Naming expert shares process for creating billion-dollar brands: Vercel, Azure, Windsurf, Sonos

David Plasik:Your brand name nothing's gonna be used more often or for longer than that name design will change messaging will change products will change but that name is there

Lenny Rachitsky:What's a name that you came up with that you had to fight super hard for that the client just hated

David Plasik: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

Lenny Rachitsky: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

David Plasik: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 gonna know it when they see it and the truth is it almost never happens

Lenny Rachitsky:Most people listening to this are founders lot of PMs on product teams let's say they have a couple weeks gotta come up with a name what should they do today my guest is David Plasik 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 Lenny'sNewsletter.com and click bundle with that I bring you David Plasik 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 Warrant the fine grain authorization service Warrant'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 1,000,000 monthly active users for free check it out at WorkOS.com to learn more that's WorkOS.com

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Lenny Rachitsky:David thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast

David Plasik:Well thank you I I'm excited about today and looking forward to the conversation

Lenny Rachitsky:Me too these are actually my favorite kinds of conversations because this topic is so outside of my wheelhouse and I know I'm just gonna learn a ton also this is just something that every founder and product builder has to think about at some point and they have no idea what they're doing and then their name becomes so core to their identity it's really the word they say more than any other word and I feel like I've never heard advice on how to do this well so I'm really excited for this conversation I'm gonna just dive into a question and the question is just what's a name that you came up with and your team came up with that you had to fight super hard for that the client just hated and you ended up winning and now it's just such an obviously awesome name that everyone loves

David Plasik:The story I like to tell is a story of Sonos one a great client team I worked with all the founders but at at the time they were stuck on being in a brand name that put them in the entertainment business and so when we presented Sonos which has many qualities to it they it was rejected because it doesn't have enough sort of emotion to it it's not entertainment like and you know we argued about that because I said I don't this is outside looking in but I don't see you as an entertainment company you you makes speakers that allow for the flow of entertainment through these things and Sonos is about sound but it had a particular quality it's it's called a palindrome right so which really means that you can flip it and and it means the same thing in the case of Sonos you could all also turn it upside down and it was essentially the same right and so I that got them thinking about this but they were still has so I left that meeting in Santa Barbara and I came back and they were still struggling with it and I went I got on a plane didn't even bill them for this went back down to Santa Barbara and met with them again and said I really believe in this name and I think it's the right for you and at a certain point one of the founders you know Bob McFarlane who's just a wonderful client I could see him thinking and he said you know we're trying to name this for ourselves and what we really should be doing is naming it for the marketplace and the customers and you know I think Sonos now is the right name and that and I feel really good about that and he later wrote me a note about about how I help to do that and we use it sometimes in credentials presentations because it's such a nice note but but Sonos is something I'm so I'm so glad that I had this internal energy to I got to go down there and make a bid for this I don't I don't do that often by the way but I felt very strongly about Sonos

Lenny Rachitsky:I love Sonos I love the name I have many Sonos products how often does this happen where the client is just this is not the name we have this bigger vision we have a whole other idea of it and then you convince them

David Plasik:Well it happens all the time and it's a little bit bidirectional right we you know there's most clients and I can understand this right they 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 I have now I think this year will hit 4,000 projects that we've completed and it's interesting you know we'll tell people in a very polite way you're not going to know when you see it but but I know they don't believe me and even when you could see them thinking that you know what he was right I really have to think about this I have to process it and part of that part of why clients don't like the bolder names the more imaginative names that we present is they are looking for comfort and that's the opposite that what you want to do and part of our our our job here is to help people to give the confidence that going bolder and bigger is and and being uncomfortable there's use the expression there is no power in comfort not in the marketplace

Lenny Rachitsky:Wow there's so much here already okay so this idea of you're not gonna know it when you see it is something that people come in with thinking like once I see it it'll be obvious just why why is that never almost never the case is it because the name has to be something that is uncomfortable there's a lot

David Plasik:Of psychology to this which ironically I never even took a psychology class in college or graduate school but the first element is humans do like to be comfortable and one of the mechanisms of comfort is if something's been successful before then I feel like I can approve it or select it. This is why you know movies like Harry Potter or even novels like Jack London's Call of the Wild get rejected so many times. I think Harry Potter was rejected 16 or 18 times and Jack London's book even more than that. I mean think about it, he's pitching a book and he says what are you talking about here? You're saying a dog becomes a wolf? I've never heard of anything like that. So we really do have to help people think about it's not about the past you're actually creating the future and we really talk to people and emphasize the idea this isn't a name you're creating that this we're creating the experience for you. We're going to work together and we really our conversations always start with talk to us about how you behave now and how you want to behave in the future as opposed to tell me about your positioning tell me about your values tell me about your mission. That's really kind of old thinking it's very traditional and that did work you know twenty five or thirty years ago but this is a far more complex interconnected world a digital world now that stuff just doesn't create names like Sonos or you know some of our other credentials that we probably will talk about today.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah we're gonna talk about just the process you guys go through so stay tuned for that but before we get to that is there another story you can

