David Placek: recommendation

Transcript context

…Let me actually follow this through real quick. It's going to be kind of a tangent. You guys have been working with AI companies more and more recently, which is so interesting. What's different about naming AI products from traditional products, not AI, I guess? First off, we are working mostly with engineers, and engineers who haven't delved into the world of creativity and necessarily marketing. And that's their strength. And what we have to do is we have to balance their strength with our strength. So there's a little bit of a challenge there, but I think we deal pretty well with that. Secondly, this is the fastest moving progressing category I have ever experienced. And I have that perspective, right? I went through the early days of the internet and the World Wide Web, and that was moving pretty fast. But the internet compared to this looks like a daycare school or something like that. We're challenged by just keeping up with developments. Third thing, and this is the creative challenge here, is that engineers come to us wanting more sophisticated names where they are likely to end up with another Codium or an Anduril or an Anthropic. And when we saw this trend of that AI is going to take off, and it was an intuitive feeling on my part. I could have been wrong. I said, "Let's find out what's going on here." So both, not only who's developing the products, but how do people think about AI? And we did a series of research. I probably invested $20,000 or so. And we interviewed consumers in Europe, South Korea, just picked out one country in Asia, and in America, and developers in those three. And they really have different views. Developers are all totally positive on it. They see the future, they see a big future, not too concerned, some are, but most aren't. Consumers are skeptical, worried about it, worried about their jobs, see the hope in it, those types of things, but haven't got the handle on it. So Codium is an example where we said, "We think what you're doing needs to be much more tangible, and something that people can grab onto, and much more natural as opposed to a Codium. " And they listened to us. Very simple as that. And in this case, we were right. And by the way also, I have to say, there's some luck to this. Windsurf happened to be available and they sought right away, not exactly right away but it took about a week going back and forth to select it. So, let me stop there and see if that answers your question. Absolutely. And it feels like most AI companies end up having a different name for their product than their company. I've noticed this funny trend cursor was any sphere bold with stack is StackBlitz, Windsurf is Codium. Basically, everyone. When does it make sense to change your name? Windsurf just officially changed their entire company name to Windsurf from Codium. It was just a product. So, let me just ask you that. When does it make sense? It feels like a huge deal and a very challenging thing to do.…

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