Patrick McKenzieEvery podcast appearance, updated as new ones drop

I talked with Patrick McKenzie (known online as patio11) about how a small team he ran over a Discord server got vaccines into Americans' arms: A story of broken incentives, outrageous incompetence, and how a few individuals with high agency saved 1000s of lives. Enjoy! Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes. Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue. Timestamps (00:00:00) – Why hackers on Discord had to save thousands of lives (00:17:26) – How politics crippled vaccine distribution (00:38:19) – Fundraising for VaccinateCA (00:51:09) – Why tech needs to understand how government works (00:58:58) – What is crypto good for? (01:13:07) – How the US government leverages big tech to violate rights (01:24:36) – Can the US have nice things like Japan? (01:26:41) – Financial plumbing & money laundering: a how-not-to guide (01:37:42) – Maximizing your value: why some people negotiate better (01:42:14) – Are young people too busy playing Factorio to found startups? (01:57:30) – The need for a post-mortem This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com

Few can measure the impact of a blog post they wrote, in the millions of dollars a year, but Patrick McKenzie has the receipts. His 2012 post on salary negotiation is read hundreds of thousands of times each year, and he has a Gmail folder brimming with success stories. This achievement is just of his many contributions, which include starting several businesses, advising Stripe and other software companies, and spearheading the launch of VaccinateCA . Lately he's been writing Bits about Mone y , a biweekly newsletter on the intersection of tech and finance. Tyler sat down with Patrick to discuss signature fields on the back of credit cards, whether bank tellers or waitstaff are more trustworthy, the gremlins behind spurious credit card declines, how debt collection and maple syrup heists should change your model of the world, Twitter's continued success as the message bus for government and civil society, crypto vs traditional money transfers, the intended desolation of bank parking lots, why he moved to Japan and how it affected his ambition, why Tether hasn't collapsed, the internet as a Great Work, how he's experiencing reverse culture shock after returning to the US, what he'll learn about next, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpf

Several years ago I wrote a blog post on salary negotiation for engineers . This probably created more value than anything else I’ve ever written — I have a folder in Gmail with thank-you messages from people, and my running total is something north of $2.3 million in added salary per year, mostly in $15k to $25k chunks. A buddy of mine, Josh Doody, has decided to thoroughly own this area, and published a book ( Amazon link ) on the topic. I rather enjoyed the book, and thought I would have him on the podcast to talk about the topic in more detail. [ Patrick notes : As always, the below transcript occasionally has my thoughts inserted in this format.] What you’ll learn in this podcast : How to avoid the “What is your desired salary?” question How to trade off across multiple axes when doing a salary negotiation (salary, vacation days, equity, etc) How to get raises after being hired A brief announcement : Keith Perhac and I have parted ways with regards to the podcast, amicably, largely due to scheduling issues. Both he and I have been quite busy with business and life, and we’ve moved to different countries, so we’ll be running our podcasts independently in the future. We’re still great friends and will probably appear on each others’ programs occasionally. Salary Negotiation with Josh Doody Patrick McKenzie : Hideho everybody. My name is Patrick McKenzie, but I’m known as Patio11 on the Internet. This is the 12th episode of the Kalzumeus Podcast. Things are going to be changing a little bit. Keith Perhac and I have been co-hosting this podcast for the last couple of years, but we’ve moved in different directions in our personal and professional lives. Both of us have young daughters. We’re now living in different countries. It’s difficult for us to make the time to do this on a weekly basis as you might notice because we’ve only done 12 episodes in something like four years now. We’re going to be podcasting independently. We’ll probably still be guests on each other’s programs in the future as is now, I guess, just the “me” podcast for the moment. I’ll have a variety of guests on. Today, I’ve brought Josh Doody. John is a buddy of mine. We came up in the MicroConf community together. We play poker occasionally in Vegas. Josh is actually good at it. I’m not. Josh has written a book called

Keith Perhac and I recorded our 3rd podcast episode with special guest Brennan Dunn. Listen to it (or read the transcript) for: why you should increase your freelancing rate how to discuss your value with your clients such that they’re happy to pay your increased rates how to scale to a multi-employee consultancy, without being bankrupted by poorly timed receivables three stories from successful consultants on three very different trajectories in their businesses how you can use drip email to sell more product (and consulting gigs, too) a bit about the business of selling info-products: pricing anchors, marketing tactics, list building, and more If You Want To Listen To It MP3 Download (~90 minutes, ~211 MB) : Right-click here and click Save As. Podcast format : either subscribe to https://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed in your podcast reader of choice or you can search for Kalzumeus Podcast in the iTunes Store. [powerpress] Transcript: Running a Consulting Business, With Brennan Dunn Patrick McKenzie : Hi everybody. My name is Patrick McKenzie, perhaps better known as patio11 on the Internet. This is the, I think, third episode of the Kalzumeus podcast, with my buddy, Keith Perhac. Keith Perhac : Hello. Patrick : And our special guest, Brennan Dunn, of Planscope and “Double Your Freelancing Rate.” Keith : Woo! Brennan Dunn : Hey there. Keith : That was our live studio audience. Last time, we had a theme song. But I don’t know. Do we have a theme song this time as well? Patrick : I think we are totally theme‑song‑less. Keith : OK. Patrick : This is still a third‑rate podcast. So, Brennan, recently you had a product launch. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that, and we’ll segue into the discussion about it. Brennan : Absolutely. So, for the last few months, I’m been thinking about putting together an info product, specifically one that is targeting, really, a passion point of mine, which is freelancers who undercharge for their services. It’s something that really came from my own experience. For way too many years, I charged dramatically less than what I was worth, and only recently have I fixed that. And since I’ve fixed that, not only has my income gone up, but the caliber of client that I work with has gone up also. And I really wanted to just not only spill the beans as to how I got t

