Pirates

Build a small band of renegades and your startup will move faster...

The balance of air superiority during World War II was at risk. Germany was close to launching the world's first jet fighter, the Messerschmitt Me 262, a plane faster and more heavily armored than anything in the Allied fleet. In response, the US military gave Lockheed Martin an almost inconceivable challenge: produce a jet fighter prototype in just 150 days.

Lockheed assigned 33-year-old chief engineer Kelly Johnson to the task. Rather than assembling a massive team with layers of management, Johnson took a different approach. He set up shop with just 30 engineers and 30 mechanics in a bomber production area in Burbank, California.

To maintain secrecy, they worked under a circus tent. The location had one major downside; it was next to a noxious plastics factory. The stench constantly wafted into their space. When project engineer Irv Culver answered a phone call one day with "Skunk Works," the name stuck.

Despite the conditions, this small team accomplished the impossible. The XP-80 was completed seven days ahead of schedule in January 1944. This team, officially known as Lockheed Martin's Advanced Development Program, went on to build many other innovative aircraft including the U-2 spy plane and the SR-71 Blackbird.

What made Skunk Works so successful wasn't just technical brilliance. The team was composed of talented but quirky engineers that didn't fit the ideal of model employees in the 1940’s. The team included pioneers like Mary Golda Ross, first female Native American flight engineer.

Kelly Johnson's genius was understanding how to mold a team of misfits into a high-functioning unit. He recognized that breakthrough innovation required individuals who thought differently, questioned assumptions, and weren't afraid to propose unconventional solutions.

Forty years later, Steve Jobs followed Johnson's playbook when creating the original Macintosh team. He took twenty hand-picked people out of Apple's main campus and sequestered them away from corporate bureaucracy. Like Johnson, Jobs actively recruited rebels. During a team offsite in 1983, he famously declared: "It's better to be a pirate than join the navy."

When building your startup team, traditional hiring practices fall short. You need to identify your own pirates and cannot rely on standard job descriptions that focus on static skills. Instead, hire for these five characteristics that identify high-performing team members:

1. Breadth of experience – Cross-disciplinary perspectives fuel innovation. Instead of seeing people with "non-traditional" backgrounds as misfits like candidates that hopped a few jobs or changed industries, recognize the fresh perspectives they bring.
2. Lateral thinking – Groundbreaking innovations emerge when concepts from one domain are applied to problems in another. Borrowing ideas from different fields often unlocks solutions to seemingly impossible business and engineering challenges.
3. History of creation – People who have built something from scratch demonstrate the focus and problem-solving abilities needed in startups. They have grit and perseverance, traits that define true builders who derive a deep sense of purpose in building things.
4. Comfort with uncertainty – Innovation thrives in uncertainty where success isn't binary. Startups operate with limited resources and impossible deadlines yet thrive in those conditions. Look for people who aren't paralyzed by ambiguity but energized by it.
5. Ability to learn – Learning agility is a critical. It's less important that team members check every box on a list of skills and more important that they've shown initiative to tackle new challenges and quickly acquire knowledge.

Once you start building the team, it is important to keep it small for as long as possible. When startup founders talk about the early days of launching, they often mention the simplicity of communication. You could swivel in your chair to ask a question or take a walk for a quick chat. The team worked in perfect flow state, shipping features rapidly without barriers.

The physics of team size explains why small teams work so effectively. Communication pathways multiply exponentially as teams grow. A four-person team has just six unique communication paths. Double that to eight people, and you're dealing with 28 pathways. With ten people, it jumps to 45 pathways. This communication overhead creates friction that slows everything.

Early-stage startups lean on this advantage. Despite limited resources, they accomplish a lot because communication is direct, the vision is clear, and everyone understands exactly how their work contributes to the whole. This allows for lightning fast decision-making because fewer people need to be informed and included in the decision process.

The optimal size for the initial startup team is what I call the "one-pizza team”, or small enough to be fed with a single pizza (typically 3-5 people). This size eliminates communication overhead and reduces the tendency toward consensus thinking that leads to analysis paralysis. This is why teams that begin with more than 2 or 3 founders are not ideal as it increases decision friction.

Contrast this with the “two-pizza team” (a team of 4-8 people) format popularized by Amazon. The natural inclination is to reduce friction and conflict, even with just a few more people. I saw this firsthand while at AWS; the bigger the team got, the slower we became. The team dynamic would shift toward more consensus-based decisions, reducing risk tolerance and stifling the willingness to pursue bold and radically different ideas.

Startups have a natural advantage in this regard. Unlike established companies with hierarchies and processes, startups can build their teams and culture from scratch, optimizing for speed and innovation. They can deliberately keep teams small, communication direct, and decision-making streamlined.

As Kelly Johnson proved with Skunk Works and as countless successful startups continue to demonstrate today, small teams of exceptional people can achieve amazing results. When given clear objectives and the freedom to execute, they can run circles around larger organizations with far more resources. The XP-80 jet fighter, the Macintosh computer, and the leading-edge products from today's most disruptive startups all share the same origin story. They were built by small teams of passionate geeks who refused to believe something couldn't be done.

When I think about building my own tribe of geeks for my startup, I remember this quote from one of my favorite authors, Jack Kerouac. He wrote this in On the Road:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

When building your startup, think about the circus tent in Burbank and the band of engineers who changed the course of aviation history. Remember Apple’s team of renegade pirates revolutionizing computing. The talent you bring to the team and the discipline in keeping that team as small for as long as possible will actually be one of your greatest strengths.

What are the traits you find most important when hiring talent for your startup? How do you ensure that they are able to move fast and work in their flow state?

Mark Birch

As I have been working out of Taipei, I have been looking into various options for low-cost workspaces. One recent find is Cozy Cowork Café (link to map), a coffee shop and coworking space with a collaborative atmosphere and lots of seating options. They have fast Wi-Fi, plugs at every seat, phone booths, laptop stands, and external screens. The café hosts regular networking & learning events for their community. ?They also serve really good coffee & tea, breakfast, lunch, and pastries. All you are required to do is spend NT$200 ($6.10 USD) per visit.

I will have more to share in the next post on places to work. Suffice it to say though, Taiwan has tons of places to get work done as a founder or digital nomad!