How to name your startup: David Placek - named Vercel, Azure & Blackberry
David Placek's firm, Lexicon, has named Vercel, Microsoft Azure, and BlackBerry. He explains why a name that describes your product is the safe, forgettable choice — and what he tells founders to whiteboard before they name anything at all.
Have you ever deployed an app to Vercel? Sprayed your house with Febreze? Carried a BlackBerry? If any of those ring a bell, you've used a product named by this episode's guest, David Placek, founder of Lexicon Branding.
Lexicon has been naming companies for over four decades and has invested more than $7 million researching how sound, linguistics, and cognitive science shape the way people react to a name. We got into what makes a name work, the biggest mistake founders make when naming a company, why "Vercel" beat every literal alternative, whether you actually need the .com, and what David tells founders to do before they even start brainstorming names.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
What's the single biggest mistake people make when naming a startup?
The most common mistake is seeking safety — describing what you do. We see the tech space riddled with it. Take Infoseek: it tells you what it does, but compare that to Google, which doesn't describe anything — it just connotes that there's something new here. That creates a predisposition to consider the brand, rather than dismiss it. And it doesn't have to be a made-up word to do that. It could be a constructed solution like PowerBook, or taking a fruit — Blackberry — and putting it on a phone. All of those say: there's a new idea here.
You named Vercel. How did that come about, and why does it work?
We worked directly with the founder and his team. In today's digital economy there's more choice, more channels, more competition than ever, so a name has to work harder — it has to be your most distinctive, most original marketing element, because it's the one thing a competitor can never take from you. They can copy your product, get a similar color, mimic your behavior. They can't take your name. Vercel's product accelerates their customers' success, so we took the "cel" from acceleration — a fragment you see across biology and aviation. We also lean heavily on sound symbolism: our research says "V" is the most alive, most daring sound in the English alphabet — think Corvette. Pair that with "ver," from verus, Latin for true, which reads as familiar across English, Romance languages, even Latin America. Two familiar pieces, combined in an unfamiliar way — that's what gives you distinctiveness and memorability at the same time.
If they'd gone with something literal, like deployfast.com, would that have worked just as well?
No — too familiar. Every competitor in your space is already saying "fast," or "true fast," or some variation of it. All you do is walk yourself right back into the competitive set. You want to be outside of it.
Once you've got a name idea you like, what checks do you actually run on it?
It's fairly rigorous. First is trademark — we have an in-house attorney of seventeen years, paralegals, subscription databases, Google searches, and now we're experimenting with AI to help narrow the field. That alone gets a client 50 to 60% of the way there. Second, we've built proprietary software that screens candidates for qualities like sound symbolism — does it support smoothness and speed — and memorability, which is affected by rhyme or rhythm. DeepSeek, for example, scores well on that alone, because of the repeated "ee" pattern. We also look for concreteness: Red Hat is memorable because you've got a color and an object. Third, every client gets a global linguistic review across roughly fifteen languages that cover about 88% of speakers in the markets that matter, run through a network of 107 certified linguists — mostly PhDs — in 78 countries. They don't know the client, only the category. So when we present a name, it comes with the creative rationale, the cognitive-science score, the linguistic review, and the legal review, all triangulated. It's not darts on a board.
Does it actually matter if you can't get the .com?
The .com is becoming more like an area code or a zip code. What matters is whether the name communicates. If a client has a great name but the .com costs three million dollars, giving up the name over that is a mistake — communication is far more important than the URL. If you've got the budget and tens or low hundreds of thousands of dollars is comfortable, fine, treat it as part of the marketing budget. If money's tight, spend it on building the brand instead. Tesla started out as Tesla Motors, and it didn't hurt them. We're lexiconbranding.com, and it hasn't hurt us either.
How did Azure come about for Microsoft?
Different story than Vercel. Microsoft initially wanted something descriptive built around "cloud." A quick search showed that space was already crowded with names starting or ending in "cloud" — for a company the size of Microsoft, that's walking straight into a competitive set that was about to get huge. We landed on Azure: concrete, real, but unexpected. It connects logically to blue, blue sky, the cloud — so it's not arbitrary — but it wasn't the "Cloud Pro"-style name people expected from Microsoft. Nobody expects Microsoft to come out with a name like Azure, and that surprise itself reads as confidence.
Some people say a name like Azure doesn't tell you anything about the product. How do you respond to that?
Cloud Pro doesn't really tell you what you do either — it just tells you you're doing something with clouds. The name was never supposed to carry the whole story by itself. We use the word "vessel": the name is a vessel that carries your story into the marketplace. You can't explain what Vercel does in one word. But you can in a line, a deck, a positioning statement — paired with a name people are already curious about.
If someone's pre-funding, very early stage, what should they actually do before they start naming things?
Forget about naming for a minute. Whiteboard two things instead: how you want to behave in the marketplace, and how your brand is going to change the future, or change a category — in a small way or a big way. Compare yourself to brands outside your own category. We want to be more like North Face, about adventure, and less like Patagonia, which is more stylistic. Only once you know that can you test a candidate name against it. Believability comes down to sound, too — reliable-sounding consonants like B, P, and Q versus slow-sounding vowels like O and U. Microsoft and Apple are both good names, but they instantly telegraph very different behavior — one serious and corporate, one open and approachable — and once you're on that path, it's hard to pull back.
If you could tell founders one thing to remember before they pick a name, what would it be?
The name you choose will be used more often, and for longer, than any other marketing device you have. Your color will change. Your positioning will change. Your product will change. The name is the one thing your competitors can never take from you. So take your time — go for the right name, not just a good name. If you get the right name, the return on investment is a hundred x.
Links & references
This episode is brought to you by WorkOS.