Article Three

Name for the Company You Might Become

The most common naming mistake is not choosing badly. It is choosing accurately — for a company that no longer exists a few years later.

Early on, a venture is usually one product with one obvious purpose, and it is tempting to put that purpose directly into the name. It reads as clarity. It looks like confidence. And for a while it works beautifully, because the name and the thing are the same shape.

Then the company grows. It adds a second product, moves to a new kind of customer, discovers that the real business was adjacent to the original one all along. The name, meanwhile, has not moved. It still describes the first version with perfect precision, which now means it describes the company inaccurately — a small daily friction that never quite goes away, and an argument that resurfaces in every strategy meeting until someone finally pays to rename everything.

A name should fit the company loosely enough to let it change its mind.

This is the quiet case for broad, plain names: they are difficult to outgrow. A word that suggests a quality rather than a product will still make sense after a pivot, after an acquisition, after the founders have stopped doing the thing they started out doing. It buys room to change without requiring permission from the letterhead.

The practical advice is simple, if slightly counterintuitive. Choose the name that fits the company you might reasonably become in five years, not the one you are on the morning you register it. You will be right more often than you expect, and on the occasions you are wrong, a broad name will forgive you.