What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from EndyHackers.com. And today I'm doing something a little bit

different and actually sitting across the room from my guest. I'm talking to Patrick McKenzie,

better known in some circles as patio 11. How's it going, Patrick? Doing well, thank you. Hi, to who everybody. My name is Patrick McKenzie, better known as Paddyo 11 on the Internet's. And yes, I have totally memorized that introduction so that I'm not too nervous when I start talking about things. So Patrick and I both work at Stripe. We're both sitting on the fifth floor of the Stripe Office, and we've got a lot of stuff to talk about. You're actually one of the founding influences for how I got into starting businesses online and one of the most inspirational people that I've met. You're one of the first people to start writing transparently about yourself on the internet. And for the people who are listening who don't know who you are, can you give kind of a brief intro of your background and where you started and how you got to where you are now.

Sure thing. I kind of feel like occasionally that I am totally pretending with regards to

actually knowing any of this stuff, but a brief background on when I genuinely did not know

anything, I have lived in Japan for approximately the last 12 years, got there shortly after

university. And when I was 24, I was working in Japanese day job that was not really challenging or giving

opportunities for professional growth.

And so I decided to do a side business, mostly as a project, to learn about running

businesses and to have a little more freedom to actually make engineering decisions that mattered.

An engineer by training and trade, but was in the models of a megacorp doing nothing really

fun.

And so I made a Java swing app called Bingo Car Creator, which made Bingo Cards for elementary

school teachers.

And it's been described by some of my friends as Hello World attached to a random number

generator, which it pretty much is.

And I did this in about a week

and then started taking payments via the credit option there was for taking payments back

then, Ecelerate and eventually PayPal in a little website that I had built for this Java swing

app program in literally Notepad. And I made $24.95 about three weeks after launching, and then about $2,000 in the first

year of running the business. And then it went, it took a while, but eventually four or five

years later, it was eclipsing the amount of money that I was making at the day job. I quit to run

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