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.
