Tech companies are renowned for their unconventional names. Ultimately, the Internet is to blame, as the lack of available dot-com domain names caused startups to get creative with their branding. Now, creating a company name out of a completely made up words is practically a rite of passage in the tech industry. New York startups are no exception to this trend. We did a little digging and discovered the stories behind the unorthodox names of some of our favorite tech companies.
Popular payments app, Venmo, obtained its name from an amalgamation between the Latin roots for “sell” (vendere) and “mobile” (mo). Venmo’s cofounders, Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail, wanted to think of a name that was short (5-6 letters), could become a verb and had intuitive spelling. Kortina and Magdon-Ismail settled on Venmo, which has seriously stuck. Venmo has reached a Google-esque level as a verb, as “just Venmo me” has become a staple phrase among millennials everywhere.
Social media management platform, Sprinklr, helps enterprise brands connect with customers across all networks. As quality often outweighs quantity in terms of social strategies, the company’s founder, Ragy Thomas, coined the name Sprinklr from the belief that the brands who perform the best on social media are not necessarily the noisiest, but the ones that carefully water their plot of land.
Hello Alfred, a company that helps you take care of errands, is ultimately in the business of helping people. According to Hello Alfred’s founder, Marcela Sapone, she wanted to name the company after a human who represented that ethos. The company drew from Batman, a beloved hero also in the business of helping people. But Sapone’s inspiration actually came from Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s (aka Batman’s) stalwart butler who through training, sufficient technology and organization, morphed a normal, human man into a superhero.
Gimlet, the startup shaking up podcasts, had a lot of trouble naming their company. Naturally, they chronicled the entire experience in a podcast. Gimlet’s founder, Alex Blumberg, wanted to originally name the company the “American Podcasting Corporation” (APC), reminiscent of large media companies such as ABC or CBS. The company also toyed with Resonance, Cream, Storytone, Toptone, Creamtone, Tonalist, Arello, Range Media and the Global Listening Service. Finally, the company enlisted Lexicon, a brand name specialist, who eventually pitched Gimlet to the podcasting network’s founders.
Andy Dunn and Brian Spaly cofounded Bonobos with a vision to create a new model for men’s clothing. Founded in 2007, the e-commerce menswear brand set out to create the best-fitting pants, and has since become the largest clothing brand launched online in the U.S. The company is named after a particularly promiscuous primate, the Bonobo.
In May 2009, one of Warby Parker’s cofounders, Dave Gilboa, was wandering around the New York Public Library when he stumbled into an exhibition about novelist and poet, Jack Kerouac. The companies four cofounders had long been inspired by Kerouac, who spurred a generation to take the road less traveled. The exhibit included some of Kerouac’s manuscripts, drafts and journals. In one of the journals, Gilboa noticed two characters with interesting names: Warby Pepper and Zagg Parker. Warby Parker found its name.
The name Casper seems more fitting for a friendly ghost than a brand of ultra-comfortable mattresses. But Casper was the name of one the company’s cofounder’s former roommates, who evidently was simply an easy going, sleepy kind of guy.
Does your company have a cool story behind its name? Email us via [email protected].
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