NYT bestselling author Ramit Sethi and I continued our earlier discussion about getting your first consulting client by addressing a common pain point for freelancers/consultants, particularly those just starting out: how do you price your offering? If you want me to tell you “You’re a Rails developer? $100 an hour if in Iowa, $150 an hour if in SOMA, best of luck” you’re in the wrong place, because you should have learned in our previous installment that you need to present yourself as someone solving business problems rather than as a mere technologist. Instead, we’re going to go beyond the tactics and talk about the psychology of customers (and consultants) that poison cheap relationships, why we typically underprice to begin with, how to walk up your rate in such a way that your customers continue to perceive outsized value from your services, and more. When we recorded this, our agenda was to talk primarily about freelancing/consulting rates, but both Ramit and I have run product businesses for many years, so we couldn’t resist tossing in a bit about pricing for e.g. SaaS companies and info-products as well. (Want to hear even more about this topic? There’s a podcast coming up next week with Keith Perhac and Brennan Dunn, where we talk about how we transitioned our three very different freelancing/consulting businesses from where they were when we were young and stupid to three different models which work out fairly well for different reasons. Subscribe to the podcast to hear it when the audio engineer gets done with the editing.) If You Want To Listen To It MP3 download (~40 minutes, ~35 MB) : Right click to save. Podcast format : either subscribe to https://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed in your podcast reader of choice or you can search for Kalzumeus Podcast in the iTunes Store. [powerpress] Transcript: Ramit Sethi and Patrick McKenzie On Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More [ Patrick notes : I have annotated the transcript heavily with my remarks, in this format.] Patrick McKenzie : Hey everybody, my name is Patrick McKenzie, perhaps better known as patio11 on the Internets. I’m a small software entrepreneur who has run a series of software as a service businesses for the last six years. Concurrent with that, for the last couple of years, I’ve run a consulting business largely helping software companies make more money by delighting their users and increasing sales. I’m here today with my friend Ramit Sethi to talk about how you can price your freelance or consulting offering better. Ramit Sethi : Hey everybody, Ramit Sethi here. Patrick, thanks for having me. I am the creator of a site called iwillteachyoutoberich.com. I also have a New York Times bestselling book by the same name. My background is in psychology and persuasion. I teach people how to use behavioral change, principles to change... For the full transcript see here.

Patrick notes : Hiya long-time blog readers. Last year I wrote two articles on career advice for young engineers, largely informed by conversations with a buddy of mine, Ramit Sethi. Over the last twelve months, I have tagged every message in Gmail I’ve gotten from someone who applied the advice in those articles to effect in their careers. Sample comments: “Your advice made me $20,000 in two minutes.”, “Your advice made me $35k”, etc etc. The running total is at about $280,000 (a year!), which makes those two articles probably my highest ROI ever from just writing blog posts. (n.b. If this were the whole of my business I’d need to have a quick heart-to-heart with myself about obvious inefficiencies in that monetization model but, luckily, the business does well enough to cross-subsidize the blog.) Ramit offered to do a series of interviews about freelancing/consulting, which I know is of interest to many of you, so I naturally took him up on the offer. (Though I think much of what we talked about applies just as well to the software business, to be honest.) If you weren’t already aware: I don’t talk about it on my blog that often, but I do high-end consulting, typically for improving the engineered marketing of software companies. Ramit is a NYT best-selling author who makes a living teaching people how to do this sort of thing better. Ramit is extraordinarily credible on this topic — in addition to his take on most things jiving with mine, I have word-for-word stolen some suggestions from him for e.g. client proposals, to the mutual benefit of my clients (they took the engagement) and myself (they paid $$$ for the engagement). This is the first in a series of three interviews — the other two will be out later. Want to make sure you don’t miss them? Either subscribe to the podcast (details below) or to my email list . If You Want To Listen To It MP3 download (~50 minutes, ~120 MB) : Right click to save. Podcast format : either subscribe to https://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed in your podcast reader of choice or you can search for Kalzumeus Podcast in the iTunes Store. [powerpress] Transcript: Ramit and Patrick on Acquiring Your First Customer [ Patrick note s: Shoutout to CastingWords for this transcription, which I paid $75