Memes, Names, and Schelling Point Brands
Why names at not important but very important for start-ups
The classic entrepreneurial tip is to not spend time on things the old guard would spend time on: business cards, office, and names.
When a business has no customers or even no product, those things don’t matter. They can be addressed later.
But I actually think there’s something else here. The stories of founders saying how little time they spent thinking of the name doesn’t mean no one should spend time thinking of the name, or that names aren’t important.
If they came up with a name quickly….and it was good…that tells more about them than the convention of how important names are.
Great names seem to coincide with great founders in many cases. Is it happenstance? Is the “greatness” of a name something that is imputed to it by success of the company, such that any old name would have sufficed?
There certainly are examples of this: a fabulous company that has a sucky name; and there are plenty, probably much more, examples of companies with fabulous names and crappy companies.
There’s still lots of “conventional wisdom” around the shortness of a name, primarily because of the need to easily type the domain name. Founders and investors still reference this, and there are very few counter examples to this.
So I think as an exercise of how to stand out, communicate, manage under constraints (most domain names that would be appealing are taken), and empathy for customers (having a strong intuition and taste, as Steve Jobs would call it, for people and customers).
Names collapse this….into a single phrase, and when a team can reach a name quickly, it’s more of a sign of how in sync they are. I see the convergence on a naming as a Schelling Point — meaning, everyone gets there (or knows they get there when they here it) — no one communicates what the name is before hand, and largely many of the things behind the name are also not communicated directly amongst the parties.
In his book “The Strategy of Conflict,” Thomas Schelling wrote:
“People can often concert their intentions or expectations with others if each knows that the other is trying to do the same.”
Names and the joint convergence on a name is more important than ever in the memefication of the world, particularly commercial entities and their equity representation.
In the crypto world, Schelling Points gained prominence in the Bitcoin community; and I think crypto, in fact, is an accelerant of tribal Schelling Points.
So let’s take a look at some characteristics of Schelling Points:
Salience: is unique, simple, and has cultural significance
Common Knowledge: information all parties reasonably know, common cues and context, widely understood
Psychological Appeal: deciders have strong intuitive or gut feel, emotional evocation, leverages cognitive biases and heuristics
Stability: self-reinforcing, resistant to change, Nash equilibria
Context Dependence: focal point shifts based on context, cultural differences can impact the options, coordination problem itself is the context
To me, a strong name has these characteristics, which is what makes it both hard to do, but also critical at the early stage.
“Coordination” for a company or a meme I would argue is more about convergence, even in an ever changing or shifting narrative space. Why? Because if the meme can’t orchestrate convergence upon itself as the salient and self-reinforcing inevitability, it will turn to dust sooner or later.
What’s missing here explicitly are a click down into great names, which is great storytelling; the richer the narrative, totemic images, tribal norms, the stronger the community. Memes often have to continue to advance their lore, and this is where many potentially fall short because they are a sly wink of irony.
In a degen space, Pepe can thrive because irony is enough to suspend gravity for now; but durable and highly valuable memes or companies are accretive, self-reinforcing. This kind of stuff usually falls under people talking about ‘brands’ — which it is, but branding has been so infiltrated with people who don’t know much about the underlying thoughts that it’s a bad term for a very important concept.
What is good and what are things that I would suggest don’t pass the test?
Palantir is a great name.
It’s perhaps longer than the common seven-letter guidance, but it has built in lore by borrowing from Tolkien.
It was able to hone in very specifically on a customer segment as well as talent by immediately culling out those who were familiar with the role of the seeing stones.
But the brilliance is that it aligned with the product vision of enabling better intelligence in complex big-data scenarios.
That narrative wrapped together is reinforcing daily the underlying ethos, product vision, both internally and externally.
This is a meme with value.
One of the things that is not discussed around memes is why do people want to share things, and the most common research around this is that the act of sharing should, by reputation, make the sharer appear better to others.
In whatever context someone may be, “virtue signaling” is the goal and, as such, must be able to represent such virtue.
The more specific and wider the TAM of such virtue, the more likely it will be shared.
Does this mean that vacuous things get shared, like the videos from the guy from The Office about happy things? Sure.
But I think largely this is a good thing; we should encourage mimetics that appeal to various forms of virtue.
Does virtue mean it must be goodie goodie?
No, it doesn’t; but the underlying virtue or irony must be done very carefully, because irony, like humor, doesn’t travel well.
