I usually ignore this windbag, but I can’t stop thinking about Jason Calacanis’ recent post about “How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips)”

There are plenty of ideas that I support

Buy Macintosh computers, save money on an IT department

Study after study shows this to be true. It also makes things like network storage for users much easier to deal with.

Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs. Tables are a complete rip off.

If you are not buying your office furniture used, I don’t know if I should let you read this blog. Let the chump who went out of business from buying fancy cubicles provide you with nice furniture at 30% of his cost. Craigslist has the best deal but most medium to large cities have used office furniture dealers. Used office furniture has been a buyer’s market as long as I can remember.

Don’t buy everyone Microsoft Office–it’s too much money. Put Office on three or four common computers and use Google Docs.

Absolutely! Office is more of a pain than anything these days. You can do mail merges just as easy with OpenOffice Calc as you can with Excel. The only thing I would say about this, is that you may have people who will feel lost without an acceptable alternative to PowerPoint, but I think that Apple’s Keynote will fill the bill for those people. Also, Apple’s entire office suite is 80 bucks or something.

Allow folks to work off hours. Commuting sucks and is a waste of time for everyone. Let folks start at 6am or 11am and you’ll cut their commute in half (at least in LA).

Outsource to middle America: There are tons of brilliant people living between San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York who don’t live in a $4,000 one bedroom apartment and pay $8 to dry clean a shirt–hire them!

There are a few I oppose:

Buy everyone lunch four days a week and establish a no-meetings policy. Going out for food or ording (sic) in takes at least 20-60 minutes more than walking up to the buffet and eating. If you do meetings over lunch you also save that time. So, 30 minutes a day across say four days a week is two hours a week… which is 100 hours a year. You get the idea.

It’s painfully obvious that a boss is talking on that one, isn’t it? Lunch = freedom to people who work for a living. I don’t know how it works with the laws and the lawyers and the labor codes, but your employees don’t see lunch as “your” time, they see it as “my” time. And frankly, some people like to go out for lunch to clear their head. I am not one of those people – although I do like to conduct some meetings with employees over lunch but I prefer to do it over lunch and off the premises, basically to see if they will open up a little bout their concerns outside the office environment.

Don’t buy a phone system. No one will use it. No one at Mahalo has a desk phone except the admin folks. Everyone else is on IRC, chat, and their cell phone. Everyone has a cell phone, folks would rather get calls on it, and 99% of communication is NOT on the phone. Savings? At least $500 a year per person… 50 people over three years? $75-100k

No, no, no – you need the voicemail. Your employees need the voicemail too. You can’t have valuable customer and internal data hanging out in somebody’s cell phone account (yes, vm is important customer and internal data), maybe, you’re not sure what happened to that message. I mean if you want to rig up some kind of fancy voicemail forwarding system and central storage without a phone system, I guess you could do that, but heck, that’s not going to save you that much over a phone system.

Fire people who are not workaholics. don’t love their work… come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. don’t work at a startup if you’re not into it–go work at the post office or stabucks if you’re not into it you want balance in your life. For realz.

He took a huge amount of heat for this bullet point, and you can see his true commitment to his “ideals” by the fact that he went back and struck through his main points. At least he recognized his own foolishness. There’s just going to be plenty of effective, talented people who, oh, have kids, have parents who need care, enjoy this thing known as life. Reading through the strikethrus we see that he really believes “don’t work at a startup if you want balance in your life” as if to say that the ideal candidate for a startup is someone with no balance in their life. You know what happens to those people? They BURN OUT. Three months of a burned out executive who used to be herculean, can undo years of good results. My favorite part is that he struck through “it’s not a game” which would imply that it IS a game, which would roughly agree with my own thinking about the typical startup culture.

And there’s a few I’m not sure about:

Don’t waste money on recruiters. Get inside of linkedin and Facebook and start looking for people–it works better anyway.

Recruiters definitely have their function, the reflexive view that they are just parasitic is uninformed. What do recruiters really do? What they do is they pull in people who aren’t looking for a job, but who can do what you need. You can facebook it up all you want, but right now a recruiter is fiddling around with your company’s or a competitior’s company phone directory system hacking their way toward the person you need to keep the business moving ahead.

Buy second monitors for everyone, they will save at least 30 minutes a day, which is 100 hours a year… which is at least $2,000 a year…. which is $6,000 over three years. A second monitor cost $300-500 depending on which one you get. That means you’re getting 10-20x return on your investment… and you’ve got a happy team member.

OK, basically the problem here is – not everybody needs this, but once some people start getting them it’s a status issue. IT departments enable this kind of squabbling all the time, mainly by buying themselves all second monitors. Your graphic designers and HTML developers need it and it will help them. Honestly, its really about individual usage patterns for everybody else. System programmers – I’ll bet you a twenty that Richard Stallman doesn’t use a second monitor. Salesmen, well, do they have laptops? In my opinion second monitor added to laptop is not really the same experience – plus its hard to fit in your bag. HA HA. You know who needs the second monitor? People who have to prepare documents for a living. You know who doesn’t? Daytrading bosses.

In any event, its a thought-provoking blog post. You may have the experience that i have had, coming up inside traditional organizations where so many things were done because of organizational inertia – “that’s the way we’ve always done it” and then getting out doing it your own way and realizing that it’s just as effective to do it differently, if the difference saves money or saves time.