Why cattle?
Ask three people where the name came from and you’ll get three answers. All of them are true. (There are actually five.)
The herdsmen of the hills
When Spartacus broke out of the gladiator school at Capua, the first to join him weren’t soldiers. According to Plutarch, they were herdsmen and shepherds from the hills: tough, practical people who each knew one thing cold. Spartacus didn’t win with an army of generalists. He won with specialists.
Cattle country
The company was incorporated in Sheridan, Wyoming, which is cattle country. On a ranch the herd does the work and the rancher sets the direction. That’s the whole model: the herd works, the Commander drives, and you own the ranch.
The engineers’ secret
Engineers have an old saying: treat your servers like cattle, not pets. Pets get names and special care; cattle are interchangeable. We took the idea and went the other way. We bred champions: every specialist in the herd has a name, a job and a pedigree.
The Purple Cow
In 1895, Gelett Burgess wrote four lines that made him famous:
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one.
A century later, Seth Godin built a marketing classic around the same idea: in a field of brown cows, nobody notices any of them. A purple cow stops traffic. A plain old cattle company would blend right in. A robotic one is the purple cow.
Burgess, by the way, came to hate that poem. He got so tired of hearing it that he wrote a sequel:
I’m sorry, now, I wrote it;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’ll kill you if you quote it!
Good news: it’s public domain.
The truth (for those who’ve read this far)
All right. Here’s what really happened.
We were watching the Season 2 finale of Landman. Tommy Norris, freshly fired by the big oil company, starts his own outfit: CTT Oil Exploration. Then he has “& Cattle” tacked onto the end of the name. For legal reasons. Which legal reasons? Nobody ever says.
We thought that was the best business advice on television, so we stole it. Then we added “Robotics,” which ruined any hope of blending in. Now everybody looks twice.
Spartacus Robotics & Cattle. It gets a question in every meeting, and we’ve never once had to remind anyone who we are.
And if you’re still wondering why the cattle? Legal reasons.
Bonus: Landman comes from Taylor Sheridan. The company was born in Sheridan, Wyoming. Nobody could have planned that.