The Pyrate Haven: Let’s forge a future for ourselves
A different way to organize, for entrepreneurs, rebels and pyrates
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“That’s how the world works.” — Pretty much every boss I ever had
Please note that this article is outdated (and quite long). An updated version is now available! A lot of fun stuff happened with the Pyrate Haven, sending in a slightly different direction than what is described here.
Ever heard that? I’m sure you did. I can even say that you heard it when someone had to justify a situation when one was a clear winner and the other a loser. And I bet you weren’t in the winner position, right?
It’s a great sentence. A powerful sentence. It encompasses the utter futility of going against it. The tide rises inexorably. There’s no use in fighting it. That’s just how the world works. Go back to your hole, get used to it and be patient. Eventually, you’ll die, and it will be all over. Go on now. Move along.
I’m a serial entrepreneur, and I worked for years as an organizational coach. I heard that sentence countless times. Spoken either by those in power as a justification for the bad deals they force onto others, and from beaten people who just gave up.
Our society tends to centralize money and control, creating individuals with far more power than any one person should wield. An imbalance of power is a tricky situation to maintain. Many powerful individuals failed and faced revolts. The trick, you see, is not to forcefully keep people on their knees like a dictator would, but to make them believe that “this is how the world works.”
I heard that sentence in countless workplaces, to keep employees in their place and have them act like the good tools they should be, rather than human beings with expertise and aspirations. Instead, we have legions of zombies who are resigned to thinking the deal they have in life is as good as it gets.
Even those who dare to dream larger and start their own business are not freed from that. The vast majority of new companies fails, and it’s not really surprising. Entrepreneurs are asked to put their companies first and be ready to sacrifice everything: finances, relationship, reputation, health. Investors keep pushing for unsustainable growth on the odd chance that you’ll generate enough ROI for them to compensate for all the others who fail beforehand. Larger companies that feel threatened will lobby for regimentation change you can’t keep up with, undermine your every move, sue for the sake of draining you of means and forcing you to quit. And when you finally admit failure, it won’t be over yet. To be certain that this ambitious spirit of yours stays crushed, you’ll keep hearing another sentence that people have been trained to repeat: “I told you so.”
Well, #%$@ that.
If you feel that the deck is stacked against you, you aren’t wrong. You’re certainly not alone with that feeling. And you are not the first generation to feel that way either.
So, what do we do? What CAN we do?
We already know the answer. We’ve known it since we were kids: if the rules of the game annoy you, change the rules.
And that’s exactly what I propose we do.
The emergence of an irresistible idea
It all started in 2016 when I was working as a business consultant. I had been working with large companies and, while it was lucrative, it wasn’t satisfying.
I have been an entrepreneur most of my life and faced a ridiculous amount of challenges. The more I spoke with other entrepreneurs, the more I kept hearing the same stories, the very same ones I lived through. Most new companies fail, and the reasons why they fail tend always to be the same few ones, and the after effects all too familiars. I wanted to help, to be able to offer a way to live as an entrepreneur without the constant feeling of playing Russian roulette.
I spent most of 2017–2018 working on a solution, an organization named Lorica, with which founders could find help and opportunities for their success, as well as support rather than scorn when things went south. A place where the focus was on them rather than on their businesses.
But we never launched. I wanted to offer an option that was different, not marginally better than what was available elsewhere. Something was missing, and I was stuck. Then came Sam Conniff Allende.
A friend of mine sent me Sam’s talk of “Be More Pirate”, saying that a lot of ideas I worked into Lorica could be found in that video. Since pirates were a strong inspiration for many of the dynamics I designed, I wasn’t expecting to see anything new. In a sense, I was right, as the material was nothing new to me. But I was also dead wrong as Sam’s take on the material opened new, amazing doors for me.
Sam’s talk made the levee break as I realized three important things. The first realization was that the focus shouldn’t be the captain, it should be the crew.
