About Jay Elliot

Pirates,not the Navy.

A flag flew over the building where the Macintosh got built. Jay Elliot was inside it — five to fifteen hours a day, nearly every day, for six years.

Jay Elliot with Steve Jobs at Apple in the early 1980s

Jay Elliot and Steve Jobs · Apple · Early 1980s

Where it started

It was not a typical business retreat.

The oversized windows of the second-floor restaurant at the Carmel Inn gave everyone a perfect view of the swimming pool below. A group of young men and women were happily cavorting in the water. Stark naked. At eight in the morning.

Most of the diners had no idea who they were. Jay did. They were the Macintosh team.

Somewhere in those days Steve started using a line: pirates, not the Navy. Jay never asked him where it came from, and says now he suspects it originally belonged to the late Jay Chiat, co-founder of the ad agency that would do so much extraordinary work for Apple. But Steve took it up, and it stuck, and it became the way an entire team understood itself.

Then somebody sewed a flag, and ran it up over the building.

“Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?”

Steve Jobs

The code

What being a pirate actually meant.

It was not a licence to be difficult. Every crew that ever raised a black flag wrote articles first — the rules everybody agreed to before the ship left harbour. This was the Macintosh version, and Jay spent six years enforcing it.

  1. The product comes first.Not the org chart, not the quarter, not the meeting. If the thing isn't good, nothing downstream of it can be fixed.
  2. Make the thing, then look at it.Everything got decided in demo form. The day they came back from Xerox PARC, Steve sent someone for a roll-on deodorant and a soap dish because he wanted a one-button mouse on a table that afternoon. Not a memo about the mouse. The mouse.
  3. “Impossible” is the beginning of the conversation.Steve would say make it smaller. The engineers would say it can't be done. Jay was the one who sat with them until it could.
  4. Cut until only the essential survives.Ask for the ten things you should do next, then cross out seven. The exercise doesn't kill good ideas. It exposes which ones were never real.
  5. Own every inch the user touches.Including the packaging, the manual, the first thirty seconds, and the parts you assume nobody notices. They notice.
  6. Keep someone aboard who will tell you the truth.Steve deliberately kept people around him whose judgement he trusted to say he'd gone too far. Jay was one of them. Most founders never build that table at all.

The other thing about the flag

You can only fly it if you actually ship.

Piracy without a product is just noise. The Macintosh team could get away with the flag, the skinny-dipping and the rest of it for exactly one reason: at the end of it there was a machine on a table that nobody else could have built.

Jay's job was never to be the pirate. It was to make sure the ship came back loaded.

He'd already done a version of it twice. At IBM he designed the ticket machines for BART, watched a thousand people fail to use them on a single Saturday, and spent nearly a year redesigning around what those people actually did — machines he writes became the prototype for the ATMs now standing in every bank in the country. IBM declined to put their name on them. Then Intel, as director of California operations, reporting to Andy Grove and Gordon Moore.

Then a stranger in a restaurant offered him two jobs at once, and the next six years happened.

If you want in the room

The flag is down. The method isn't.

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