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- Peter Thiel on why the name of your startup is predictive of success or failure
Peter Thiel on why the name of your startup is predictive of success or failure
“This is a slight aesthetic thing that I believe in very strongly: the names of companies are often very predictive of future failure or success.”
PayPal and Napster are the first example Thiel gives:
“PayPal was a very friendly name — it was the friend that helps you pay. Napster was a bad name — you nap some music, you nap a kid. That sounds like a bad thing to be doing, and it’s no wonder the government then comes in and shuts the company down within a few years.”
“You want to be very careful of how you name companies,” Thiel warns founders. In the context of the sharing economy, he likes Airbnb more than Uber:
“Airbnb sounds very innocent like this virtual bread and breakfast — this very light, non-threatening sort of company. Uber sounds like a bad name from Germany sometime in the 1930s. What are you exactly above? Maybe the law? This is probably something that, again from a regulatory perspective, I think Airbnb is a vastly better name than Uber.”
And on the social networking side, Thiel likes Facebook more than MySpace:
“You can say that all these social networks involve both reading and writing… Over time, reading dominates writing. Facebook was about learning about people around you — about their real identities at Harvard. MySpace started among wannabe actors in Los Angeles, and it was about them coming up with fictional narratives around themselves and a lot of other people in LA who are generally like that. And because reading dominates writing, Facebook would ultimately dominate MySpace. There’s a certain version where the whole arc of the company and the whole product arc was implicit in the names.”