You see, by putting the focus on founders, I still left them isolated even if they were in a community. They still had to bear most of the risks, devote their lives to their businesses and maintain asymmetrical relationships with their employees.
Golden Age pirates were crews; their officers, including the captain, were elected servant-leaders. Not benevolent leaders: they were at the service of, and fully accountable to the crew. Wow. Now THAT is different.
The implications changed everything. There was no isolation anymore, as crews go in business together, not as individuals. Risks and rewards are fully shared. Everyone has skin in the game. Everyone operates within a group that fully understands the difficulties at hand and can support each other. Working as a group significantly reduces the risk of tunnel vision that plagues most entrepreneurs. Working as a group allows for a variety of diverse concurrent strategies that can compensate for challenges, slow periods or bursts of workload. The idea of crews unlocked the real power of community-based entrepreneurship, and linking crews together within a networked community opened up new opportunities.
The idea of business itself changed. We often see companies put in competition one against another. While competition is good for innovation and offers choices to people, for bootstrapped startups, it raises the stakes while offering little benefits in return. What if we could tap in the innovation and options made available by competition without suffering from the added challenges?
Enter the second realization I got from Sam’s talk. He recounted how Henry Morgan launched a piratical attack on Panama City in 1671. How he sent a rallying call to pirates in the area to join him and raised a 2000-strong army of pirates, sacked the city, then disbanded his forces. From a single ship of about 100 men, he scaled up his operation by 2000% and then scaled back down by the same amount. WITHIN TWO MONTHS. That’s a feat almost impossible for businesses today. And all he needed in order to convince and manage all these disparate crews, each with their own goals and visions, was a simple agreement of maybe a dozen clauses, simple enough for anyone to be able to learn it by heart.
This meant two things for me. First, grand ideas require resources that few visionaries can easily muster by themselves; but by selling the vision and being ready to share risks and rewards, you can always find some who will want to join the adventure. Second, when you have a strong goal alignment, process can be and will be better kept simple.
With those realizations, Lorica was no more. We needed a structure to capitalize on those amazing pirate dynamics. We needed to look for more than hopeful entrepreneurs, but for pirates ready to change how the game was played, to change how the world works. We needed a Pyrate Haven!
A network of Pyrates
The Pyrate Haven is where all those ideas and ideals come together. It is a communication, collaboration and resource hub for an entrepreneurial community that’s designed as a distributed network.
Now, what does that mean?
Most organizations are centralized, meaning that they have a strong leadership that controls the decisional power. This is the system that creates the individuals with too much power I spoke of earlier. A large centralized organization has enough clout to impose its will over pretty much everyone. A smaller centralized organization, like most start-ups, doesn’t have that much influence and instead simply offers a convenient bullseye centered on its leaders. That’s why new entrepreneurs have it so rough: they are smack in the middle of the storm, with little to protect themselves.
What we propose is to build a distributed organization, meaning that we have no leader and no seat of power. We work together because we want to, not because we have to. Of course such model cannot muster as much clout as a large centralized organization, but we don’t need to. Why? Because a fully distributed organization is almost impossible to squash.
As I described in my blog post A primer on Hivernité’s Social Decentralization scale, distributed organizations are faster to evolve when faced with general situational changes and can easily adapt to local realities.
Such a distributed organization also offers plenty of opportunities for everyone, even for people who would have otherwise no resources to put their ideas together.
As an example, let’s say that you are a Crew that starts a business somewhere. Maybe your resources are too limited to make it to profitability, or maybe local regulation makes it very difficult for you. Maybe even are you attracting the attention of a much larger competitor. Through the Pyrate Haven, you can find solutions to all of these problems through cooperation, if your idea had enough merit to get the attention of other Crews .
If you lack resources, then you can partner up with other Crews who will provide the required expertise. If local regulations are the issue, then maybe joining forces with other Crews around the world will allow you to create multiple instances of your project in more welcoming areas. If the problem is a hungry competitor who aims to cast you aside, absorb or discredit you, then it is possible to create multiple instances of the same project with a few variations with the help of new partner Crews, making it very difficult to squash it entirely.