David Plasik:Share that kind of shows this idea of being bold I'll talk about Microsoft Azure. So when Microsoft came to us they were pretty much stuck and in many ways to their credit a lot of things don't need to be named they don't need trademarks they don't need brand names they need descriptors. And so they came to us to develop a name that started or ended with cloud made sense to them because it was a cloud service and our reaction was if you do that you're going to be in an ocean of other cloud this cloud that and you have an opportunity as Microsoft here to really emerge as a leader in this. And so there was a discussion about okay we'll take a look at those but we'd like to see some cloud some cloud names okay which is easy to do by the way and so we did that and along the way we came up with this word Azure which is another word for blue and so there was a link to clouds blue sky clouds things like that but we really presented it based on its linguistic qualities it's a noisy word that z in there starts with an a and it ends in a nice smooth flow. So we really strive to create names that are balanced and in a very busy competitive world having some strong signal which is generated by noise is a good thing. The reaction wasn't good you know one of the clients said that's just a dumb idea and I you know this remarks like that at this point after these four decades it sort of rolls off my back like water off a duck is what my grandmother would say but I think along the way as we talked about it they began to warm up to this and now of course it's I don't know a $100 billion brand or something like that. But that's an example of I haven't seen that before I'm very comfortable with cloud cloud is what it is we're describing it but that's a statement and I think that well I don't think I know that's what I said in one of the presentations is you don't wanna make a statement here you wanna start a story right and Azure is gonna behave differently in the marketplace than you know cloud pro which is I think one of the names that we presented to them on the other side at their request.

Lenny Rachitsky:I'm glad they went with Azure. Let me actually ask this question I know you're biased but just how important is a great name like if you had a better name than a product that was better than you does that make a big difference just anything you can share there to help people see this is the power of a great name.

David Plasik:Let's look just at the reality of this. 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. Design will change messaging will change products will change right but that name is there. So I like to talk about this idea of cumulative advantage. Over time as people buy more and more of the product they see it more often that bond between you and that brand or them and the brand becomes stronger and stronger so you want that name to stick in their mind to be distinctive because distinctiveness is what creates that cumulative advantage. The second thing is this notion of what I call asymmetric advantage. It makes perfect sense and most people most clients agree with this when we say this is that even before you launch this brand why not start with an advantage in the marketplace and you won't get an advantage if you're descriptive. If you are cloud pro and there's 10 other cloud services you're not going to stand out in the marketplace you won't have the ability to create that necessarily that cumulative advantage in the marketplace. So those are my two reasons why names are done right and we do talk about our mission is not creating good names a lot of people can do that our mission is to create the right name for clients and because the right name does deliver asymmetric advantage and cumulative advantage for you and that for us has almost unlimited value.

Lenny Rachitsky:This is a great answer essentially you're saying it's not gonna necessarily make or break you but it gives you an advantage a great name gives you an advantage especially if you're just getting started like you need every advantage you

David Plasik:Can get exactly and this is maybe a little bit off a tangent but one of the best books on marketing I've ever read which is not a book on marketing it's and you may have read it along the way in college if you studied unique Greek or classics is called The Melian Dialogues and it's a dialogue it'll take anybody listening to this maybe twenty five minutes to read it between the Athenians and the government of Milos and the Athenians had decided that they needed that island and they went and approached them very nice way but that we want to take over the island nothing will change you'll be taxed a little bit but we'll protect you and the Athenians had thought every aspect about how to take that island before so they by the time they got there they had created asymmetric advantage in terms of ships and men and all this other stuff. It's just that there by the way in the book there's no mention of marketing or brand strategy or any of these things but if you read it you begin to see that it's marketing really is about asymmetric advantage and so why not start from the very beginning with an advantage that's the value of a name.

Lenny Rachitsky:Let's dive into the actual process you guys go through and I wanna read a quote that Guillermo Rausch shared when I asked him about what it was like working with you. He's the CEO and cofounder of Vercel which he has worked with I definitely wanna hear that story by the way. So he said before David the ability to name something was like charisma you either have it or you don't it was so surreal to watch his team distill it down to a science. So let me just ask you what does that science look like what are the steps to coming up with an amazing name for your product or company that you guys go through.

