The honey badger of payments
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his classic Bits about Money essay on how checks shaped the entire American payments infrastructure, from the origins of ACH to why a standard US bank account is, tech...
23 Apr 29min
Cash received is not revenue earned
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his classic Bits about Money essay explaining why revenue recognition in software is more complicated than most engineers, founders, and financial reporters think. The...
16 Apr 33min
Your bank balance isn’t in the bank, and other alchemy
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his classic Bits About Money essay on why your bank deposit is not what you think it is. He explains the capital stack that makes deposits appear riskless while fundin...
9 Apr 48min
Payroll, pins, and punch cards
In this episode of Complex Systems, Patrick McKenzie riffs on why public sector payroll modernization is even more likely to fail than the typical public software procurement project. He then goes int...
2 Apr 47min
Delve into compliance theatre
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) explains how compliance regimes designed to be viral brought many more firms into the scope of frameworks like SOC 2. This created a market demand for compliance-on-the-chea...
26 Mars 56min
Understanding consumer debt collections: the underbelly of finance
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his classic Bits about Money essay explaining why the debt collection industry earns its “river of effluvia” metaphor. From the accounting standards that force banks t...
19 Mars 44min
Inference engineering and the real-world deployment of LLMs, with Philip Kiely
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) and Philip Kiely, early employee at Baseten, discuss the inference stack: the critical layer of software and hardware that sits between a model’s weights and a user’s prompt...
12 Mars 1h 23min
Secrets designed to be divulged and other payment oddities
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) deconstructs the "original sin" of payments: building a global financial substrate on shared secrets that were distributed promiscuously to function. He examines the multi-d...
5 Mars 25min