In all of those situations, a Crew that would be doomed for failure can be turned into success, creating not only prosperity for you but for several other Crews as well.
That’s the power of a networked community. That’s what the Pyrate Haven is about.
Why are we spelling Pyrate with a y? We wanted to distinguish our movement from modern pirates, be they the nautical or computer versions. We take inspiration from a specific period of piracy, so why not borrow the spelling used for the pirates of the era, in one of the primary sources we get, the book A General History of the Pyrates?
The Pyrate Way
At the core of the Pyrate Haven, we can find a clear but high-level and very flexible way to organize. We call it the Pyrate Way.
This set of practices was strongly inspired by those the Golden Age pirates put in place; we simply modernized them. We consciously plundered their models and their terminology because they are simple to understand, flexible, plus… well… pirates.
Crews
The first type of structure is the Crew. A Crew is a small group of people who want to work together as a group, following a comradeship model quite similar to what the pirates used 300 years ago. In a Crew, everyone is a partner with skin in the game, with an equal voice in the decision, a share of work and a share of rewards. A Crew is a business in itself, just… different.
If you want to form a Crew, first find a few good friends. We suggest a team of 5–7 people, as less than that will limit your strategies and leaves you wanting for people to share the workload with (the Crew I’m part of is currently of 3 people, and we really feel the pain), and more than that will make it increasingly difficult to reach an agreement on most things.
When you have your initial Crew, just sign up on the Pyrate Haven website. In exchange for a modest membership fee, you will be supplied with tools and services and a community to help you prosper and reduce your risks.
To define how they will work as a team, all members of the Crew participate in defining their Articles of Agreement of the Crew (Articles of the Crew for short). Part contract, part employee handbook, part pledge of comradeship, the Articles are a simple document that set the boundaries of the group’s relationship. It is kept simple, around 10–12 Articles only as, like the pirates of old, each crewmember must know those articles by heart. Traditional employee’s handbooks are a tool to help protect the company rather than the employees. Articles of the Crew are meant to help the crewmembers define the boundaries they want to set for themselves. When they agree on them, they all sign the agreement and live by it.
One thing required of all Crew to include in their Articles across the Pyrate Haven is the mention that every crewmember has the right to cast one vote in any decision of the Crew, and a right to receive one share-of-profit per share-of-work they produce, regardless of who they are. Now, it doesn’t mean that profits will be shared equally between people as some might take on more work than others. Shares-of-work aren’t determined by the number of hours put in, but by the relative effort needed to deliver a specific value to the Crew. It sounds more complicated than it is, really.
Since the crewmembers are the owner of the Crew, they don’t have bosses or even a hierarchy to speak of. They do have officers to take on specific duties, however. But those officers are voted in and accountable to the Crew at all times. Not the right person to hold the position? A simple vote will replace them with a more appropriate one.
There are three types of officers that are required by the Pyrate Way, albeit some Crews can add others:
- The Captain acts as a figurehead for the Crew. His primary duties are to act as an ambassador as well as to ferret out new opportunities for the Crew and lead them to prosperity.
- The Quartermaster is the caretaker, taskmaster, and referee of the Crew, all rolled into one. It’s a complex role requiring empathy, diligence, mediation and facilitation skills.
- The Treasurer is a cross between an accountant and an archivist. His duties are to maintain the Crew’s information, be it decisional, financial or historical.
As I mentioned before, the Pyrate Haven supports the Crews by granting them access to a variety of tools and services.
To help manage your Crew, we will offer chat software, accounting software and document repositories. To help benefit from the community, we will have The Tavern, a community discussion board with a dedicated section to post opportunities for work or partnership, engage other Crews or recruit new members. We will also maintain an index of all the Crews, a kind of a group resumé that will include many details about each Crew, including composition, Articles, accomplishments, and endorsements from other Crews.
