Patrick McKenzie — known nearly everywhere online as patio11 — is an American software entrepreneur and essayist whose public writing built him a career arc with no institutional precedent: rural-Japan salaryman to niche-SaaS founder to Stripe engineer to civic-infrastructure organizer to independent publisher of financial plumbing.

## From St. Louis to Gifu

He grew up in the US, attended Washington University in St. Louis (2000–2004), and graduated with a computer science degree plus a second degree in East Asian Studies. Worried by a Wall Street Journal claim that engineering employment was leaving America, he hedged with Japanese — "the Venn Diagram game," he called it — and moved to Japan right after college, placed as a technical translator at Softopia Japan, the Gifu prefectural technology incubator, through the exchange program whose Coordinator for International Relations track is better known as JET. When that contract elapsed in 2007 he became a salaryman engineer at a Japanese megacorp he has never publicly named. March 30, 2010 was his last day of salaried work; Hacker News threw a congratulatory thread.

## Kalzumeus Software

The side business had started in mid-2006: a free bingo-card generator he built in a day for a Gifu English-teachers' mailing list drew sixty emails overnight, so he productized it on a $60 budget — Java Swing at first, a Rails SaaS by 2009 — targeting $200 a month. It passed that in its second month, took payments through eSellerate and later PayPal, and within four or five years was earning more than his day job. Bingo Card Creator made him a different kind of public figure: he published revenue, traffic, A/B tests, and strategy year after year, at a time when almost nobody running a real business did that. "Breadcrumbs for the next person," he told Indie Hackers — plus the discipline of written plans checked against later results.

He launched Appointment Reminder in December 2010 — Twilio-powered reminder calls for professional-services businesses, deliberately recurring-revenue after BCC's one-off sales — and sold both products through broker FE International: BCC in May 2015 (listed around $57,000), Appointment Reminder in late 2016. In between he co-founded Starfighter (March 2015) with Thomas and Erin Ptacek, an attempt to replace the technical interview with CTF work-sample games; it shuttered in August 2016, and he joined Stripe that September to work on Atlas.

## Essays

Three kalzumeus.com essays became canonical internet texts: "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" (2010), which spawned a genre of assumption lists; "Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice" (2011), arguing engineers are hired to create business value; and "Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued" (2012), still read hundreds of thousands of times a year, with reader-reported raises he has tracked into the millions of dollars.

## VaccinateCA

On January 14, 2021 he tweeted that someone should call every California provider and put the yeses in one place. Karl Yang spun up a Discord that night; roughly seventy volunteers joined by morning; VaccinateCA.com launched the next day. McKenzie became CEO of Call The Shots, Inc., the 501(c)(3) behind it — about ten organizers, ten employees, and five hundred volunteers whose method was human phone calls at scale, plus data collation and brokerage. It expanded nationally as Vaccinate The States in April 2021, fed availability data to partners including the federal government and Google Maps, wound down in August 2021, and dissolved February 3, 2022. He wrote the oral history for Works in Progress and a reflective post-mortem on the EA Forum; his estimate — thousands of lives for about $1.2 million — is his own. NPR, NBC News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and SFGate covered the first weeks.

## The media business

Since October 2021 he has written Bits about Money, a roughly biweekly "professional journal at the intersection of finance and technology" — ACH mechanics, debanking, card tokens, title insurance. In 2024 he launched the Complex Systems podcast: weekly Thursday interviews with people who built institutions, published with carefully edited transcripts. Both run under Kalzumeus Software, LLC, during what he calls a semi-sabbatical; he remains a Stripe advisor after six years of full-time work ended around December 2022. In February 2025 he refused a retraction request from Anchorage Digital's CEO and published the correspondence — a small monument to his stated editorial standard: cite heavily, disclose conflicts, don't retract under pressure.

## What the record does not settle

There is no Wikipedia article or Wikidata item for him; his birth date is unpublished in the cited record; his Japanese employer is deliberately unnamed; the sale prices of both companies are undisclosed; and his current base is ambiguous — the October 2023 interview records him back in the US with Chicago roots while his profiles still say Tokyo.

*This index was compiled from public sources and does not imply the subject's endorsement. Citations live in the packet's source catalog.*