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Arielle Jackson: preference

18 Aug 2022 Lenny's Podcast The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital)

“You want to be a Maven, instructors are Maven's, it's short, it's easy to say, when I tell you what that company does, that name makes perfect sense. So I tend to like those [inaudible 00:15:17] of names myself, but I also, I don't know, I like other kinds of names for other kinds of products too.”

— Arielle Jackson

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Arielle Jackson
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
preference
Recorded
18 Aug 2022
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…It's an awesome name. It is an awesome name and I'll use it as an example. So seesaw is a ed tech company. They had a really bad name before that and we did this whole naming process and ended with that name and why I think that's a good name is when I say Seesaw, you don't really know what it is, but when I tell you, oh, it's this ed tech company and it's an iPad app and it helps the work that elementary school students do go between the teacher, the parents and the student. And you're like, oh, well, Seesaw makes sense for elementary school, it's something that goes back and forth. It has that sort of nostalgic feel. And it makes sense that it's an ed tech company. And I personally tend to like those kinds of names that are suggestive or evocative, where when I tell you what the company does, you're like, oh, that makes sense. But it's not that what the name is tells you exactly what the company does. So that's an example, I think of a good name. I don't know, during COVID and when my older son's school was closed and they all used Seesaw and I got to tell my son, oh, that's my friend's company and we named it back in the day. And he was like, oh, that's cool. That name makes sense. That's the reaction you want. It also has a little bit of emotion to it. It has some nostalgia. It's fun to say it's short, it's memorable. I think all of those things make a good name. Another company that has a good name that you and I have both worked with is Maven. So they're a First Round company. Gogan has talked about this publicly. We named that company together. Maven is a Yiddish word that means one who understands and it means specifically one who understands because they've done something, they've acquired the skills or knowledge over time. And I just think that's such a cool name for a platform that allows X operators or current operators to teach their skills to other people through cohort based classes. You want to be a Maven, instructors are Maven's, it's short, it's easy to say, when I tell you what that company does, that name makes perfect sense. So I tend to like those [inaudible 00:15:17] of names myself, but I also, I don't know, I like other kinds of names for other kinds of products too. I think it really comes down to what is your product? What is your company? What is the name trying to achieve and really getting clearer with those criteria. So we can talk about the criteria that always apply, the criteria you might add and a process to get there. That sounds great. Yeah. I'm really curious about a process. If one exists, that'd be really cool. So another question in my mind is just some names are just nonsense words like Yahoo and I don't know Google, I guess. What's your take on that as a name, that approach?…

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