David Plasik:That's very nice of Guillermo he is a very impressive innovator in this category and we greatly enjoyed working with him. Well our process is real break it down in three steps if at first we have to identify then we invent and then we implement so it's just three things it's not rocket science but it does it's a combination of creativity and discipline right and obviously talented people and experience in these things. So let's just kind of go through those things in the first section of identify it's really trying to find out from the client let's talk about behavior right so how do you how are you behaving now and how do you want to behave in the future right that behavior is bidirectional in other words the marketplace behaves towards a Vercel as you know that's the name we created for Guillermo and they behave towards the marketplace and that's an important point because everything you know buildings are bidirectional even the look at a building you behave differently towards a temple than you or a church versus a holiday inn in terms of how that architecture states so we focus on that behavior is closely aligned for us with experience how do you want this brand to the experience of this brand now when we listen to those things we begin to think about rhythm of the name so something like Dasani has a lot of rhythm to it right it's kind of calming right and so we'll begin to extract things from that discussion on experience. We will then also as part of this first phase look at the competition we call that developing a landscape and we're looking for what are the words the brand names first and then what language are they using in this space because we wanna be distinctive if a brand name isn't distinctive you lose right then you're imitating and that's a form of suicide I think that's a famous quote from some president of P&G fifty years ago or so. So that's that first phase which allows us to create what we call a creative framework and we don't even use the word objectives here because that gets too logical. Framework for us is a metaphor for a window for us and our teams and our linguists to travel through to open things up so that we're not coming back with a narrow list of names we're coming back with names that have depth and breadth and have different experiences and personalities to them and clients will sign off on that and then we get going. So now we're moved to the invent stage and in the invent stage we do really two things you can look at this as two layers of our process and I think the second layer is probably what makes us quite unique in the marketplace and it's the result of millions of dollars of R&D on our part. So the first thing is no surprise to anyone we work with creative individuals and we don't use large brainstorming sessions. I did when I first started the company I used freelancers I used brains large brainstorming groups and along the way through some analysis we really discovered that was not really working for us that actually the names were coming from employees and from small groups and so we've moved our process to at least two or three small teams of two people in each of those teams. So let's say on significant projects we always use three teams and each team gets a different briefing one team knows everything about the project but the other teams don't. We'll replace if we're working for Microsoft the second team thinks they're working for Apple. I mean they know it's disguised we're not keeping this from anyone and then the third team we take it out of computers and they might be naming a bicycle or a car or something like that. What we're trying to do is open up the coffers of creativity for this and when people are working on what they know is not the real assignment they are now free to make all kinds of mistakes and so most of our names have come out of the second or third team because wow they're yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the process at some point I will hopefully write either a good article on this or maybe even a book but this process would work for a lot of things. I know it would. All right now what's that second layer that I talked about? Well we've made significant investments in this area of linguistics and cognitive science and it's in two ways: one building proprietary knowledge so we know through and through research that we funded extensively about an area in language called or linguistics called sound symbolism so what are the sounds of the 26 letters of the alphabet and what do they do how do they evoke things. Well it turns out each of those letters sends out a signal that creates a certain sort of vibration or experience now there's been research on that over the years but there were some gaps and we decided to fill this and over the years we've had a very good relationship with Stanford University with their department of linguistics with we've hired linguists from MIT from Berkeley we have a linguistic internship here I actually just ran this number preparing for this discussion we have employed over four decades now 253 linguists most of them PhDs some contracts some actual employees. Well that's a lot of intellectual knowledge so we really have what I call a linguistic engine here and then we now have an operating network of I just checked on this figure yesterday we have 108 linguists in 76 countries that help us some do creative work others do just analysis of names for us. So now we have that creative framework we have creative teams working on this now we're tapping into databases that have over 18,000 small word units technically called morphemes and so we can tap in from a sound standpoint you know what are the sounds of reliability what are the sounds of aliveness and so with Sonos by the way we wanted things that are somewhat noisy right so s is a noisy letter like z or even v and so you begin to set priorities about what letters we're gonna use and that work from that we call it an engineering layer sort of floats up into the creative teams and so it's a mixture of things. At a certain point usually three to four weeks into this we might have two or 3,000 ideas I say ideas because they're not all solutions they're not all workable they may be just beginning ideas concepts and we sift through those and now one of the major challenges that we face and certainly our clients face is the need to clear a trademark for it to be not in conflict with a marketplace. We were almost reaching a tipping point in terms of difficulty of clearing names here and so we have paralegals here and a trademark attorney and we'll analyze those names that gets us to a much smaller set and then we'll do our linguistic work with our linguists and we end up with a set of names to show our clients. We'll do this twice with most assignments sometimes only once depending on timing and budget but we try to get two cycles partly because humans love to compare. Well you don't if you're looking for a house you don't just look at the first house and say okay let's sign us up. You look and learn that we don't need a swimming pool but we do need a view it's the same with names and so we get feedback from our clients and sometimes that's a co creative process where a client will come up with a word or a solution and we'll run that through screening mechanisms for them and that's really the process and the final phase is implementing.

