Speaker

Patrick McKenzie

Patrick McKenzie

Writer and software engineer, known online as ‘patio11’, whose work applies systems thinking to the hidden infrastructure of business — banking, payments, and the institutions that sit behind everyday transactions. He writes Bits about Money, a newsletter on the mechanics of finance, and previously worked in the payments industry at Stripe, where he remains an adviser.

McKenzie moved to Japan at twenty and spent roughly two decades there — first as a burnt-out corporate ‘salaryman’, later as an independent software publisher and writer — before returning to the United States. His 2012 essay on salary negotiation is among the most-read pieces of career advice on the internet, credited by readers with tens of millions of dollars in aggregate additional compensation. During the COVID-19 pandemic he founded and ran VaccinateCA, a volunteer-run effort to map vaccine availability across California. He is a longstanding, vocal sceptic of cryptocurrency.

Core positions

  • Institutions persist by inertia, not design. Much of what looks deliberate in banking and payments — signature requirements, decades-high spurious decline rates, Western Union’s fee structure — is legacy behaviour nobody with authority has been made accountable for fixing, rather than a rational current-day choice.
  • Evil is real and must be modelled, but is overpredicted relative to incompetence. He treats malicious intent as a genuine, non-negligible feature of institutions and labour markets, while arguing that people generally overestimate how much bad outcomes trace to deliberate wrongdoing rather than ordinary friction and error.
  • Nonspecialist, internet-sourced talent is systematically underrated. His experience running VaccinateCA with largely non-credentialed volunteers reinforced a prior that motivated generalists can match or exceed career specialists on a bounded problem, within weeks rather than years.
  • Crypto’s critique of legacy finance is often right; its proposed fix is not. He shares crypto advocates’ view that KYC/AML compliance imposes real, underappreciated costs on ordinary people, but argues the correct response is legal and regulatory reform, not building technology to evade the law.

In the wiki