How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips)
[ UPDATE: This post caused some big debate over at TechCrunch. I respond here with the blog post titled “can you work at a startup and have a life?” I updated #11 to make my point a little less harsh, more true to my true feelings ]
Context & Ripple Effects
Jason Calacanis has spent the past year building his credibility as someone who knows where online money actually flows — his October 2007 argument that some blogs are genuinely, very profitable set up his persona as a hard-nosed operator. This 17-point cost-cutting list is that persona pushed to its edge: treat staff amenities as line items to be cut.
The pushback was immediate and unusually wide — TechCrunch framed him as 'Calacanis Fires People Who Have A Life,' Tech Confidential ran a darker spin ('into the ground'), and Stilgherrian contrasted his approach with 37signals' people-first reputation. Within the same day Calacanis published a follow-up, 'can you have a life and work at a startup?', and edited tip #11 to soften its harshest wording.
First-order effects
- Calacanis himself becomes the story rather than his advice — the TechCrunch framing forces a same-day retraction-and-explainer cycle, showing how fast an advice post can turn into a personal-brand liability.
- Startup employees at cost-disciplined shops get an explicit signal from a prominent operator that perks and boundaries are treated as expendable spend when cash gets tight.
Second-order effects
- Other prominent founders are pulled into publishing counter-positions within days — Mark Cubaan-style rule lists (like the 'Couple of My Rules for Startups' post that follows two days later) become the standard rebuttal format, splitting the founder-commentariat into austerity vs. sustainability camps.
- Recruiters and competitors gain a ready-made wedge: against a Calacanis-style shop, a rival can pitch culture itself — 37signals-style restraint versus burn-them-down economics — as a differentiator in hiring engineers.
Third-order effects
- Founder advice consolidates into content strategy: the listicle-plus-backlash-plus-follow-up loop doubles as audience building, meaning provocative management takes are partly performance, which degrades the signal value of founder guidance generally.
- If the pattern holds, work-life balance becomes a recurring public fault line in startup culture, resurfacing whenever capital tightens — with profitability-first voices and quality-of-life voices trading blows through their blogs rather than industry bodies.
The trend: Startup cost discipline is migrating from private operating practice into public founder-brand theater, where each money-saving manifesto triggers a counter-manifesto and the debate itself becomes the product.