Lenny Rachitsky:Let's actually pause at that because I work so much I wanna talk about this second step but we'll get to step three. There's just this is just blowing my mind all the things you guys do here this is incredible there's so many things here that are so unlike what I expected. First of all the creative folks that are actually coming up with these names what are what's kinda like the background of these people who are these who are these people.

David Plasik:Yeah so the fundamental quality is they're gonna be curious and they're gonna be hardworking and hopefully this is hard to screen for but you know lower egos. This is unlike the advertising business which I came from right so I have six years at large agency where a creative person or a copywriter can think about something and come in with three or four alternatives in terms of a headline or body copy and that might be refined a little bit and maybe sent back to the drawing board but it's a relatively simple process. No disrespect intended there. Here I can't just sit down and say okay we're naming a new car here and generate 100 names and you generate 100 names and something will fall out. Those names will not there's not enough in that list to clear through our screens of legal or linguistic screens and remember we start with a creative framework and criteria that the names need to meet. So we're looking for people who can churn out a lot of work and when that's rejected they just keep going so we look for tenacious people. Now we have and we'll probably get to this later but we have software that helps people generate names not really maybe five years down the road it'll actually spit out solutions but now it's helping us to generate ideas and directions and sound symbolism ideas word unit prefixes suffixes things like that. So it's relatively easy for anyone that works here to develop a list of two or 300 names over a three or four day period. Where do we find these people? More, writers from newspapers, reporters because they have to work fast their stories get rejected. People who might have written a novel. We have hired people from agencies over the years they work a little less effectively than others who have a speechwriter from Washington DC I wrote speeches there those people have to work hard crank out a lot of material get rejected candidate says don't like this start over. Those are more resilient people. That's where they come from. It's not easy to find these people it really isn't.

Lenny Rachitsky:Let me just throw out here I'm gonna ask you after we go through this process what people that don't have the resource and time to do this what they should do to come up with a good name I'm just gonna let people know as they're listening because I imagine many people are wondering but let's not go there yet. Okay how long does this process usually take what's like the ideal length that companies should expect when they wanna come up with an amazing name.

David Plasik:For us the ideal link is pretty short it's eight weeks for larger corporate projects where you have boards and a little more politicking to do and a few more presentations it's a three month turn and sometimes by the time they approve things and clear it it's a four month process.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay cool so eight weeks mostly if you're a big company with a lot of red tape you have to work through then longer. Okay this point you made about three different teams with different in almost context is so interesting so say let's use Windsurf as an example which is an amazing name killing it that you guys helped come up with so is the idea there okay here's we're naming this IDE AI IDE one of the teams is told no you're building a bicycle but here's all the same brief but it's a bicycle and then another team's bill you're building a AI I don't know lap like I don't know something nontechnical essentially right.

David Plasik:Yes.

Lenny Rachitsky:Like a cup say more about that because that is amazing because and you're finding that most of the best names come from the groups that aren't build let's name an amazing i ai id.

