The Markdown Employee Pack — Garry Tan's 5 New Rules, Turned Into Templates You Can Run Tonight
The companion to the video on Garry Tan's a16z podcast interview with Anish Acharya (Aug 12, 2026). The president & CEO of Y Combinator laid out five new rules for running work in the agent era — his business numbers are his claims, and this pack frames them that way on every page; the quotes are his, verified and timestamped to the official upload. INSIDE: (1) THE 5 RULES ONE-PAGER, TIMESTAMPED — stop counting yourself as one person ('you can be a multiple of yourself'); a markdown file is an employee ('an employee that will do the job perfectly every single time, as many times as you want' — anatomy: markdown = job description, code = hands, tests = performance review, cron = shift schedule); give yourself permission to token max via harnesses like OpenClaw or Hermes Agent ($50–100K/yr is HIS number for a CEO's job — the loop itself costs nothing extra); run the company from meetings you're not in (Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi's agent reads transcripts two levels down, with brexhq/CrabTrap as the safety layer); and files rot — hire a janitor. (2) THE SKILL-FILE EMPLOYEE TEMPLATE — a copy-paste SKILL.md skeleton (ROLE, INPUTS, STEPS, OUTPUT FORMAT, TESTS, SCHEDULE, CORRECTIONS LOG) plus the exact hiring prompt that turns any good session into a skill file. (3) THE JANITOR CRON — the weekly sweep prompt: provenance on every fact, newest-dated-fact-wins on conflicts, suspend files whose tests fail, archive after 30 days unused — with the cron line. (4) THE TOKEN-MAX DIAL — the simple decision table for when to pay for max context and when the base plan is enough. (5) THE GITHUB RECEIPTS — gstack, gbrain, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, and CrabTrap star counts pulled via the GitHub API on Aug 16, 2026, all clickable. Independent companion from Hyperautomation Labs — not affiliated with Y Combinator, a16z, or Garry Tan.
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