Good Names

This week, two friends told me they were struggling to come up with a name for their new company, so I wanted to share my notes.

I’ve worked in startups my entire career and grew up with a younger brother who had a speech disability, so I’ve always been a little obsessed with how people communicate new companies, products, and even people. My wife and I named our two babies after famous people and places tied to the values we wanted to instill, with matching first letters and 2-1-2 syllables for symmetry. A little obsessed might be an understatement.

Onto the notes...

Good names have the following attributes.

• Easy to say
• Easy to spell
• 1-3 syllables
• Searchable
• Attainable .com
• Map to a symbol

Good names usually fall into three buckets.

• What it is
  • The name is what the company or product does.
  • Examples:
    • Air-BNB
    • You-Tube
    • Coin-base
    • Micro-soft
    • Face-book
    • Vitamin-water
• Feeling
  • The name is a feeling of what the company or product does.
  • Examples:
    • Uber
    • Slack
    • Apple
    • Stripe
    • Nvidia
    • Notion
    • Whatnot
• Famous
  • The company or product is named after a famous person, place, or thing.
  • Examples:
    • Nike
    • Tesla
    • Palantir
    • Amazon
    • Farcaster
    • Robinhood

Additional Advice

• Nicholas Charriere shared advice from Dan Romero that stuck for naming: pick two common nouns that hold meaning together. Farcaster did this brilliantly; Superlogical does as well.
• Good names for agents should signal structure, machine-readability, a canonical source of truth, infrastructure (not brand fluff), and clear semantic meaning — e.g. Model Context Protocol. Agents do not optimize for vibes; they optimize for clarity and authority.