I. This post outlines Patrick McKenzie - a brilliant technologist and entrepreneur - how he's done such amazing things and learned so much, and why he's getting drastically underpaid and how it's his own fault. This post will be most valuable for technologists who underestimate themselves and undervalue themselves.
II. Hacker News is the best tech community on the internet, and patio11 - Patrick McKenzie - is the best contributor there. I don't even think that's controversial, I think it would be near universally agreed by the HN crowd that Patrick has made as many or more important contributions as anyone.
If you're from Hacker News, you know Patrick already. But for my readers that don't know him, let me give you a quick overview.
III. Patrick is a multi-faceted genius, and I don't throw the word genius around casually.
Patrick McKenzie is many things - he's an expatriate to Japan, he's a talented coder, tester, metrics/split-testing/analytics user, a great writer, extremely modest and helpful. He can recruit people, evaluate talent, and manage people well. He understands ROI very well and is good at purchasing advertising. He's good at customer service. Outsourcing. Automation. Coding. Ecommerce.
Quick verdict - it's a good book, and I think it's worth reading.
Josh Kaufman sent me a message on Twitter a bit back, asking if I'd like a review copy of his book. Indeed, I would, I replied, and he sent me a digital copy.
Before I review the book, let me tell you how I read - when I get a nonfiction book that I'm not sure if I'm going to read, I "fastread" it. That's me starting to skim and move quickly, then I slow down and read in depth when something catches my eye, and speed up after I finish that section.
I fastread a lot of books. Especially reading a in-depth reference book on a topic you already know, I think you can get 90% of the lessons of a book in 30% of the time by fastreading. I typically fastread historical backgrounds about eras I'm very familiar with, thoughts on an aspect of business I know, introductions to technologies I'm already familiar with, etc.
My first thought when I was reading The Personal MBA was that this would be a good book to fastread.
