As pirates, adulterers, and L. Ron Hubbard will tell you, the best place to secure the freedom others would so cruelly deny you is on the high seas. Now a fledgling company called Blueseed wants to help you join them.

Blueseed’s plan is to park a boat full of startups in international waters, 12 nautical miles off of Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. Foreign entrepreneurs who want to come to Silicon Valley would use Blueseed to make an end run around immigration laws. Tenants would pay $1,200 a month to live and work on the vessel, from which they could prowl the Valley (via a 30-minute ferry ride). They’ll need a tourist or business visa but not those hard-to-wangle work papers. Blueseed isn’t flouting the regulations, cofounder Max Marty says. It’s simply “using the existing code in a different way.”

The company has raised a third of the $27 million it says is needed to cast off, and the founders claim to have enough interest from startups to fill the vessel. Marty expects the project to set sail in mid-2014.

Some observers are skeptical, and the legal waters ahead are murky, but cofounder Dan Dascalescu is unfazed. After all, the privateers and seafaring explorers of old had to be prepared to take some licks. “You have to have that grit,” he says. Peg legs and eye patches optional. —Nick Veronin