Let's be clear about something before we go through the historical record: none of the original names in this post were catastrophically bad. Nobody saw "BackRub" and immediately closed the browser. Nobody drank a bottle of "Brad's Drink" and poured the rest down the sink. These names weren't offensive or unpronounceable or actively hostile.
They were mediocre.
And mediocre is the real enemy. Not bad names — mediocre names. Names that don't embarrass you but don't do anything for you either. Names that describe the product instead of creating a feeling. Names that limit the company's imagination before the company has had a chance to develop one.
The lesson isn't "rename early and rename often." The lesson is: mediocre is a category, and it's the category you most need to escape.
BackRub → Google
In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin named their search engine project BackRub — because it analyzed backlinks, and apparently this seemed like a reasonable name at the time. You have to understand the internet of 1996 to not wince at this too hard: it was a different era, when "Netscape" and "Lycos" and "AltaVista" were the sophisticated end of naming culture.
BackRub is not a terrible name for a research project. It describes the mechanism accurately. Graduate students running research projects can be forgiven for naming them mechanistically.
But here's what BackRub couldn't do: scale. "BackRub" doesn't leave the university. It doesn't go on a business card. It doesn't launch an IPO. The mechanism it described was the scaffold of the product, not the product itself, and a name that only captures the scaffold collapses when you build something bigger.
Google — a misspelling of "googol," the mathematical term for 10 to the power of 100 — doesn't describe any mechanism. It describes scale. Unimaginable, aspirational, literally-beyond-comprehension scale. That's a name for a company that intends to index everything. BackRub is a name for a feature.
Confinity → PayPal
PayPal started life as Confinity, a company that developed cryptography for handheld devices. Confinity is the kind of name that sounds like it was chosen at midnight by engineers who were confident no one outside the company would ever need to say it. Confident + infinity = Confinity. It's clever in the way that proves you've been staring at a whiteboard too long.
Confinity's name was too narrow in a different way from BackRub. Rather than describing a mechanism, it described a founding-era obsession (cryptographic security) that became less central as the business evolved. When the company pivoted toward payments and then merged with X.com (Elon Musk's online banking venture), the name had no relationship to anything the company actually did.
PayPal, which emerged in 2001, is one of the great compound names in tech history. "Pay" and "pal" — two words that do specific, complementary work. Pay describes the function. Pal describes the relationship: informal, friendly, safe. Your pal PayPal. The name reduced the psychological friction of sending money to a stranger on the internet, which was the entire product problem to solve. That's not an accident. That's excellent naming.
Brad's Drink → Pepsi-Cola
In 1893, pharmacist Caleb Bradham invented a carbonated drink in New Bern, North Carolina, and called it "Brad's Drink." Because it was his drink, and his name was Brad, and apparently he was not a branding person.
Brad's Drink is perhaps the purest example of the founder-named product that dies the death of literalism. It's accurate. It's honest. It's deeply boring. It tells you nothing about what's in the bottle, what it does for you, or why you might prefer it to any other carbonated liquid on earth.
In 1898, Bradham renamed it Pepsi-Cola, derived from pepsin (a digestive enzyme) and kola nuts (a source of caffeine — the two functional ingredients he wanted to promote). This is a clipped compound name with genuine semantic content. You're drinking something that aids digestion and gives you energy. The name makes a promise. Brad's Drink made no promise at all.
The product was the same. The name was different. The company became one of the two largest beverage companies on earth. Draw your own conclusions.
The Patterns Worth Studying
Looking across these renames and others in history — Philip Morris became Altria, ValuJet became AirTran, Research In Motion became BlackBerry the product and briefly flirted with renaming itself BlackBerry the company — a few consistent patterns emerge.
Names that are too literal trap the company. Naming your company for what it does today is dangerous because companies evolve. Amazon started as a bookstore. If Bezos had named it Onlinebooks.com — which was, apparently, the domain he briefly considered — there's a real question of whether he ever would have expanded beyond books. The name would have become a cage. "Amazon" allowed him to sell anything.
Names that don't travel internationally create entirely avoidable friction. Mitsubishi means "three diamonds" in Japanese — poetic and meaningful in its home market. Their foray into food sales created the "Pajero" SUV, named after a small wildcat. In several Spanish-speaking markets, "pajero" is a vulgar slang term. The product sold under a different name in those markets. Not a crisis, but entirely avoidable with basic due diligence. Similarly, the Chevy Nova (Nova means "doesn't go" in Spanish — "no va") was actually fine, because Spanish speakers understood it as a proper noun, not a phrase. But the urban legend persists because the concern was real even if the harm wasn't.
Names with embarrassing alternate meanings require discovery, not just avoidance. The way to catch these is not to rely on your own linguistic knowledge — hire someone who speaks the language your name will be heard in, and tell them to think like a twelve-year-old.
The Mistake That Actually Matters
None of the companies above were sunk by their original names. Google became Google. PayPal became PayPal. Pepsi became Pepsi. They renamed when they had the clarity and motivation to do so, and the products were good enough to survive the transition.
The mistake isn't picking a bad name. The mistake is being too precious about it to change course when you have evidence you should.
Founders get attached to their original names in the same way they get attached to their original product ideas — which is to say, pathologically, defensively, and often past the point where the attachment serves them. The name is not the company. The name is a label on the company. Labels can be changed. The company — the people, the product, the relationships, the culture — cannot be replaced as easily.
If you're pre-launch, a mediocre name is inexpensive to fix. You just fix it. If you're post-launch with six months of brand equity, it's more expensive, but still usually worth it. If you're post-Series A with a category-defining product, you're probably fine either way — the product will pull the name into relevance.
The optimal strategy is simply not to accept mediocre in the first place. Not because renaming is fatal — clearly it isn't — but because you're making an already hard problem harder. Get the name right at the start. Or get it right at the first obvious moment you realize it's wrong.
The only real mistake is knowing the name is wrong and doing nothing about it.
