We strongly believe that all great businesses are built by a real skunkworks, scrappy, small team. 

The story of how Steve Jobs and his team of Macintosh engineers became known as the Pirates of Silicon Valley is legendary. At an offsite meeting with the original Macintosh team, Jobs set up his pad, laying out three maxims for the team to live by:

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Real artists ship.

Better to be a pirate than join the Navy.

Mac in a book by 1986

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The "Pirates" comment caught on immediately. To the assembled engineers and designers, it allowed them to romanticize 80-hour work weeks and frustrating development schedules in the context of being renegades against the establishment.

So a couple of Jobs's renegades created a Pirate flag with the Apple logo as the patch, snuck into Apple's headquarters at midnight and hung it from the Macintosh building to egg on the Lisa team across the street, which, at the time, was designing a next-gen Apple computer that was the very antithesis of the Mac.

We couldn't think of a better metaphor to capture the spirit of what we do.