The year was 1717. The Caribbean was thick with rumor and smoke. Edward Teach, the man history would call Blackbeard, had seized the Queen Anne’s Revenge and was preparing her for a long and dangerous voyage.
Legends make him sound like a demon: a giant of a man with slow-burning fuses braided into his beard so sparks and smoke haloed his face. But the theatrics were only half the story. What made him terrifying wasn’t fire, it was alignment that no Royal Navy could compete with.
Before the anchor came up and the sails caught wind, the crew assembled on deck. Nailed to the mast was a sheet of parchment: the Articles of Agreement. Every man read it, and every man signed.
The Articles were a contract, a financial structure for survival. The captain, took two shares of any prize. The quartermaster, the CFO of the seven seas, claimed one and a half. Skilled men, the gunner, the surgeon, the carpenter, received one and a quarter. The rest of the crew, one share each.
Even injury was accounted for. Lose an arm in the line of duty and you’d be compensated in silver. Lose an eye, and the payout was written into the code. These weren’t promises; they were obligations.
The shares acknowledged a brutal truth: most voyages would fail. The seas were uncertain, the Royal Navy relentless, and every battle could leave men crippled or dead. Pirates knew the risks better than anyone. That’s why no one would sail for wages. Wages demanded cash up front, whether the voyage succeeded or not.
Equity was the only honest currency. If the ship failed, everyone failed together. If it struck gold, the upside was shared by all. It was a bet on survival, and on each other.
This was the pirate cap table: transparent, unforgiving, and designed to make men risk their lives with conviction.
The Problem: Why Wages Would Sink a Ship
For all their bravado, pirates were realists. They knew the math.
A voyage was a gamble against storms, starvation, and the Royal Navy’s guns. Ships were lost as often as they returned. The risk wasn’t abstract. Every man had watched friends vanish beneath the waves or bleed out on a splintered deck.
That’s why wages made no sense. Paying sailors in coin up front would have drained the chest before the ship ever left port. Worse, it created indifference. A crewman already paid had no reason to fight when the cannons opened. Why risk your neck when your money was safe on shore?
No banker would underwrite that model. No investor would front the gold. And no sailor worth his salt would sign on for wages that didn’t match the peril.
Wages demanded certainty. The sea promised none.
The Structure: Discipline Without a Whip
A Royal Navy captain ruled by hierarchy. Orders flowed downward, punishment kept the line straight, and pay was guaranteed no matter the outcome. Sailors followed because they had to.
A pirate ship was different. The Articles turned command into contract. Authority wasn’t absolute; it was earned. The captain could be deposed by vote if the crew lost faith. The quartermaster, part chief operating officer and part internal auditor, kept the books and watched the captain’s hand.
This balance of power mattered because the shares weren’t abstract. They were survival.
When the lookout spotted a fat merchantman heavy in the water, the deck came alive with math. A surgeon might murmur to the gunner, “That’s thirty barrels of sugar, fifty hides, a chest of coin. Call it 10,000 pieces.” A man with a single share would already be calculating his cut. The quartermaster would run his slate, what one and a half for himself meant, what each sailor’s single share would bring.
By the time the order came to run out the cannons, every man on board knew exactly what he stood to gain. No one had to be forced into the fight. They were fighting for their own upside, written in ink weeks earlier.
The structure did more than divide spoils. It shaped culture. With upside tied to outcome, crews fought harder, repaired faster, and sailed further than any paid navy could demand. Discipline came not from the lash, but from alignment.
That was the quiet genius of Blackbeard’s Articles: they turned a band of outlaws into a venture-backed enterprise, bound not by fear but by shared incentives.
The Payoff: Voyages Without a Banker
The Articles didn’t just keep order. They solved the hardest problem in finance: how to launch a high-risk venture with no cash.
Most sailors of the age had two choices. Take service under the Crown for a steady wage, or work a merchant ship for scraps. In both cases, the financiers had already been paid. The sailor bore the risk, but not the reward.
Pirates flipped that. With no lender willing to fund them, they turned the crew itself into the capital stack. Shares were both payroll and investment. A man’s labor was his stake, his risk was his collateral, and the prize was his upside.
That structure was brutally efficient. It allowed a captain with no coin to raise a fighting crew and set sail on nothing but reputation and terms. It scaled belief into balance sheet.
And it worked. In a world where banks would never underwrite a pirate voyage, the Articles created self-funded enterprises that grew large enough to threaten empires. That was the genius of the pirate cap table: it transformed a ship full of mercenaries into co-owners of the same risk.
Equity didn’t just buy loyalty. It was the only way the ship left harbor at all.
The Lesson: Equity is the Currency of Conviction
What made pirate ventures endure wasn’t brute force or cannon smoke. It was structure. Blackbeard understood something that every founder eventually learns: cash buys labor, but equity buys belief.
Wages were dead weight. They drained the chest before the voyage began and created mercenaries who fought only for survival. Equity cost nothing on day one but bound every man to the mast. It turned risk into alignment. A pirate ship was a partnership.
That’s why these Articles matter. They weren’t just rules of conduct. They were the cap table that made the impossible possible: broke men, no banker, no collateral — yet voyages large enough to terrify empires.
Gold feeds hunger. Equity fuels victory.
Blackbeard’s crew knew the difference. And so should you.
The Modern Echo: Bootstrapped Crews
Founders today aren’t so different from Blackbeard. You’ve got a ship to sail and a market to raid, but the chest is light. Banks won’t touch you. Investors shrug. Wages drain what little cash you have before you’ve even left harbor.
So you do what the pirates did: you pay in shares.
The first engineer who builds your product doesn’t get a market salary, they get a stake. The sales lead who skips a bigger paycheck at a safer firm joins because they see upside. Even the friend who bridges your seed capital isn’t lending, they’re buying into the voyage.
That’s the modern Articles of Agreement. It’s how bootstrapped startups scale when cash is scarce: they turn their crew into co-owners.
It’s not charity. It’s alignment. When the prize is uncertain, equity prices the risk more honestly than wages ever could. A startup that burns cash on salaries before proving the market is like a captain trying to pay his crew in coin before sighting land. The voyage ends before it begins.
Blackbeard didn’t build a payroll. He built a cap table. And for bootstrapped founders, that’s still the smarter way to sail.
The Challenge: Who’s Really Sailing With You?
Every founder knows the sea will get rough. Markets turn. Competitors close in. The wind dies when you need it most. In those moments, salaries won’t keep a crew aboard. Cash is a temporary bribe. Alignment is what keeps hands on the ropes when the cannons open.
The hard question isn’t just “Can I pay this person?”
It’s “Will they fight for the prize when the storm hits?”
If your venture is built only on payroll, don’t be surprised when loyalty disappears the moment a safer harbor appears. But if your crew owns a slice of the voyage, they’ll row harder because the outcome is theirs too.
Blackbeard understood this. Bootstrapped founders must as well.
At Saorsa Growth Partners, this is the work we live for: helping founders structure their “Articles of Agreement”, creative financing that turns belief into capital and makes the impossible bankable.
So ask yourself: Who in your world should be on the hook for more than a paycheck? And what will it take to make them co-owners of your journey?
