Every Saturday, local farmers and San Francisco residents flock to the Alemany Farmers Market to experience a tradition steeped in 80 years of California history. But recently, above stalls selling £1 tomatoes and free peach samples, a sign of our spooky moment loomed: a huge ad for Prophecy – not a gift from divine power, but a Palo Alto-based data technology startup.

A ubiquitous part of life in San Francisco, these tech billboards proclaim the names of the area’s emerging and established companies. But so often the company names that dot our landscape seem like a parody — they’re more likely to create uncomfortable confusion among Bay Area residents than to give a startup its next paying customer. After all, the most valuable company of all time is named after Steve Jobs’ favorite fruit, part of a legacy of tech dominance by companies whose names have little to do with their actual function — think Twilio, Spotify, and Uber.

Add in the inherent brain drain of the tech industry, which all but guarantees that only a fraction of the startups formed each year survive, and you have a litany of bizarre company names scattered across San Francisco. Do you need insurance? Try Hippo, Glow or Huckleberry. Businesses looking for city-designed human resource tools can choose to buy from Cocoon, Rippling, Gusto or Hammr. There is a pylon for mortgages as well as a pylon for managing digital calls; There is a thread for fixing code bugs and now there are two different threads apps for messages.

In this age of tech startups that cost just a dime, fast-paced founders struggle with how to name their new ventures. Some outsource the work, or choose (or make up) a random word and hope for the best. But oftentimes, founders market their products to venture capitalists—chasing industry trends and lingo in hopes of snagging high ratings—rather than using a name that will expose their company to a larger audience.

San Francisco-based Stripe, currently the most valuable private startup, reportedly got its name when early collaborator Greg Brockman chose the word “Stripe” from a list of hundreds of “random nouns” he wrote after the availability of ” .com” searched. And now it’s serving as inspiration for newcomers: Kevin Lu, co-founder of new AI startup Sweep, told SFGATE that while the Stripe name “has absolutely nothing to do with what their product is, its simplicity is a helpful guideline goes”.

“Most businesses want a one-word name that can become part of everyday language,” said Ashleigh Hansberger, co-founder of branding agency Motto, which helped name payment platform Hopscotch and podcast collective Soundrise. “‘Let’s grab an Uber,’ ‘Google it,’ ‘Slack me’.”

Tim Qin had Apple’s “very fun, very approachable” naming vibe in mind while working on branding for his travel loan startup, which launched in early 2023. He and his co-founder went through dozens of iterations of a company “name,” he told SFGATE, trying to find something that didn’t sound too serious. After entries like Positano and Toujour — which didn’t quite live up to the Wanderlust brand — they landed on Roame.

But many other startup founders think of investors, not ordinary people. Right now, venture firms are particularly bullish on software-as-a-service companies — think Salesforce or GitLab — that mainly sell to other companies. These companies don’t have to appeal to the average person; They tend to opt for innuendos within the group. After realizing that corporate buyers couldn’t easily pronounce Tractific, Buğra Gündüz simply swapped the name of his data analytics startup to HockeyStack “because it sounds like ‘hockey stick growth,’ which is what we promise our customers.”

An advertisement for Zoho, a software-as-a-service company, at the Van Ness subway station in San Francisco on June 30, 2023.

Stephen Council/SFGATE

According to Denis Pakhaliuk, president of San Francisco-based branding agency Ramotion, venture capitalism is also leading founders to naming conventions with proven fundraising potential.

“It’s really easy to come up with a trending name that’s really easy for the investor to recognize,” Pakhaliuk said in an interview, adding that trends are especially useful when a company is still developing its first products. “You can just call it ‘Whatever Dot AI’.”

Indeed, in the months following OpenAI’s viral success with ChatGPT, there was a torrent of imitators. “AI” ends the name of at least 15 of the 130+ startups announced in the latest class at prominent San Francisco tech incubator Y Combinator. Now the “-AI” trend may have taken its course: Elon Musk’s newly announced artificial intelligence startup with his team of all-star researchers will trade as xAI. Pakhaliuk reckons that the most successful artificial intelligence companies will begin to abandon these identifying letters to escape the saturated naming convention.

