Startup camp for entrepreneurs
Perhaps my favorite thing to do outside of building companies is help other folks build companies. I was a major outsider in this business and had to fight my way inside over a decade. It sucked at times, but it's paid off.
Context & Ripple Effects
This post sits at the start of Jason Calacanis's shift from operator to mentor-investor. Two weeks earlier he had published his 17 tips for saving money running a startup, part of a run of practitioner advice aimed at founders outside the traditional venture inner circle. It also lands amid a broader argument — made around the same time in the case for building startups in New York rather than Silicon Valley — that viable company-building ecosystems could exist beyond Northern California.
First-order effects
- Founders get direct access to an operator who spent a decade fighting his way into the business, compressing the apprenticeship that Calacanis says he had to endure alone.
- For Calacanis himself, teaching becomes a filter: the camp surfaces ambitious founders early, converting mentorship into relationships before formal investing would.
Second-order effects
- Other operators and angels face pressure to open up their playbooks publicly — the pattern already visible in Calacanis's own cost-cutting advice — because free practitioner knowledge becomes table stakes for attracting deal flow.
- Ecosystem-building efforts like this reinforce the argument that startups can cluster outside Silicon Valley, giving New York and similar hubs more credible founder pipelines.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, founder education stops being charity and becomes core infrastructure of angel investing — content, camps, and communities functioning as proprietary deal-flow channels.
- Over time this erodes the gatekeeping Calacanis describes having fought through: access to startup know-how shifts from network privilege to openly distributed material, lowering the outsider's cost of entry.
The trend: Operators are turning hard-won startup experience into public teaching and community formats that double as early-stage deal flow, gradually democratizing access to the knowledge that once required insider networks.