Make the product so good the marketing gets easy.

The code

What being a pirate actually means.

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.