There is precedent for Pakhaliuk’s conjecture. A decade ago, the startup name of choice almost always ended in “-ify” and “-ly,” popularized by Spotify, Shopify, and Bit.ly. When Chinese tech giant Bytedance debuted Musical.ly, it was an oddity, a legacy of Vine at best. But when the company merged with TikTok, it decided to keep the unconventional name for its American product. Meanwhile, TikTok is as common a noun as Band-Aid.

Hansberger said that when her firm helps name a new company, she will work out hundreds of options over a six-week process. It begins with a “name letter,” which includes descriptions of how the name is intended to evoke emotion, words to avoid, the names of competitors, and criteria for safeguarding against linguistic or cultural “disasters.”

But in this industry, the quirkiest names have respectable track records, and sometimes linguistic disasters are warranted.

Sure, data security startup Snowflake’s US Highway 101 ad might make motorists think politically thin-skinned, but the company just made nearly $2 billion in 12 months. And “Git” is an iconic Harry Potter roast, but that hasn’t stopped San Francisco-based GitLab and GitHub from becoming — by name alone — two of the most successful startups of the last decade.

Prophecy billboard shows a view of US 101 and the Alemany Farmers Market on the edge of the Bernal Heights neighborhood in San Francisco, July 15, 2023.

Stephen Council/SFGATE

Palo Alto-based data analytics startup Prophecy, whose advertising dominates the German market, isn’t faring too bad either, according to Crunchbase, with over $30 million in venture funding since 2021. The ad, blue and nondescript, is as vague as the name of their manufacturer.

Can you spot a standout tech startup name in the Bay Area? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council at stephen.council@sfgate.com or via Signal at 628-204-5452.

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San Francisco royalty, the Getty family, took over their hometown for a big wedding last weekend – Governor Gavin Newsom reportedly attended during his lengthy public absence – which was very strange.

Reported in detail by Vogue, the luxury affair celebrated the wedding of Ivy Getty, the great-granddaughter of oil magnate J. Paul Getty, and photographer Tobias Alexander Engel.

Here’s a roundup of the strangest things that happened, from IV fluids to famous bridesmaids.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, will meet with reporters at the Capitol in Washington on Tuesday, October 12, 2021. (AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite)J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press

A premier officer

House spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco-born daughter, presided over the wedding. The affair took place in the San Francisco City Hall, which was decorated with pink and blue-green Persian carpets for the occasion. Even the massive rotunda was carpeted.

According to Vogue, attendees were asked to put on their masks before Pelosi’s performance.

Anya Taylor-Joy poses for a portrait in Belfast’s Titanic area in Northern Ireland on Tuesday October 6, 2020. Taylor-Joy has been named one of The Associated Press’ Groundbreaking Entertainers of 2020. (AP Photo / Peter Morrison)Peter Morrison / Associated Press

A famous bridesmaid

Anya Taylor-Joy, who rose to superstar as the leading actress in “Queen’s Gambit”, is said to have served Ivy Getty as the bridesmaid. Apparently she led the bridal shower in a dance through the altar to “Miracles Can Happen” (the song from “Princess Diaries,” also set in San Francisco) sung by Myra.

Governor Gavin Newsom speaks at a news conference in Oakland, California on October 27, 2021.

Jeff Chiu / Associated Press

Well-known politicians present

San Francisco Mayor London Breed and California Governor Gavin Newsom reportedly attended the wedding. You can read more about Newsom’s appearance at the wedding during an extended absence from the public here.

A dog ring bearer

Ivy Getty’s Chihuahua Rescue Blue served as ring bearer. He was apparently lured in by none other than Pelosi.

IV is dripping on the log cabin

After a nightly “Mod-Party” on Friday, via Vogue, the wedding celebration began on Saturday morning with a picnic in the Log Cabin on the Presidio.

