Share this page!

Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Twitter logo
18 Nov, 5 tweets, 1 min read
I feel unreasonably proud as a Chicagoan interested in credit cards that when I got the email about Reserved by Sapphire I said “Chase did Tock? No. Chase must be white labeling Tock.”

(They are.)

media.chase.com/news/chase-ult…
Tock is an amazingly brilliant business by the way, by the sort of restauranteur who also posts on HN for fun.

High end restaurants have an inventory management problem and the relevant inventory is seatings not food. Tock suggests they sell pre-paid reservations like shows do.
This way they don’t have to eat no-shows or parties which reserve a table for 8 but only show up (and pay for) 5.
For much more about Tock and the business that is high-end restaurants see
Anyhow, clearly a brilliant bit of cross-promotion. Chase’s entire shtick with the Sapphire line is to get upwardly mobile urban professionals on it then charge businesses a lot for their custom; using themselves as a demand aggregator for high-end dining is incentive compatible.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Patrick McKenzie

Patrick McKenzie Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @patio11

Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
17 Nov
Stripe Tax is chugging along. We wrote a brief roadmap of what problems we can solve for users today and which ones we hope to be able to solve soon:

stripe.com/blog/building-…
Some people think that taxes are complex because the people who write or enforce the rules are perverse. I think it’s mostly because a) taxes are used to express society’s preferences and b) society’s preferences are complex.
For example, consider sales/use taxes around food. A key goal of most tax regimes is “progressive taxation”; you generally want to take more as a percentage from “richer” people and less from less well-off people. (Definition of “richer” also complex when you try to encode it.)
Read 17 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
5 Nov
If you enjoy my writing and enjoy e.g. Money Stuff you would likely enjoy Net Interest, which is @MarcRuby's newsletter on banking topics.

netinterest.co

Let me illustrate with a single paragraph why this is obviously the future of e.g. equities research:
Substack has made it incentive compatible for the world's various obsessed experts on various topics to hire themselves out to the Internet rather than hiring themselves out to e.g. financial intermediaries, and then they do the sort of deep work that experts do.
Also: holy me do I not want to be the investment banker who let a math error work its way into an IPO prospectus.
Read 6 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
5 Nov
Agree so much. Interesting knock-on effects, too:

1) Companies which previously had a $25k minimum to account for legal friction/founder headaches should be happy to take $1k from e.g. an engineer.

2) It's SO MUCH better for "not my day job" angel investors to centralize info.
e.g. I owe the National Tax Agency (Japanese IRS) some math every year about all of my overseas assets, including those which did nothing in a year, and the process of collecting that information looks something like this:
Non-AngelList investment from 2012: get docs out of Dropbox, grep inbox to see if e.g. this is the one that I remember signing the docs about a corporate transaction this year or not, math math math, en-spreadsheet.

AngelList: download report on all, send to accountant, done.
Read 11 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
5 Nov
Bits about Money #3: How credit cards make money.

bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/how-cr…

Some brief elaborations from the cutting room floor:
The essay talks about cross-subsidization at a few points. One fascinating form of cross-subsidization was that credit cards *changed who ultimately pays for an individual's use of credit.*
This had huge ramifications for small businesses, which are historically (and currently) horrifically capital constrained almost all of the time. They also have extreme difficulty in lining up traditional bank financing.

Credit cards let merchants opt-in to financing customers.
Read 11 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
5 Nov
A quirky feeling I've had on our covid-19 response is that some institutions have difficulty doing things which are *clearly* within our capabilities while others are pushing boundaries in their respective fields.

A happy example of the later:

pfizer.com/news/press-rel…
More effective covid-19 treatments is always good news, of course, but taking a teensy look at the actual specifics of this:

This was identification of a new molecule, synthesization, testing, demonstrating of efficacy, and preparation for scaled manufacturing.

In two years.
My impression is "Humanity very literally did not know it could do that on that timescale. Not for covid. Not for anything."
Read 4 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
4 Nov
Isn't this just *obviously* the way the typical consumer's most important transaction should want to work? People are worried if they can make the math work. Me, less so, but that aside: few would say "Sign me up for the traditional sell/buy process!" with this as an option.
Ignoring the "new experience" thing which is product speak for "We stitched everything together in a web app", substantively:

1) You ask Opendoor for a quote.
2) They give you a hard quote and accept sale contingent on you winning target house.
3) You share pre-qual letter.
A "pre-qualification" letter is a document from a mortgage broker or originator that says "Contingent on you submitting a bunch of documentation, indicatively, we think we can underwrite you for a mortgage up to $X." Most common use is showing to seller to say "I could swing it."
Read 12 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @patio11 has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @patio11!

Read all threads by @patio11

:(