Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding)

**David Placek** (0:00)
Your brand name, nothing's gonna be used more often or for longer than that name. Design will change, message will change, products will change, but that name is there.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:09)
What's a name that you came up with that you had to fight super hard for, that the client just hated?

**David Placek** (0:14)
When we presented Sonos, it was rejected because it's not entertainment-like. We argued about that because I said, this is outside looking in, but I don't see you as an entertainment company. Humans do like to be comfortable. Part of our job here is to help people to give the confidence going bigger and being uncomfortable.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:32)
There's a quote that I found of yours. If your team is comfortable with the name, chances are you don't have the name yet.

**David Placek** (0:37)
We look for polarization. We look for tension in a team arguing about these things. Polarization is a sign of strength in the word. Most clients, they come to a naming project absolutely believing with full confidence that they're going to know it when they see it. And the truth is, it almost never happens.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:57)
Most people listening to this are founders, a lot of PMs on product teams. Let's say they have a couple of weeks. Got to come up with a name. What should they do? Today, my guest is David Placik. David is the founder of Lexicon Branding, which pioneered the field of brand naming and invented a few names that you may have heard of, including PowerBook, Pentium, BlackBerry, Swiffer, the Impossible Burger, also Vercel and Windsurf and CapCut and Azure. In our conversation, David opens up about the very specific process that he and his team go through to find winning names, including a simple exercise that you can do with you and your team to help you find the right name in just a few weeks. We also talk about why a great name is worth spending your time on, why you won't know a great name when you see it, and why you need to feel uncomfortable about the name first. Also why big team brainstorms don't ever lead to great names, the stories behind names like Pentium and Sonos and Vercel and Windsurf, also such interesting insights about the feeling and energy of every letter of the alphabet, and so much more, this episode is designed for anyone trying to figure out a name for their product or company, and also just for anyone that's interested in hearing the stories of how some of the most iconic names came to be. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. And if you become a paid subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of amazing products including Bolt, Linear, Superhuman, Notion, Perplexity, Granola and more. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you David Placek. This episode is brought to you by Work OS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and skim provisioning. That's where Work OS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by Work OS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow and Loom. Work OS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, skim or user management, you should consider Work OS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to one million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com. Last year, 1.3% of the global GDP flowed through Stripe. That's over $1.4 trillion. And driving that huge number are the millions of businesses growing more rapidly with Stripe. For industry leaders like Forbes, Atlassian, OpenAI and Toyota, Stripe isn't just financial software. It's a powerful partner that simplifies how they move money, making it as seamless and borderless as the Internet itself. For example, Hertz boosted its online payment authorization rates by 4% after migrating to Stripe. And imagine seeing a 23% lift in revenue, like Forbes did just 6 months after switching to Stripe for subscription management. Stripe has been leveraging AI for the last decade to make its product better at growing revenue for all businesses, from smarter checkouts to fraud prevention and beyond. Join the ranks of over half of the Fortune 100 companies that trust Stripe to drive change. Learn more at stripe.com.