Denver, Colorado
Black Flag Design
We’re in downtown Denver, and we have a simple approach to software: it should make an ambitious services business better at the thing it’s already good at. So we start with the business rather than the interface. We build digital products and AI systems for companies that know their business and need the software to catch up.
Eli Wood, our team captain, grew up installing water wells in South Texas. Eagle Scout, Texas A&M. He came to software through design, and spent years as a design director at Designit, where he ran strategic design programs for Fortune 500 teams and facilitated design sprints for Adobe, Humana, Fidelity Investments, and the City of Austin.
He still runs our workshops himself, and that’s deliberate. The hard part of this work isn’t building the thing anymore — AI made that cheap. It’s deciding which thing is worth building. That decision gets made in a room with the people who own the outcome, not handed down in a deck.
Keith Pattison, our chief technologist, came up through programming competitions and legacy systems, and now builds AI applications for regulated industries, where a wrong answer has consequences. His family worked with Edison to bring electricity into American homes. A century later we’re doing the same job with AI, and the parallel is hard to ignore. He and Eli met at Texas A&M through a co-ed service organization and ended up roommates, then spent years in services businesses — design consulting on one side, financial services on the other — before there was a Black Flag Design.
Most of what we do is business design before it’s software design. The economics, the operations, the organization: how a thing earns, what it costs to run, where it fits among the offerings you already have, and how a small team stays organized enough to carry all of them at once. A small team doesn’t beat a bigger brand by working harder. It wins by being organized well enough that a handful of people can run a portfolio a larger company would staff a department for. So we settle the viability question before anyone draws a screen.
That work happens in meetings, which is why we invest in them harder than most people expect. We prepare before rather than showing up to think out loud, and we treat the meeting as the place decisions get made instead of a status report about decisions made somewhere else. AI runs underneath all of it, inside the way we already work rather than as a separate tool somebody has to remember to open. What that buys is continuity: decisions and owners don’t evaporate when the call ends, the thinking from one conversation shows up in the next, and everyone stays connected to each other and to the work. Between us we’ve sat in thousands of client meetings. This is the one we’d want to be on the other side of.
Then we run the work as business experiments. Each one starts as a hypothesis about your business rather than a feature request, paired with the evidence that would settle it and the cheapest way to go get that evidence. Some hold. Some don’t — and the ones that don’t are supposed to be cheap, because finding out in two weeks is the entire point. What ships moves a number you already care about. The standard we hold ourselves to is software so good you smile.
Our collaboration cadence hasn’t changed since the beginning. It’s the greatest hits of human-centered design thinking, Agile, and SAFe, assembled over decades of shipping products and kept only where it still earns its place. Our tools change constantly. The rhythm doesn’t.
We prioritize open-source technology, which keeps iteration fast and cost low. Safety isn’t a later phase: our SOC 2 compliance runs through Vanta, and our cloud architects and engineers hold credentials on AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Anthropic, and OpenAI. We keep the environment deliberately flexible so the frontier labs can keep doing their research and we can pass the progress along at the application layer — the part you actually touch.
We’re selective about our partners because we believe in their distribution, their hopes, and their dreams. Our client work mostly stays private, which is deliberate and occasionally inconvenient. What we offer instead is people: we’ll connect you with references who can speak to our character and our work product, and we’d rather arrive by referral. We don’t work with assholes, and we want to build a diverse and sustainable future.
BFD is the name, because we are a BFD — and we believe your company is a BFD also. Black Flag Design was built to be ambitious and a little punk, and to bring AI to businesses everywhere rather than to the handful that can already afford a research team. We like the people we work with. We’re persistent optimists.
Whether you’re working on one small project, starting your first business, or leading an AI transformation across a company, we scale to what you need and we operate in your interest and your customers’.