Over time, we plan to integrate all these tools into a suite specially adapted to our particular needs. This kind of software development requires funding, however, so we will start with disparate open-source options that we will host as part of your membership.
We will also provide some coaching, access to instructional videos and discounts for services offered by other Crews.
Ventures
The second type of structure is Ventures. Every time two or more Crews come together to organize something, that’s a Venture. We expect most of them to be businesses, but we also allow provisions for non-profits, social groups, charity projects, and the like.
The trick with Ventures was to give them a basic structure to allow the Crews to organize, communicate, decide stuff and, when/if needed, determine equity and share profits. That structure had to be maintained from one Venture to the next to ease organization while allowing for Ventures that are tremendously varied in nature, scope, size, and purpose. A tall order but, again, the pirates were a great source of inspiration.
When a Crew has an idea for a new Venture, its crewmembers determine the goal of the Venture and the different expertise they need. They then can do like Henry Morgan and launch a general call for help in a dedicated Pyrate Haven forum. Interested Crews can apply, and the Venture’s Board (see below) can extend an Offer to Join to the selected Crews. Maintaining a high Crew Rating will ease being selected. That Offer to Join will specify some variables, such as the scope of involvement and compensation. Everything from exchanging a specific one-time service for money to becoming full-fledged partners is possible.
Once the core group of Crews is onboard, the Board of Captains will be formed with the Captains of all participating Crews, to help guide the Venture. The Articles of Agreement for the Venture (Articles of the Venture for short) will be decided amongst them and signed (along with contracts if needed) by all participants. A Commodore, to act as Captain for the Venture, will be voted, along with the Venture’s Quartermaster and Treasurer. Theses roles follow the same rules as their Crew counterparts.
The Pyrate Haven is itself a Venture, and so it has its own set of Articles of the Venture and its own officers.
New Ventures need to register with the Pyrate Haven for membership, at a fee similar to a Crew’s. In exchange, they will gain access to a similar series of tools than what we offer to Crews, in addition to ones specific for decision-making, minutes-taking, as well as to specific services such as coaching and arbitration.
Ownership and profit sharing is done through dynamic equity split, championed in the broader world by Mike Moyer. In what is possibly the fairest way to set up a partnership, ownership is built through risk investment, including unpaid or partially paid work, rather than split at the beginning. Small variants to Mr. Moyer’s preferred approach were necessary to the particularities of the Pyrate Way. These include an allowance for more limited participation, link ownership to Crews rather than individuals and calculate work investment based on agreed upon value rather than time.
This means that through Ventures, Crews can spread their risks and their chances of success by investing efforts in several different endeavors, from revenue-making businesses, high-risk/high-rewards innovative startups, volunteer community development projects and anything else they care to try. They can build an income for themselves not just in exchange for their immediate work, but through their effort-based investments across several projects that will continue to pay over time.
Decision-making through Pyrate Voting
Working in communities involves making collective decisions. This is rarely a walk in the park.
Have you ever heard the argument that some people shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they don’t have the critical thinking skills or background information necessary to make such important decisions? While I agree that large swaths of people lack the mindset and knowledge to appropriately vote on many issues, I fundamentally believe that the answer isn’t to prevent them from voting on things that will affect their lives but to turn them into enlightened and invested voters.
I studied several voting systems to find an appropriate one. I didn’t. I wanted a system that:
- follows a direct democracy model, like the pirates used to have,
- would include a built-in way to improve the critical mindset of voters over time, without being instructional,
- would let us select a rallying solution, not just a weak compromise,
- couldn’t be easily manipulated by a group of jerks,
- would allow for a large number of options, without diluting voting power,
- would allow for experimentation to get better data, with provision to change our mind as more information becomes available,
- would not prevent us from moving forward swiftly, a problem with many consensus-based organizations.
