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Lenny's PodcastDavid Placek: Why a name your team likes is the wrong name
Through Lexicon's polarization test and sound symbolism research; Sonos was rejected as not entertainment-like before becoming a billion-dollar asset.
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Episode Details
EPISODE INFO
- Released
- June 29, 2025
- Duration
- 1h 22m
- Channel
- Lenny's Podcast
- Watch on YouTube
- ▶ Open ↗
EPISODE DESCRIPTION
David Placek is the founder of Lexicon Branding, a company that focuses exclusively on the development of brand names for competitive advantage. Lexicon is behind iconic names such as Sonos, Microsoft’s Azure, Windsurf, Vercel, Impossible Foods, BlackBerry, Intel’s Pentium, Apple’s PowerBook, and Swiffer. Over 40 years, David’s team has named nearly 4,000 brands and companies, employing over 250 linguists and pioneering naming innovation. *What you’ll learn:*
- The three-step process that generated names like Windsurf and Vercel
- How a name can give you the edge that no marketing budget can buy
- Why you won’t “know it when you see it”
- Why Microsoft called Azure “a dumb name” before it became their billion-dollar cloud platform
- Why polarizing opinions are the strongest signal that you’ve found the right name
- How every letter of the alphabet creates a specific psychological vibration
- The diamond framework: a 4-step process any founder can use to find their perfect name
- Why domain names don’t matter anymore in the age of AI
*Transcript:* https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/naming-expert-david-placek *Brought to you by:* WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: https://workos.com/lenny Stripe—Helping companies of all sizes grow revenue: https://stripe.com/ OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster: https://oneschema.co/lenny *Where to find David Placek:*
*Where to find Lenny:*
- Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
- X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
*In this episode, we cover:* (00:00) Introduction to David and Lexicon Branding (04:44) The story of Sonos (09:27) The psychology of naming (11:33) The initial resistance to Microsoft's Azure (14:35) The importance of a great brand name (18:11) The three steps of naming: create, invent, implement (28:23) Qualities of great brand name creators (31:24) How long the naming process takes (32:12) The Windsurf case study (36:10) Naming in the AI era (39:37) When to change your name (43:10) The role of linguists (45:54) The power of letters in branding (48:15) The Vercel case study (50:12) The implementation phase (52:52) Client management and market success (55:16) The diamond exercise (01:04:23) Suspending judgment (01:07:31) Polarization and boldness (01:11:01) Domain names (01:12:48) Final thoughts and lightning round *Referenced:*
- PowerBook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook
- Pentium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium
- BlackBerry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry
- Swiffer: https://www.swiffer.com/
- Impossible Burger: https://impossiblefoods.com/
- Vercel: https://vercel.com/
- Windsurf: https://windsurf.com/
- CapCut: https://www.capcut.com/
- Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/
- Sonos: https://www.sonos.com/
- John MacFarlane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-macfarlane-08a8aa20/
- Harry Potter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_(film_series)
- The Call of the Wild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Call_of_the_Wild
- Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders | Guillermo Rauch (founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/everyones-an-engineer-now-guillermo-rauch
- Sound symbolism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism
- Anduril: https://www.anduril.com/
- Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/
- Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-bolt-eric-simons
- The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-rise-of-cursor-michael-truell
- Building a magical AI code editor used by over 1 million developers in four months: The untold story of Windsurf | Varun Mohan (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-untold-story-of-windsurf-varun-mohan
- Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/
- Chevrolet Corvette: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Corvette
- Viagra: https://www.viagra.com/
- In vino veritas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vino_veritas
- Infoseek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infoseek
- Andy Grove: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove
- Churchill at War on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81609374
...References continued at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/naming-expert-david-placek _Production and marketing by https://penname.co/._ _For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com._ Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
SPEAKERS
David Placek
guestLenny Rachitsky
hostGuest (OneSchema sponsor segment)
guestNarrator
other
EPISODE SUMMARY
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, featuring David Placek and Lenny Rachitsky, David Placek: Why a name your team likes is the wrong name explores Naming expert reveals bold, scientific process behind billion-dollar brands Naming legend David Placek, founder of Lexicon Branding, explains why a name is a product’s single most enduring and leverageable asset, and why great names almost always feel uncomfortable and polarizing at first. He walks through Lexicon’s three-step process—identify, invent, implement—showing how they blend behavioral insight, deep linguistics, and disciplined creativity to develop names like Sonos, Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, BlackBerry, and Pentium. Placek emphasizes that strong names create cumulative and asymmetric advantage by being distinctive, evocative, and easy for the brain to process, not merely descriptive. He also offers a lightweight framework and practical exercises founders and product teams can use to name products on their own when they lack time or budget.
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