There's been some interesting debate across a number of blogs today about some tips for startups. Some of them are rubbish - but some are gems.

It started with a post by Tech Entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, which is mostly directed towards web startups, and I don't really agree with a lot of them.

But then Mike Arrington of TechCrunch weighed in, and he had some gems of advice. Here are some great quotes..

You must hire the right people. In particular, the early employees must be perfect. This is more important than anything else, including the product or business idea. Perfect teams can adapt to failing products or market/competitive issues and correct for that.

The most important part of hiring correctly is to not hire the wrong people. The second most important part of hiring correctly is to hire the right people. What that means is that it is better to not hire anyone at all if you can’t find the right person.

So who are the right people and who are the wrong people? It’s not that hard to tell. The right people are the ones that really, really want to work with you. You can tell they’re excited to be a part of the team. They actively look for problems to solve, and then solve them. This is a personality type that is very easy to spot once you know what to look for - they have fire in their eyes.

If you hire badly, it isn’t just that employee who’s not performing. They poison the entire organization. If everyone is pushing hard to get a product out the door, but one sulking individual is passive aggressive about working late, morale drops across the company. It spreads like cancer.

Startups cannot waste money. If they do, they’ll fail. As I said above, they don’t probably fail, or maybe fail. They just plain fail.

All the blogs mentioned are worth reading - because these issues of people and money are the most vital things for startups to keep a focus on.