Needless to say, that thing was a hellish nightmare to design. The end result is the Pyrate voting system, one that ticks every single of these boxes and still has us feeling like pirates.
On one hand, I believe that I hit on something powerful with this Pyrate voting. On the other hand, I don’t expect any organization to use it except us because it has two distinctive characteristics: It’s a system that makes it increasingly hard to fool people with cheap rhetorics, and it’s a system that’s comfortable with a good measure of uncertainty. Neither are popular trends.
Of everything that I include in the Pyrate Haven, this Pyrate voting system is the closest to an unfinished experiment we have. I really look forward to seeing how it is used at scale, and to evolve it with everyone’s feedback as we use it again and again.
This post isn’t the best place to fully describe the system, but it will be presented in another one soon.
Managing work
Both Crews and Ventures are organizations that aim to deliver value, such as products or services, regardless if the end goal is to make a profit or not.
I have been an organizational coach for years now, and I have observed that most organization don’t actually manage work: they just manage people. This results in poor performance, a general lack of information and a lot of wasted efforts. When you manage work instead of people, it’s much easier to extract the value you hope to gain.
Over the years I developed a standard package of techniques that works well in most situations. Simple to learn and use, highly adaptable to different contexts, this package has proven its value time and again. Additionally, like Pyrate voting, it is designed to teach people through action, move them away from simple execution and change them into experts who know how to ask the right questions to deliver the maximum value with the least amount of wasted effort.
Please note that I haven’t created any of those techniques, and you might be already familiar with some of them.
Canvassing is the art of the 1-page plan, whose variants can be used for figuring out a business model, a new product or a simple project. It allows a whole team to get alignment from the get-go and to figure out some important (yet often neglected) questions such as: What do we hope to accomplish? Who is the intended market? What distinguishes our solution from the competition? What are our biggest risks? How are we going to fund this thing?
Story Mapping is a novel approach to communal, visual, dynamic planning. During a single session, we can visually discuss, define, prioritize and organize work. This creates a plan that we can all understand and agree to. It is a tremendous help for having clear communication, for reducing our risks and for getting usable results quickly. The plan is dynamic, meaning that you can change it over time as your needs evolve and you figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Kanban comes from the Lean family of management techniques. It allows to visualize workflow to both easily communicate progress and figure out where we can improve the process. The idea behind Kanban is that of continuous improvement, meaning that you continuously learn and improve your system.
There’s more to it, but these three techniques form the heart of our ways of working. Video training will be made available for everyone in the Pyrate Haven so you can set yourselves up and start working quickly. If need be, some Crews will be offering paid coaching services to helps you get better faster.
Learning the Pyrate Way
We touched all the main subjects of the Pyrate Way, but the devil is in the details.
Basic training through e-learning will be available through the Pyrate Haven as part of the membership. This will include videos, blog posts, and dedicated segments on our podcast. Don’t hesitate to send us your questions.
We are also creating a 2-day workshop that will go through the whole process of forming a Crew and learning the Pyrate Way. Sign up to our mailing list if you want to be kept informed.
The Pyrate Way book
As much as I love the idea of the Pyrate Haven, I understand one thing very well: centralizing control in one place is a terrible idea, as it creates a new oligarchy. I certainly do not want that. Distribution of authority and power is essential to avoid tyranny.
I opted to separate the Pyrate Haven, which my crew is actively putting together and will lead to a Venture, and the actual Pyrate Way model we use. That system should be widely available for all, and should be usable independently, tweaked, evolved or put in action outside anyone’s control, including mine.
I am currently writing the entire system into a book, simply called The Pyrate Way. Everything will be in there, including the historical elements I took for inspiration, and the discussion of several experiments my partners and I ran over the last few years that influenced how the Pyrate Way turned out. Everything to set up your own Crews and Ventures will be there.
Of course, a book isn’t a replacement for a community or for the tools and services we’ll have available through the Pyrate Haven.