David Plasik:This is a good example so so in technology there there are some things that that if someone hands you a new phone and you look at it it's tangible and it's got a shape and color things like that easier to name but but you know the the the name of windsurf before it was windsurf was kodium right and so so it's all about a type of code or a process for coding that's intangible and even though we do an awful lot of technology work it is still hard for us to kind of really get a hold of what that is right so so our rule here is if there's something that is intangible like that we have to make it tangible and sometimes we do that not by not by giving a team and sometimes it's an individual the assignment to create ideas for the brand itself but to just dive into a particular context and in this case with windsurf it was this this is about sort of flow about giving people that are coding something much more of a flow process you know a smoother process a more dynamic process so in that case one team was just given the task of we want to look at a list of all the things that can communicate either in a real word like flow or metaphorically or in a sport about that kind of dynamics that kind of movement and there was windsurf sitting on a list i mean it's sometimes this is just it really just that simple of course you have to have the right framework and you have to give the right sort of directions to someone and you you windsurf for us particularly for me you know it checks all the boxes it's a it's a wonderful image it's an experience literally a physical experience it's a compound right two words put together we know from the research we've invested in that compounds like powerbook or facebook are multipliers of of of associations because there's wind and there's circles around that you know and then there's surf images around that so one plus one equals three right it's interesting that when we present compounds to clients we we we often get the comment well yes a little bit long and it's a compound i'd i'd rather have a shorter single word and then that that's why we actually did research on just how effective our compounds so we we could pass that information along we pass that along to the the team at at that time codium by the way could not have been a you know more intelligent nicer more respectful team that we've we've worked with i'm i'm so glad for their success but we explained to them about the multiplier effect of compounds we showed them imagery that they could use right i mean it's simple to to execute on something like that and so that that's how that that's how that came about i i'll stop there and and see if you need more information or not.

Lenny Rachitsky:Let me actually follow this thread real quick it's gonna be kind of a tangent you guys have been working with ai companies more and more recently which is so interesting is what's what's different about naming ai products from traditional products non ai i guess.

David Plasik:First off we are working mostly with engineers engineers who haven't you know delved into the world of kind of creativity and necessarily marketing and that that's their strength and what we have to do is we have to sort of balance their strength with our strength so there's a little bit of a challenge there but i think we 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 of the internet right and and the world wide web and that was moving pretty fast but the internet compared to this looks like a a daycare school or something like that i mean so so we're we're challenged by just keeping up with with developments right 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 and the real or an anthropic and we when when we saw this trend of that ai is gonna take off and and it was an intuitive feeling on my part i just you know i could have been wrong i said let's let's find out what's going on here so so both not only like who's developing the products but how do people think about ai and we did a series of research i mean you know 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 they really have different views developers are all totally positive on it okay 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 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 on to and much more natural as opposed to a codium and they listened to us they're as simple as that and and and in this case we were right and by the way there's also i have to say there's some luck to this windsurf happened to be available and they they sought right away not not not exactly right away but it took about a week going back and forth to to to to select it so let me stop there and see if if that's answers your question.

Lenny Rachitsky: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 anysphere bold with stack stackblitz winsorf codium basically everyone when does it make sense to change your name windsorf just officially changed their entire company name to windsorf from codium it was just a product so let me just ask you that when does it make sense feels like a huge deal and a very challenging thing to do.

David Plasik:It is challenging and it and the larger you are and the more customer base you have it it becomes you know a significant project so the first thing is you have to you have to make an argument that it's worth the change right that that we're going to be better off by changing our name so there's there's a couple of situations where you want to you want to change first one is let's focus first on startups startups get going early that you know they get into y combinator or something like that they're raising money and they just need a name and although they know what they're doing and that may change by 10 or 15 degrees it's almost like we just got to have a name i mean that is the absolute expression i hear from when it when a startup calls and says we want to change your name you know we started off a year and a half ago we just needed the name for the documents and so we chose x right and it's not a very good name so that's that's example number one number two is the company actually has you know pivoted right and so the name that they have no longer really reflects who they are or who they're becoming and which makes that name ineffective and the third is that a company has merged and and it's time now to to to create a new start and reflect to the marketplace that we're we're we're new now maybe bigger we have but certainly have more capabilities and we want you to know about it and because of that we're changing our name to blank which reflects those capabilities at some some level.

Lenny Rachitsky:I'm excited to have Andrew Luo joining us today Andrew is CEO of OneSchema one of

Andrew Luo:Our longtime podcast sponsors welcome Andrew thanks for having me Lenny great to be here.

Lenny Rachitsky:So what is new with OneSchema I know that you work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp and Vanta and Watershed I heard you guys launched a new data intake product that automates the hours of manual work that teams spend importing and mapping and integrating CSV and Excel files.

Andrew Luo:Yes so we just launched the two point o of OneSchema FileFeeds we've rebuilt it from the ground up with AI we saw so many customers coming to us with teams of data engineers that struggled with the manual work required to clean messy spreadsheets FileFeeds two point o allows nontechnical teams to automate the process of transforming CSV and Excel files with just a simple prompt we support all of the trickiest file integrations SFTP S3 and even email.

Lenny Rachitsky:I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this how nice would it be to take this.

Andrew Luo:Off our road map and instead use something like OneSchema absolutely Lenny we've heard so many horror stories of outages from even just a single bad record in transactions employee files purchase orders you name it debugging these issues is often like finding a needle in a haystack OneSchema stops any bad data from entering your system and automatically validates your files generating error reports with the exact issues in all bad files.

