrote that piece.
I'm generally of the position that I don't care that much when people are wrong about me. At the same time, it wouldn't feel good to have someone hijacking my visibility to raise their own agenda, which I see now could be how this is going.
Take a guy who's well respected in the community, dish out praise and criticism, establish yourself as the authority figure and pull traffic based off his good name. He certainly has the self-aggrandizing part down...
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.
If you make money either from you own business or someone else's you have to do not-so-fun stuff all the time. That's the reality. Amount of not-so-fun stuff can change massively though.
You either slave of your boss or of your own customers :)
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.
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.And I also agree that its a self-serving post. He basically boosted his own profile by tearing down a popular community member for linkbait and then injected himself into the conversation all over the place. And clearly the author has very little perception that what he's done here is in any way wrong, he's been defending and promoting it all over the place. Ugh
An observation I feel comfortable making about another HNer? Sebastian Marshall clearly spends way too much time on this site.
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-in... , the last paragraph).
I think this is all about having your comfort zone and learning to walk before learning how to run.
Having read/skimmed Sebastian's article, it felt as though something ignorant and grand-standing had just trampled that.
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.
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?
I'm not attacking Patrick at all! I think Patrick is a great guy! I think Patrick works very hard at what he does, which includes engaging with the community and branding himself in a certain way, and he deserves all of the respect this community gives him.
From a personal branding perspective, it's interesting to see someone rise from obscurity to pg-like levels of fandom simply through hard work and providing value. It's great as a case study/learning experience.
Just because Patrick isn't the only one to do this doesn't make his accomplishments any less worthwhile. And most of those others don't share their knowledge on HN.
Here's a thought experiment- How much money would you pay, tomorrow, for patio11 to announce that all of his posts on his blog and on HN have actually been ghostwritten by CapitalistCartr. What if he said the patio11 profile was actually a sockpuppet account run by CapitalistCartr, and all of the respect he has built up through his hard work and posts would now belong to you?
How much would that be worth to you? $1,000?$5,000?$10,000? I bet that intangible, what accountants call goodwill, is actually worth quite a bit.
If the suggestion is that you can't freely admire someone (and the praise was clearly served up as an extra helping to offset the criticism) based only on the quality and volume of writing that Patrick has produced, well, that's just extra creepy.
Hitting with one hand while praising at the same time never fooled anybody.
God lets hope the patio11 guy doesn't take any of this advice. I mean jesus christ: ...rose to international celebrity...
This is so stupid. Look at this guy's own about page. It is a billion words about how he tries to be disciplined and travels. Oh, and he's interested in "strategy". That's it. Is this a guy you want to emulate? Or is this a guy who avoids work, has accomplished nothing, and expects to be commended for it?
He is looked up to on the Joel on Software board and this forum as a marketing/business genius, yet he barely makes enough money to break the poverty level for one person (I can't imagine how he affords to live in Japan).
He has talent and perseverance, but he's not a model we should be following for business.
There is born-genius and being genius through hard work and determination. I think Patrick is of the later kind. It took him a good amount of time to be the genius he is (I have been reading his posts from JoS/BoS days). Now that he has quit his day job, I have no doubt that he will be successful in any endeavour he takes on.
Also, the original article's estimate of 10k/month is VERY LOW. If he can make 3k selling to teachers (a very narrow niche), he will make a boat load of money selling to businesses. Let's say in first year, he has 100 customers (a very conservative estimate) on 79/month plan. That's 7900$ in revenue. Next year he adds 200 customers more, now you are talking about revenue of 24k. In 5 years, he can easily make 50k/month with minimum effort on his side. This business can give him the lifestyle we all dream about. Freedom to work your own hours, freedom to travel around the world, being your own boss etc.
I am sure Patrick will keep us updated on how his new product is doing and once Sebastian sees the results, he will realize that he underestimated Patrick's genius. :)
Good luck Patrick!
Absolutely, and Amazon spent about the same amount of time bleeding hundreds of millions of debt _every quarter_. Notch (of minecraft fame) spent several years making little java applet games with barely any fanfare and barely eking out an earning if at all (he had a few day jobs prior to breaking free and founding Mojang Specifications).