“Infusions were available for anyone who needed help recovering from the night before,” reports Vogue.

Ann Getty was sitting in the living room of her home in San Francisco in 1977.

Horst P. Horst / Conde Nast via Getty Images

An unusual subject

The motto of the wedding was Ivy Getty’s grandmother, who died in 2020, philanthropist and interior designer Ann Getty.

“The theme of my entire wedding is the house and my grandmother,” Ivy Getty told Vogue.

Various works of art from Ann Getty’s home were incorporated into the invitations, and Ivy Getty borrowed jewelry from her grandmother’s collection to incorporate into her wedding look. Even Getty’s ring contained diamonds that were given to her by her grandmother when the bride was a teenager.

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A rider cares for his elbow and pride after a fall. Cycling was rough in the beginning – but this gentleman was lucky. He could have been at the Tour de France, where competitors broke their bikes on broken glass thrown by loud fans. Library of Congress hide caption

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A rider cares for his elbow and pride after a fall. Cycling was rough in the beginning – but this gentleman was lucky. He could have been at the Tour de France, where competitors broke their bikes on broken glass thrown by loud fans.

Library of Congress

This week the Tour de France riders spent three strenuous days in the Pyrenees. Once again you have made the curious decision not to just get off your bike and get on the bus like sensible people.

Anyway, the Alps are yet to come, and there is still a lot to pedal before they sprint to Paris on July 26th.

So while fans are waiting for the triumphant return home, there’s no better time to turn to know-it-all journalist AJ Jacobs. He takes NPR’s Scott Simon on his own tour and talks about fun facts with a little bit of cycling knowledge.

Interview highlights

In the scandalous first Tour de France in 1903 and the dangerous second

The 1903 winner was a former chimney sweep named Maurice Garin. And during the race, Garin is said to have crashed a rival’s bike. And then Garin got off his own bike and stomped on the poor guy’s back wheel until it was destroyed. So not quite as subtle as Lance Armstrong. …

The next year was worse. The fans were hooligans, and they threw broken glass and nails on the street to hand out tires they didn’t like. The leader of the race was actually attacked by four masked men. There was riots, broken fingers, gunfire in the air, racing drivers secretly taking trains. …

I’m sure it was very entertaining not to get shot.

With the early bike models that were a little less comfortable

The first bicycles in the 1860s were called boneshakers. So they had an iron frame, iron tires. They weighed over 40 pounds. And you rode her over cobblestones. So it wasn’t for the faint of heart or, as they said at the time, for the faint of heart.

On the role of the bicycle in the women’s movement

Cycling was actually a big part of the women’s movement. And Susan B. Anthony said that cycling has done more to empower women than anything else in the world because it gives them freedom of movement. And it helped them get rid of those huge, flowing dresses.

But there were men who thought it was a serious threat to women’s sexual purity. And so they designed the so-called “hygienic saddle”, an uncomfortable seat that would keep women really chaste. So we can thank these guys for saving western civilization.

About Annie Londonderry, one of the first female cycling superstars

She was a Jewish mother of three from Boston. And in 1894, based on a bet, she decided to ride a bike around the world in 15 months. And she went with a pearl-handled revolver, a change of underwear.

She did it. She was thrown in the Korean prison [but] she did it. There is a wonderful book about it called Around the World on Two Wheels.

She also became a big focal point for women’s rights because she ended up wearing men’s clothes. Apparently a bystander saw her in pants and ran away screaming.

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In May 2021, in a suburb of Barcelona, ​​father and son noticed a strange stench from a massive paper mache sculpture of a stegosaurus. They called the police who, with the help of firefighters, discovered a body in the dinosaur’s leg. Authorities believe the victim dropped his phone into the structure and got stuck trying to fish it out.

The hollow leg of a paper mache stegosaurus may be the strangest place a corpse has ever been found, but it’s not the only bizarre place in the annals of crime and adversity. From Murphy beds to haunted Disneyland rides, here are eight other weird places where people have come across dead bodies.