Lenny Rachitsky:I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust Andrew thank you so much for joining me if you wanna learn more head on over to 1schema.co that's 1schema.co I wanna come back to this linguist piece which I know is really unique to the way you guys operate and it's so interesting so you employed you said over 250 linguists over the course of your business career this linguist step the way you described it is they're not coming up with names they're more kind of like a filter for here's all the names we've come up with here's the ones that are good linguistically is that right or is that team also suggesting names.

David Plasik:Yeah some of the people there particularly depending on the assignment will actually help us create names for sure right and so we have linguists here and then we have in the network we have linguists and those linguists are contracts to to us not full time employees so so there's a little bit of both but the preponderance of their work in our linguistic network is to evaluate names not only just is it does it mean something negative or positive but are there cultural implications to it political implications or even things that a natural disaster that would have happened somewhere that that you know no one here would know about even if we had if this was in Italy and there was you know a bridge or a flood that killed a lot of people someone that speaks Italian very well here say at Berkeley University but has lived here for twenty years wouldn't know about that and we and we we don't we don't want anything linguistically that would slow our clients down and so that's why we've invested in building this network we have a woman that runs the network for it so it's not an insignificant facet of our business that we have to run and manage.

Lenny Rachitsky:Is there any you love that didn't pass the linguistic filter that ended up being like oh shit that's a really bad name in this culture?

David Plasik:Yeah, well it happens frequently where we will find something that isn't really terrible but it's worrisome to us. It's interesting, you know, cultures like Australian or people in Australia, they have a lot of interesting expressions right? And so we do find things that sound like a certain kind of shrimp and things like that and we eliminate those things. And then we find things that have sort of sexual connotations, we eliminate those. I would say it happens every third or fourth project we will find something that we eliminate and never show the client.

Lenny Rachitsky:And something you love and you're like okay I guess we can show that one?

David Plasik:That's true, that happens. It does, it does.

Lenny Rachitsky:You also said this really interesting thing about how every letter of the alphabet has a vibrance and an experience. Can you give a few examples of that? I know you're not the person doing that work specifically but just what are some letter feelings?

David Plasik:Well yeah, I do. The work is from the linguist but at this point I'm pretty adept in it. So let's look at, I'll start with the letter V because it's so illustrative of what this is about. V from our research is the most alive and vibrant sound in the English alphabet and whether you were born in Rome or in Sausalito, California, if you know that as you go around the world there are going to be some exceptions, but it's going to have that vibrancy. So look at Corvette, I mean they probably didn't know about V but it's a perfect name for a car that's fast and has a big engine that roars. Think about Viagra, same idea. And there's been surprises to us: B, the sound of the letter B is one of the most reliable sounds in the English alphabet. That was one of our rationales for Blackberry. That's another example of a client who thought we were crazy when they presented Blackberry. We said, well let's stop and look at some of the assets here. First off, black colors, technology, yes, not everybody knows the word berry but we have those two Bs. We talked about the nature of a compound and suddenly people lean forward to consider it as opposed to rejecting it too fast. So those are just two examples. I mentioned Z in Azure, that's a noisy letter. X is fast and crisp as a sound and of course there's semantic value to all these letters too. X is about innovation from aircraft to computers, so you have to look at the semantics of it and the sound symbolism of it.

Lenny Rachitsky:This is so fascinating. I could listen to this stuff all day just thinking about Vercel with the V that very aligns with what they're trying to do, just like very strong, opinionated, yes way of working. And Guillermo, he feels like a V person.

David Plasik:He is, and there's an example of a group that had a lot of confidence, right? And what their product is is very innovative. So we had permission there to create something new because Vercel is a coin solution. Notice that we put some very simple, easy to process things together: there is 'ver' — you know in this case, vino veritas, truth and wine, things like that; you have verde, green, very familiar; and then there's sell like accelerate something, which is really what they do, they accelerate a client's performance. So that was a relatively easy name for us to present and for them to sort of grasp. By the way, that's known as processing fluency which is when you think about how the brain processes information, we're told by cognitive science that our brains are a little bit on the lazy side, we don't like complex things and so we really strive to make all of our solutions relatively easy for the brain to process. So it leans in towards them as opposed to 'I'm too busy, I'm walking past that.' Names that are complicated are a liability and we really avoid that. But Vercel, perfect fluency.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay, let's go back actually to the three steps. So we covered two. I went, it took us on a long tangent to dive into a lot of the stuff you shared with the second step which you call invent. So it's essentially the three steps are — was it create, which...?

