Naming expert shares process for creating billion-dollar brands: Vercel, Azure, Windsurf, Sonos
David Placek (guest), Lenny Rachitsky (host), Guest (OneSchema sponsor segment) (guest), Narrator
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, featuring David Placek and Lenny Rachitsky, Naming expert shares process for creating billion-dollar brands: Vercel, Azure, Windsurf, Sonos 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.
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.
Key Takeaways
A name is your most used, most enduring brand asset.
Design, messaging, and even products will change, but the name is repeated more than any other brand element; a distinctive, memorable name compounds in value over time (cumulative advantage) and can give you a head start at launch (asymmetric advantage).
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If everyone is comfortable, the name probably isn’t strong enough.
Teams naturally seek comfort and precedent, which pushes them toward descriptive, forgettable names; Placek intentionally looks for discomfort and internal polarization as a signal the name is bold, different, and has real marketplace energy.
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Don’t expect to ‘know it when you see it’—you almost never do.
Founders assume the right name will be instantly obvious, but in practice strong names (Sonos, Azure, BlackBerry, Pentium) are often rejected initially because they don’t match existing mental patterns; they require reflection, context, and imagining execution.
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Start with behavior and experience, not mission statements or descriptors.
Lexicon’s discovery work focuses on how the company behaves today, how it wants to behave in the future, and what experience it wants to create, then translates that into rhythm, sound, and metaphor—rather than starting from values decks or literal descriptions.
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Use disciplined, small-team creativity backed by linguistic science.
Instead of big brainstorms, Lexicon uses 2–3 tiny teams with different (sometimes fake) briefs, then layers in research on sound symbolism (e. ...
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For DIY naming, generate far more ideas and delay judgment.
Most teams stop after 100–200 names, which is far too few; Placek recommends getting to 1,000+ ideas, suspending evaluation at first, then later asking, “What could this name do for us? ...
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The exact .com matters far less than having the right name.
Domain constraints should not drive the naming decision; today the URL is like an area code, and you can use modifiers or alternative TLDs—better to spend money on marketing than overpaying for a mediocre name just because the dot-com is available.
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Notable Quotes
“Your brand name, whether it's a product name or a company name, nothing's going to be used more often or for longer than that name.”
— David Placek
“If your team is comfortable with the name, chances are you don't have the name yet.”
— David Placek
“Most clients come to a naming project absolutely believing with full confidence that they're going to know it when they see it—and the truth is, it almost never happens.”
— David Placek
“Polarization is a sign of strength in the word.”
— David Placek
“You don't want to make a statement here. You want to start a story.”
— David Placek
Questions Answered in This Episode
How can a small startup approximate Lexicon’s rigorous process—especially the linguistic and legal screening—without significant budget?
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. ...
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When a team is deeply split on a bold name, how do you distinguish constructive polarization from a genuine strategic mismatch?
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How should founders think about renaming an already-launched product with some traction without confusing or alienating existing users?
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What are practical ways a non-specialist can apply sound symbolism (letter ‘feelings’) when shortlisting or refining name ideas?
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In an AI-driven world where search and discovery are changing, how might the criteria for an effective name evolve over the next decade?
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Transcript Preview
Your brand name, nothing's going to be used more often or for longer than that name. Design will change, messaging will change, products will change. But that name is there.
What's a name that you came up with that you had to fight super hard for, that the client just hated?
When we presented Sonos, it was rejected because it's not entertainment-like. We argued about that because I said, "This is outside looking in, but I don't see you as an entertainment company." Humans do like to be comfortable. Part of our job here is to help people to give the confidence going bigger and being uncomfortable.
There's a quote that I found of yours, "If your team is comfortable with the name, chances are you don't have the name yet."
We look for polarization. We look for tension in a team arguing about these things. Polarization is a sign of strength in the word. Most clients, they come to a naming project absolutely believing with full confidence that they're going to know it when they see it. And the truth is, it almost never happens.
Most people listening to this are founders, a lot of PMs, on product teams. Let's say they have a couple weeks, got to come up with a name. What should they do? Today, my guest is David Plaszek. David is the founder of Lexicon Branding, which pioneered the field of brand naming and invented a few names that you may have heard of, including PowerBook, Pentium, BlackBerry, Swiffer, The Impossible Burger, also Vercel and Windsurf and CapCut and Azure. In our conversation, David opens up about the very specific process that he and his team go through to find winning names, including a simple exercise that you can do with you and your team to help you find the right name in just a few weeks. We also talk about why a great name is worth spending your time on, why you won't know a great name when you see it, and why you need to feel uncomfortable about the name first. Also, why big team brainstorms don't ever lead to great names, the stories behind names like Pentium and Sonos and Vercel and Windsurf. Also, such interesting insights about the feeling and energy of every letter of the alphabet and so much more. This episode is designed for anyone trying to figure out a name for their product or company, and also just for anyone that's interested in hearing the stories of how some of the most iconic names came to be. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. And if you become a paid subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of amazing products including Bolt, Linear, Superhuman, Notion, Perplexity, Granola and more. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you David Plaszek. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warnt, the fine-grained authorization service. Warnt's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to one million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com. Last year, 1.3% of the global GDP flowed through Stripe. That's over $1.4 trillion. And driving that huge number are the millions of businesses growing more rapidly with Stripe. For industry leaders like Forbes, Atlassian, OpenAI and Toyota, Stripe isn't just financial software, it's a powerful partner that simplifies how they move money, making it as seamless and borderless as the internet itself. For example, Hertz boosted its online payment authorization rates by 4% after migrating to Stripe. And imagine seeing a 23% lift in revenue like Forbes did just six months after switching to Stripe for subscription management. Stripe has been leveraging AI for the last decade to make its product better at growing revenue for all businesses, from smarter checkouts to fraud prevention and beyond. Join the ranks of over half of the Fortune 100 companies that trust Stripe to drive change. Learn more at stripe.com. David, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
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