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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
, 4 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
Three anecdotes on writing online:

One essay of mine demonstrably created more economic value than everything I've done in ~15 years of my career. Probably combined.
I produced a bit of scholarly output in my life, including being published in a legitimate journal.

The most useful essay, measuring by citation count in legitimate journals, is an HN comment which I posted on my blog because it was getting long.

It spawned a small genre.
If I were to list the ten most important relationships to me careerwise, at least six of them are directly subsequent to writing a shedload online, and the other four are just slightly more indirect.
Self-citations:

kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/sal… <-- people tell me this has gotten (cumultatively) high 7 figures in raises (and that's just what I know about)

kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/fal… <-- was almost going to be this HN comment: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438355
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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
HN commenter, paraphrased: "HFTs pay brokerages money to see non-executed limit orders! That's outrageous."

Literally anyone can pay a trivial amount of money to see non-executed limit orders on the order book at a stock exchange, which exists in large part to do exactly this.
Not dunking on the commenter here; this feels like a good encapsulation of something which is easy for a technologist to believe so good to correct publicly.
The purpose of a limit order is to ask an exchange to advertise your willingness to buy or sell a defined quantity of stock at a defined price, so if you do not want market participants to learn you wish to buy a defined quantity of stock at a defined price, perhaps don't do that
Read 3 tweets
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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Thinking of writing an essay on how brokerages make money since a) it comes up on HN a lot and the easy answer (commissions) is wrong and b) the revenue mix for different brokerages, even among discount brokerages, varies hugely.
Charles Schwab, for example, runs a brokerage almost as a loss leader to have access to $100 billion (you read that right) in client deposits paying an average of 27 basis points (0.27%; you read that right) annually.

Net interest revenue is 70% of their topline revenue.
TDAmeritrade, by contrast, actually earns ~36% of their revenue by selling the thing that everyone thinks they are in business to sell. That is a high number among discount brokerages.
Read 4 tweets
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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Don’t use “SMB” in customer-facing copy. The people who you think are SMBs do not self-identify as it.

The people who have an extremely dictionary correct version of what SMB means and believe their company qualifies are probably higher in your internal segmentation.
(The government considers a manufacturer who owns a $100 million plant with $60 million of annual sales, 450 employees, and a total payroll cost of about $30 million an SMB.)
Different companies I know do segmentation differently internally but broadly speaking they mean “A company we don’t need a high touch sales process or custom legal work to close.”

Companies like that might self-identify as a startup, business, local business, $FIRM_TYPE, etc.
Read 3 tweets

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We need to talk about Eeyore:
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