David Plasik:Yeah, it's identify, identify and I use the word invent with intention because it's more than creative. And then the final thing is implement. Now for us, we're not a design firm, we're really focused on brand names and the nomenclature that supports the name. So for us implement is helping the client team if they choose for us to help them with the presentations as it goes up the chain, to help them sort of write a longer rationale for why these names, if they are presenting three names to the president of their company or the CMO, why these names make a lot of sense and to help them develop what we call prototypes. We'll put the name on a baseball cap, on a t-shirt; we'll put the name in a mock-up ad in the Wall Street Journal, something very positive like, 'because of Procter and Gamble’s new blank product, P&G shares gained 10% this year,' so that executives can see that the lift that name can have. That's our implementation phase for them. We also do consumer research or customer research at that stage and do that probably about 50% of the time on our projects where we're really talking to their customers and putting the names in a series of drills that make them not the marketing person for the day, but really making these customers feel that this is a new brand and then we're asking about expectations or seeing how these names fire their imagination. That's the most important thing in research — not is the name popular, are they comfortable with it, does it fit the concept. If you're asking people 'does this fit the concept' you are inevitably always gonna get a descriptive name.

Lenny Rachitsky:You make such a good point about how you need to arm the people working with you with ammo to win over other folks internally because if the person working with you is on board then and the name is bold and not an obvious winner, I could see it being important to be like, 'Here's what you should show them to help them see the story and the mock-ups and all that.'

David Plasik:Yes, and what's really important is to help their management see this in the context of the marketplace and their customers. This is a very human thing but people want their boss to be happy, right? They want to be okay with their boss. So they're thinking about, 'I don't know if my boss would like this, he's more conservative or she's more conservative.' We try in a very diplomatic way to say this has nothing really in the end to do with your boss; it has to do with the marketplace. That's easy for me to say because I'm not working at P&G or Intel, but we really try to give that advice because it is about being successful in the marketplace. We first try to separate the clients that we work with. We really want to work with clients that play to win, that want to win, not just want to not lose in a marketplace. We encourage our direct clients to lead the process, to really say, 'Hey, if a manager or a CMO or a president says we're the team that's going to execute on this and we believe in this, we can make this work,' they usually rally around it. But if you're just taking names up to a manager and saying, 'What do you think?' and there's a different outcome offered, so we like to be in that implementation phase because we have so much experience and credibility with people.

Lenny Rachitsky:And you said that you come up with three to 4,000 names, that's the top of...

David Plasik:The funnel, yeah. And just to clarify, it's ideas, directions, it's not complete ready-to-ship names, not ready to ship names at all. It's a very inefficient process and a little chaotic. So in that list of 3,000 names there are probably 250 potential diamonds that have to be fractured and examined.

Lenny Rachitsky:I really want to see just like a documentary of this process at some point. This is the closest we're going to get for now but this is so interesting. I want to ask about how you would approach this if you're just a startup that doesn't have the time or resource to do this. But before I do that, is there anything else around the process that you guys go through with clients that you think is important to share or that you think might surprise people?

David Plasik:I think we've covered it. I do.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay, yeah great, awesome. Okay, so most people listening to this are there's a lot of founders, lot of PMs on product teams, they're working on new feature, they're about to launch a product, they got accepted into YC, they're about to like launch a product, then they have I don't know, let's say they have a couple weeks gotta come up.

David Plasik:With a name, what should they do? So the first thing I do is to say, okay, let's forget about developing the name for right now and I will have them, and I think this is a good exercise for anybody. We do it here internally when we think about our business so I say just because most of this now because of COVID is on video and I'll say just draw a shape of a diamond on a piece of paper in front of you and I said on the top of that diamond put the word win, right? You know how do you define winning is really it. I said now on that other next corner of the diamond what do you have to win? Write that down on the bottom, what do you need to win? And then on that final angle on the left hand side what do you have to say to win? Okay, then I said yeah let's go all the way to that final thing of what do you have to say to win and that's where you just get people thinking about well you know what we really have here is and we're better than this and and and then I'll just say okay now what you want to take that because this is really should be about experience and behavior, how do you want to behave in the marketplace and how do you want the marketplace to behave towards you and what kind of experience are you creating because and and then they'll start you know talking a little bit I'll say now you just need to probe on that you need to keep going you need to look at metaphors because this is about experience and I'll just give them some of our examples so we've talked about when you have Blackberry it it it says to the marketplace they're not like the other guys I mean think of something like Google versus Infoseek right Google is an experience Google says I don't know what these guys are going do but it's not this practical mundane InfoSeek right and that's what attracts people and so I'll do a little coaching like that and and then that usually kind of sets them free and they're now thinking about it not as a word which has maybe limited value but as creating experience which has the potential for unlimited value.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay so let me try to reflect this back for folks so they so the advice is create draw a triangle so you're coming up with a name draw a triangle at the top win yes at the bottom left was it how do you win?