1. Near the CSI set: New York

In September 2006, a mummified body was found on the fifth floor of a Los Angeles building where CSI: New York was filming a season three episode (although it was filmed on the seventh floor). The plot did not involve a mummified body, but there was one in an earlier episode that has not yet aired. While some people suspected the gruesome discovery was a publicity stunt – nicknamed “Corpsegate” – at least two people who claimed to be building residents told Gawker Media’s Defamer that they believed the story was true, citing pungent smells in the fifth floor. Apparently the man had not paid the rent, and his body was found when an employee of the building opened the investigation.

2. In a Murphy bed

When British six-year-old sisters Mildred Bowman and Alice Wardle did not return from their vacation in Benidorm, Spain in 2005, a friend alerted the authorities. Resort workers discovered that both bodies were trapped between their Murphy bed and its frame, which had detached from the wall and fallen onto the bed, suffocating residents.

3. At the Phantom Manor at Disneyland Paris

Disneyland Paris’ Phantom Manor, filled with fake cobwebs and bellicose ghosts, turned seriously macabre in 2016 when employees discovered the body of their colleague, a 45-year-old technician believed to have been electrocuted while fixing a broken light . It wasn’t the only recent fatality at Disneyland Paris – another employee had died five years earlier after getting stuck under a boat on the It’s a Small World trip. It had suddenly started working while he was tinkering with it.

4. Behind a cooler for grocery stores

When workers removed some cool boxes from the wall of a disused no frills supermarket in Council Bluffs, Iowa in 2019, they found the body of Larry Ely Murillo-Moncada. The 25-year-old, who worked in the supermarket, had been missing almost 10 years earlier. It was believed that he had climbed onto the coolers – a hidden storage room frequented by workers on unauthorized breaks – and fell into the 18-inch space between the coolers and the wall. Murillo-Moncada was not scheduled for a shift at this point, so the other employees may not have known he was even entering the store; and authorities believed that the loud roar of the coolers blocked all calls for help.

5. In a rabbit hole

In January 2015, a person was on a walk at Squirrel Wood Scout Campsite in Doncaster, UK and came across legs and a torso sticking out of a rabbit hole. They belonged to Stephen Whinfrey, 50, a lifelong rabbit hunter who choked to death the day before after getting stuck in the hole. His dog, tied to a tree near the hole, was still alive.

6. In a cryotherapy chamber

It is believed that 24-year-old employee Chelsea Ake-Salvacion chose the cryotherapy chamber after closing the Rejuvenice Spa in Las Vegas in October 2015. When her body was found the next day, it was frozen – but the coroner later ruled that the cause of her death had in fact been “suffocation from an oxygen-deprived environment.” The nitrogen pumped into the cryotherapy chambers to keep them well below freezing also lowers the oxygen levels, which can make you unconscious and ultimately dead. Neither Rejuvenice site had any workers’ compensation records, and the one Ake-Salvacion was working on wasn’t actually licensed to provide cosmetic services, so authorities forced both of them to close.

7. In an aquarium

In the early summer of 2018, Devon Egg called his brother Brian and got his answering machine – the message said Brian was on vacation. Not only did Brian never use his answering machine, Devon believed the voice in the message was someone else’s. Neighbors reported Brian missing in late July, and police visited his San Francisco home three times but left when no one answered their knock. Other people came and went out of the house, and a clean-up truck showed up in mid-August. Neighbors called the police again, who eventually discovered a room with the door hidden behind a picture. In the room was an aquarium where Brian’s body was found, with no head or hands. Although two suspects who were living in the house at the time were arrested, they were later released pending further investigation.

8. In a hospital blanket

In May 2019, Sandile Sibiya went missing when she was held with a fractured thigh at the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Hospital in South Africa. An internal search revealed nothing, so the staff reported his disappearance to the police. But soon “an unbearable stench built up in the hospital,” said a health officer. “Eventually it led into the storage room, where liquid dripping from the ceiling was a telltale sign that something was wrong.” Sibiya’s body was found in the ceiling, but how it got there is still a mystery.