While I do think that the Pyrate Haven will offer enough incentives to be the home of pyrates everywhere, it doesn’t have to be. Every Crew must be free and have the option to do its own thing. Collaboration can only truly work when it is 100% voluntary. We should never have to work captive of an organization or a situation.
In the end, I believe that this move will make the pyrate ideals survive and thrive no matter the situation. The Pyrate Way book is a manual for a constructive revolution or multiple such revolutions. New instances of pyrates should be allowed to pop up across the world, across time, whenever they are needed.
For this reason, at some point in the future, the text of the Pyrate Way book will be made available under a creative commons license. The details are still being discussed as we currently need the sales to finance what we are building in the Pyrate Haven, but it will be determined before the book is completed and clearly presented within its pages.
If you want to help turn that book into reality more quickly and participate in the creative common license discussion, I encourage you to visit our pre-order page for it. It is a good way to help us now, while keeping in touch and making sure you receive one of the very first copies.
Rebellions and revolutions
In the 18th century, a few Golden Age pirates under the name of The Flying Gang established the first prototype of what we are doing here: the famous Republic of Pirates.
Based in the Bahamas, the Republic of Pirates was a service and information hub for the pirates who preyed on the Spanish Main (the corridor used by the Spanish treasure galleons to bring back home whatever they looted from the American continent). It allowed the emergence of many famous pirates, such as Blackbeard, Charles Vane, Calico Jack Rackham, Black Bart, Black Sam Bellamy, Edward England, and many others, to such extent that they became household names in both the colonies and the European mainland.
Ultimately they became victims of their own success. Their Republic was invaded and scattered, they were hunted down one by one. But we can learn from their story.
Like them, those who join the Pyrate Haven are fed up of playing a game where they cannot win, and where their efforts will always benefit others. Like them, we are rebelling against “how the world works.”
Unlike them, however, we don’t need to rely on crime to succeed. Markets are easier to get into these days, and the way we organize ourselves, we can create plenty of opportunity for ourselves.
They were few in numbers, mostly operating in a specific area (the surviving pirates went back to smuggling goods between East Asia and the American colonies, many of them escaping capture). We can be numerous and spread all around the world, with eyes on local opportunities anywhere.
We have access to instant communication between multiple Crews, allowing us to operate in a coordinated fashion across the world.
Unlike them, our base of operation is virtual and can’t be invaded by a competitor. If hacked or destroyed, it can be put back up quickly, from anywhere.
What we have is a real opportunity to create a future for ourselves independently from any plutocrat. We have the potential for a revolution, and a positive, constructive one. We can help create options for ourselves and for people who have few. We can help create prosperity for many people, across the world. We can give people a choice, a voice and a share of the loot.
To be clear, I’m not advocating confrontation. Violence rarely solves anything, and bloody revolutions only makes room for a new oligarchy. It doesn’t fix the problem.
But we don’t need to beat the plutocrats. What we need is to wean ourselves from them and the systems they built. We can do much worse than hurt them: we can make them irrelevant.
Let’s opt to turn pyrates.
I can’t promise you fortune and constant success. But what I can promise you is that together we can form a community of people who face the same challenges and instead of just offering each other moral support, we will use our system to create new opportunities for ourselves and others. We will use tools of our own device to make noise, to show people that there are other options and that, should they choose to explore them, they won’t have to do it alone.
We pyrates are a community who want change. We don’t believe in simply asking for change and then wait for it to happen, no, we want to forge that change ourselves.
There is no freebie for anyone, and no one can save us. If we want a better life and a better world, then it’s up to us to make it. It’s up to us to show to others how we can make an impact. It’s up to us to create new opportunities and new prosperity for as many people as possible because together we can go much, much farther than alone.
Together, let’s raise some hell.
I am an organizational designer, social futurist, and pyrate. I spend my time finding new ways to prepare us for the changes brought by Society 5.0, as well as making rebellious pyrates out of people. I’m the editor for the blog The Pyrate Futurist.