There's no time limit in creating or running your own business, and there is no marker of success except those defined by the founder's goals. Is it always a good idea to enter a market you don't care about just because it's big? Not really, or else everyone would be making operating systems and office suites.
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.
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.
He did that while working a substantially-more-than-full-time salary man job.
I know. He put lots of effort into his products. However, success is based on results, not effort. A successful business to me means you can pay all of your bills, the business's bills, and have some savings with revenue. If he isn't quitting his job, it means:
1) His business isn't making enough for him to survive or
or
2) It's making more than enough, but he still has enough time during the day to run his biz and hold down a full-time job.
Just looking at the numbers, it's obvious it was #1. Still, he only just quit his job after how many years?
A smart business person needs to know if there is a market for their product and if that market is profitable enough to sustain a business. It's obvious the bingo card market is very small and probably won't reliably sustain a business. Even the main users of the bingo card creator app are very cheap and probably won't be willing to pay for very much. So we have a small niche market with users that aren't willing to spend money a lot of money (or can't afford it).
The question is: if he finds out that his new service (the appointment reminder) has a small, unprofitable market, will he waste another 6 years trying to make it a success?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That rules out B2B, which is where the money is when you're a one man show.
So, now he's got his hands free, he's got his knives sharpened and he's going to do his next project, presumably at a higher level of turnover.
Some people are cautious other people are much more of a risk taking nature. I can fully sympathize with the way Patrick went about this and I would definitely not assume that this was all one big accident, it seems to me as though it was by design. He simply tried to find a way to turn his idle time in to passive income enough to get his hands free.
Running a business is about being in control, about not letting your business run you in to corners that you can not back out of, and Patrick has - as far as I can detect - succeeded admirably in his goals so far.
I have absolutely no doubt that he will do it again, I really hope that this time he'll hit one out of the park.
> 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.
Let's look at that 5 years from now, ok? Some people are slow but steady, some people are fast but go down as fast as they go up. Patrick has tried very hard to take the lottery element out of how he runs his business and that alone should tell you something.
I think Patrick loves writing, he loves writing about his business and he loves helping other people, making informed and reasonable comments. I imagine, and hope, he has had a lot of fun the last few years doing what he did and in the end it made him money too.
It's just that he could have made so much more, vast amounts more, if he'd taken a bit of risk. And every time I see him talk about business or strategy or anything that idea is screaming at the back of my mind and I judge him harsher than I should.
Someone down the street where I used to live won the lottery, it was just a bit of risk. I'll never win the lottery because I'm not that kind of person.
Instead I very slowly year by year move forward. Invariably when I do take risks I either lose big time or I move forward a bit, on the whole that seems to work out to a slight net positive but it hasn't been a real game changer for me.
Patrick seems to prefer 'monotonic upwards' instead of 'rollercoaster', and that's his privilege.
He might have made so much more, or he could have lost it all, who is there to know for sure.
>I'm not saying I'm better, in many, many ways I'm a lot worse
So being worse than someone gives you the power to critique someone so badly ? I wonder what you would've said if you thought you were better shudder
Just for the record: He's managed to build a $30k business... on the side... while working a 70hr/wk job.
If you can't concede the business acumen of someone that manages to go from employment to being self supporting in such a short time without any outside help or financing then you're very much out of tune.
I think we are seeing again the whole "you are not a real startup if you haven't raised at least 1 million in venture capital" meme. No right to exist for lifestyle entrepreneurs in some little minds.
Seriously, I don't understand the expectation that there's a correlation between genius and riches.
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.
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.
Well - it's also the middle of the night in Japan. 04:28 according to the site I glanced at.
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.
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.
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.
Tim Robins makes more than 600k/year.
“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).”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know HN tends to be all about the money at times, but seriously, it's not everything.
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.
(At least until my brain kicked and thought "he can't be dead, he's posting". But sheesh.)
Also, the mere mention of Grad School would make this article explode.
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.
You've made it bro. Congrats!
http://ompldr.org/vNW1pMw/the_genius_and_tragedy_of_patrick_...
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...
However, now that I recall this lionhearted guy better, I think he should be held to his own standards.
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.
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.
A restraining order?;-)
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don't need to read any further.
Hustler baffled by this attitude to the point of almost tearing his hair out? Also normal. Sad but normal.