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My first time in San Francisco will never forget looking for a place to live.

My husband and I saw a dizzying number of places that day, unsure of which neighborhood to live in, and mostly dazed with sticker shock at each new place. But the jaw-dropping prices weren’t what stood out the most that day – it was one of the first places we saw in Noe Valley. As an old Victorian apartment, I was immediately delighted with the bay window and high ceilings. Then I opened a hall closet door, which I assumed.

There sat a lonely pink toilet – the only one in a confined space. My confused reaction was evident. The real estate agent who showed us around knew we weren’t from here and immediately said, “It’s a shared bathroom.”

More than five years later, I’ve seen tons of shared bathrooms at friends’ homes, and most are just like the first ones I saw – no sink, with the sink and shower in a separate room next door. The occasional “lucky few” huddled or wall-mounted a small sink in a corner, but that was likely an addition to the tiny space in later years, said Bonnie Spindler, a real estate agent and “Victorian specialist” of San Francisco.

When most houses were built in the Victorian era, there was no toilet in the house at all as most people would still have used an outhouse and / or chamber pots. Indoor plumbing was just becoming the norm, so Bay Area residents may have installed their sinks and tubs years before adding an indoor toilet. Once they were able to add the toilet, it might make more sense to convert a nearby closet into a toilet room than to build it into the existing bathroom.

More likely, however, this is due to the Victorian era’s new obsession with hygiene. “The idea was to separate where you clean yourself and where you have bowel movements,” said Spindler. “You would have thought it would be most unclean to empty yourself in the same room that you take a bath and shave in.”

A shared bathroom in North Beach.

Ben Ramirez

Spindler also said that most toilets at the time did not have something called a “backflow preventer”, which prevents wastewater from flowing back through the toilet and onto the floor. Thus all incidents would have been limited to the small area. She said that the Victorians are also responsible for the proliferation of tile in bathrooms and kitchens as it is an easy-to-clean material.

Rob Thomson, president of the San Francisco Victorian Alliance, said Victorian-era residents were avid adopters of new technology, and there was no bigger story in the home than indoor plumbing in the second half of the 19th century. “This residential trend was compounded by the advent of consistent municipal water and sewer systems – these were the fiber optic data networks of the 1870s,” he said.

Open, multi-purpose floor plans like those common today were unknown. “In the houses, the Victorian and Edwardian San Franciscans were very aware that they should separate the space for different uses and users: double rooms, separate stairs and entrances for servants, and formal dining rooms played one role in both architecture and society special role, “said Thomson.

Shared bathrooms are particularly common in San Francisco, but they can also be found anywhere from Europe to Australia.

The Victorian and Edwardian San Franciscans were very conscious of separating the space for different purposes. The shared bathroom is a good example of this.

Caroline Smith

Modern home design has its own version of the split bathtub in the form of a water closet, although these are usually included in a larger bathroom. Many San Francisco homeowners choose to convert shared bathrooms into one large bathroom during a renovation, Spindler said.

But more than a hundred years later, many homeowners and landlords with these old San Francisco homes have chosen to keep the shared bathroom simply because it is often more convenient for families or roommates.

I did and I loved it. Had 2 roommates so it was almost like having 2 bathrooms – one could use the toilet while another is showering or brushing teeth. I was really a great setup.

– Jeffrey Jones (@ JeffreyJones63) February 8, 2021

Multitasking is great, and I also like it a lot when the toilet and its aerosolizing properties aren’t near the sink and shower, toothbrushes and towels and – you get the picture.

– Eugene Archibald (@Dzhena) February 8, 2021

Loved it. Only 1 bathroom for 3 roommates, but rarely waited for “important business”. Used the sink when someone showered.

– Christine Herron (@christine) February 8, 2021

Loved it, was the perfect setup during the parties, we could keep a keg in the bathtub.

– Sammy the dead rat @ (@gmonie) February 8, 2021

Keeping a barrel in the tub is also a great perk for sharing bathrooms.

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