A Couple of My Rules for Startups
My buddy Jason had a GREAT post about rules for startups. Read it, love it learn it. — Of course, anyone who has started a company has their own rules and guidelines, so I thought i would add to the meme with my own.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days after Jason Calacanis published 17 money-saving tips for running a startup, the author of Blog Maverick adds his own set of rules to the conversation — explicitly framing it as joining a meme rather than starting one. The timing matters: this lands in a stretch where prescriptive founder advice is circulating fast, from Scobleizer's rules of Twitter and how he breaks every one in late 2007 to Calacanis's cost-discipline list.
The pickup pattern shows the format travelling: Scobleizer responds through the lens of work-life balance ('work and family and having a real life') and A VC's Fred Wilson folds it into what he calls 'Startup Advice Weekend.' The confirmed record on Jason himself — his 'Less as a competitive advantage' talk at Web 2.0 in 2005 and his 2006 proposal that Wikipedia run charity-funded ads — establishes him as a serial public rule-maker whose lists reliably draw peer responses.
First-order effects
- Founders reading these blogs over the same weekend now hold three competing playbooks — Calacanis's austerity tips, Blog Maverick's counter-rules, and Wilson's roundup — and must reconcile directly conflicting guidance on spending and focus.
Second-order effects
- Peer entrepreneurs like Scobleizer are pulled into responding on their own terms, turning a single advice post into a multi-blog conversation where each author's rules double as a statement of how they run companies.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, prescriptive numbered-list advice becomes a standing genre of founder blogging, with prominent operators using rule-making as low-cost positioning against each other's philosophies.
The trend: High-profile founders are turning personal operating rules into a conversational blog genre, where each new list invites corrections and counter-lists from peers within days.