“Liquid Death Mountain Water” is, in fact, a great meme because it went against a commodity virtue, of just plain clean water, and rode an existing, large cult TAM of heavy metal esthetic; but the irony has almost no room for mistake or someone taking literally, which should always be an assumption; water cannot be liquid death.
If they alienated the super healthy yoga audience, they could find it in hard core athletes. The TAM is clear and the virtue actually isn’t advocating anything degenerate per se; virtues of fierceness, independence, and toughness can be conveyed and don’t have much risk of being translated into something that would impute the absence of virtue.
Palantir over time, and without much effort, imbues the sharer of the meme with virtue — the Palantiri themselves weren’t bad, it just so happened the users were; but it conveys the very thing that villains crave — power, omniscience, knowledge; and the reclaiming of the narrative to provide the seeing stones for truth, justice and the American way strengthens it.
Truly unvirtuous connotations are very sticky.
Bitcoin is encoded belief as I wrote about before: hard money, scarcity, immutability, permissionlessness, and decentralization of monetary policy is encoded. People who cared about such things as virtue gladly talked about it and built a community.
However, the taint that Bitcoin is only used for illegal activity, which was largely true because of the notoriety of Silk Road, still has not washed off for many people; negative associates are also memes and Schelling Points for people who encounter something novel.
In fact, loss aversion and Prospect Theory plays into the degrees people invest time, money and belief: negative taint, even for the sake of irony (and irony doesn’t travel well, it’s payload on the communication protocol is too heavy because it must encapsulate a lot of winks and nods), is sticky.
As a thought experiment, imagine a chain that launches a token calls itself Illegal Chain.
There are several behavioral occurrences that happen for the ironic name.
The chain may not, of course, want to actually advocate for things illegal; but it’s mocking the fact that governments consider blockchains illegal things because of Bitcoin.
First, if names are Schelling Points and irony does not travel well, it very well could just straight-line attract people who legitimately want to do illegal things.
This is taint that just can’t get removed.
Even if someone is operating on second-order (ah, this must actually be a highly legal chain, because anyone saying they are an Illegal Chain must want to attract people who engage in illegal activity, therefore they are probably law enforcement).
But that doesn’t actually help those who want to appeal to mimetic virtue signaling: even the most virtuous don’t want to be near a trap designed by the virtual to catch the unvirtuous.
It’s like those sting operations that used to be televised to catch people engaging in inappropriate activity with the underaged: virtuous people would applaud its existence, but wouldn’t want to be associated or even close to that television show.
Subversiveness is actually different, and because that which subverts often becomes convention, this is perhaps the approach for those willing to sacrifice some mimetic TAM for edginess.
Punk rock and rap are examples of subversive culture which has become much more mainstream via the mixology of music.
DOGE was subversive, and now is associated with the United States Federal Government.
But I will say, those are risky, and it really depends on the goal. Some names off the top of my head:
Stripe: a brilliant visual association with the credit card without needing the word “pay” anywhere, but the name reinforced its product strategy
Splunk: subversive black t-shirts with scatalogical taglines got bought by Cisco; but the story was about spelunking which reinforced its product strategy.
Cloudflare: the imagery of light through the clouds permeates the product direction of making the internet better
Notion: doesn’t have anything to do with organizing or note taking, but captures the higher-order product alignment with “thinking” and thought
Great memes allow people to insert themselves into a narrative, want to share the imputed virtues of that narrative, and actually enable (ideally through brilliant product strategy and execution) people to bring those values into reality.
That’s quite alot to ask of a name.
But when all companies will be memes (and as I wrote earlier, firms are unbundling into agents), I believe agents themselves are memes and their names matter.
Given the Paradox of Choice, even highly rational people take short cuts.
Grayscale has built a portfolio fund buying a specific crypto currency, The Graph, on the belief it represents growth in AI. But in actuality, there is no connection to AI; there’s narrative and talk, but the name The Graph has enough resonance and mimetic value (especially as people recognize graphs are essential for alot of AI to understand data).
But an investment firm is willing to put money into a mimetic story even though no AI tooling, no AI use case, uses a GraphQL query API to get blockchain smart contract data.
That is the counter example of the power of getting the name right.
Even if your meme or company cannot deliver on the promise, it’s still better that decision-makers wrongly believe this to be true. Positive, self-reinforcing beliefs are what is driving meme market caps now; it will do the same for companies, as well.
Why play on hard mode?