Jason,

You sure don’t know me. I’m one of your anonymous 7,000 Twitter followers (my feed here), your whatever number of blog readers, and I’ve watched a serious number of podcasts featuring you. I think you do a fantastic job at sharing your passion for entrepreneurial adventures & your obvious will to change the world. I think Mahalo is a brilliant Wikipedia-style idea, and I have a lot of respect for your public speech & communication skills.

Same with your recent post on startup cost-killing rather modestly entitled 17 Really Good Tips to Save Money. Most of it was compelling, and I had all the office read it – I’m an entrepreneur too, I should’ve added before. We’ve decided on applying a number of them, starting with #3 ‘use lunchtime for meetings’, #2 on second monitors (especially to software developers), & most of the rest was already implemented but #4 & #12 which I fiercly disagree with.

• Your tip #4 says that startups should spend about 600$ on chairs & 100$ on desks. To me, this looks extravagant. Take a look at the picture right here. The leather-style chair costs 59 USD, and the table in front of it another 59USD. That is about 120 USD per work station at my company Emerald Vision (don’t worry, we’re no competition: we do exciting enterprise software. And sorry, website still in French & workin’ on an English version) vs. 700USD at Mahalo. Are you guys extravagant on the West Coast or what? I should add that my chair is by far the most comfortable chair I’ve ever bought. FYI, & I’m not getting any rebate or commission, it’s all from Ikea.

•  Second and last (because, as I said, I loved your post – but a couple little things), tip #12 says startups should buy a 3K-5K USD coffee machine. Come on Jason, no one is making 5K / month in my company as a stipend, and you want me to spend 3 – 5K in a coffee machine? Makes no sense. Here’s our ‘Help Yourself’ space at Emerald Vision. We purchased a 25 bucks American-style coffee machine that’s up and running day & night; a 20USD kettle to drink tea or instant coffee; Xuoan (photo blog here), a web graphic designer & SEO specialist who rents office space from us (see, we had already applied tip #6), brought his good old 130$ espresso-machine that does pretty good coffee, thanks. That’s less than 200 USD overall, & less than 500 USD if you add the fridge & the microwave. 500 USD for a fully equipped ‘Help Yourself’ corner at Emerald Vision vs. 5000 USD for a coffee machine at Mahalo. I think you investors would love working with us.

Before I finish this post, I just wanted to state clearly that there’s nothing either sarcastic or personal in these remarks. These are just 2 plain, sincere feedbacks on your tips (15 of them were just great). For 600$ a chair & 5000$ a coffee machine, I would’ve either tried to quit the digital & Clean Tech business to enter the furniture market in Silicon Valley, or at least tried to buy second-hand Philip Stark design chairs & coffee machine on eBay or so, or most probably provision it for when times get worse on the Web to show how we value cash, or give it out to top performers in the team as a way to show how we care about people working on building the next big thing with us.

I still and more than ever enjoy looking at what you do on an hourly basis on Twitter, reading great startup fish on your blog (like larger monitor = better productivity; or these very interesting thoughts on work-life balance in startups - I needed it bad). I hope you don’t take this post personally, & that we’ll have the chance to meet you some day here or there. Maybe you’re okay for the two of us to sit at a table, discuss treasury management & compare burn rates – all things being equal (we’re a very early startup compared to you). At Le Web 3 (or 4?) in Paris next winter? You may even come to our office at the very center of Paris & try on our wonderful chairs. Keep me posted.

Cheers,

Jeremy Fain

PS1: On #17, come on, do you really need a PR firm? A 15K USD / months one? or even 3 times 15K USD / year one? You, Jason Calacanis? You do more PR than all European startups together (I’m based in Paris, France). Save on this too, or be tough-as-nails bargaining every 6 months or so (tip #15) because they’re definitely not using so much bandwidth with you.

PS2: another French blogger, Hervé Kabla, wrote pretty interesting complementary remarks on his blog here - however it’s in French only, sorry about that.