David Plasik:Yeah what what you so so the diamond is you know a...

Lenny Rachitsky:Oh diamond okay, I see two triangles my mind, okay got it a diamond great.

David Plasik:And so on that next angle there on on the right side is what do you have to win already right because they they wouldn't be you know either in a Y Combinator or getting some seed money if they didn't have something to win right and so and that's and and often people startups don't appreciate how much they actually do have to win because they're so busy and so stressed on on what they're doing and then what what do they need to win and then finally what do you need to say right and and and and then back up to you know defining what is winning to us which by the way if we you know we start with that question usually on an assignment that we've been awarded and if we're in a room with five people all five people have a different you know definition of what their definition of that company winning and that's good to kinda sort that out because we can move down different different avenues from a creative standpoint.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay let's just make sure people have these phrases because this is awesome and I imagine many people are gonna be taking notes I'm like cool I'm gonna do this I hope so say the four points of the diamond again just so folks can write it all down.

David Plasik:At the top of the diamond is just the word win and underneath that is how do we define winning for us as a company right and and that that can start off being simple like you know we wanna be the dominant player here but you really have to work at that what does that really mean right the second on that right hand tip there of the diamond is what do we have to win what are we doing now that makes us a winner then we go down to the final the bottom of the diamond and it's what do we need to win there could be technical things that people talk about talent and resources often there they'll say you know we need a good name we always correct that it's not the good name it's the right name and then finally is what do we need to say and that's where I say that's where you wanna spend some time in really thinking about all the things you need to say that you can say or you even like to say which maybe right now you can't say but you want a name that actually is gonna have the flexibility as to when you can say that it still works and that gets them into behavior and experience and that usually launches a really good a good discussion with founders in internally.

Lenny Rachitsky:And so in the when you say have to win the what you're thinking about there is what is it that you have that will help you win and then what do you need to have in...

David Plasik:Order to win and and all companies are in that same situation they they have a bunch of stuff but they need you know a P&G might say well we need a you know a good distributor okay all right well that's that put that on the list right and then you might say well we need an when it gets to what do we have to say we have to say the right things so that a distributor is interested in us and then that that then you go down sort of an avenue there well what what is that right and it all it should if you work at it it's not this is not a a one hour exercise may be an you know repeated over the next four or five days.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay so you have this diamond and then the idea is just sit and put names down in a google doc let's say.

David Plasik:Yeah and then you start but but there is this in and maybe it's naivete guess that's probably the best word for this is that because I do hear this all the time hey you know we've worked at this we got a list of 200 names and you know they but they don't we we don't think there's something there and I'll say well 200 names is not enough right get to a 1,500 names and directions don't evaluate them just just generate names and directions and ideas and then have a meeting and don't evaluate but speculate you know what could we do with this name what's the potential here the there's a lot of overevaluation in our industry right it it's makes sense it's you know we survive as humans because we figure out what's wrong with this picture right if if I wanna cross the street is it safe to cross the street what's going on those kinds of things you have to counter that you have to say let let's just suspend judgment for a while and and let's let's do an exercise here where we take these 10 names that we think might work and what are we gonna do with it because it's how you execute you know going back to windsurf if as we showed them pictures of people windsurfing and waves and things if they said you know that just doesn't work for us at all I'm very uncomfortable with well then it's not their name right but they leaned into it okay I can see this is you know easy for us to execute as dynamic is different so so that's why we build these prototypes for people and that's what I think the best advice I can give to whether it's a startup or someone starting a new cookie company is it's not just a list of 200 names it's you know 10 or 15 lists of 200 names and it's thinking about what do we have to say here what behavior how do we want people to feel in the marketplace about us I imagine with Google people felt relief that it wasn't a descriptive thing that you you know that there was something new out there in the marketplace.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay so one more question along these lines so say you have a list of let's say 2,000 or a thousand names there's this tension between choosing something like as a person that is doing them themselves your advice is choose something bold not something descriptive you won't know it when you see it very hard to do obviously when you're doing it by yourself any just advice for not you know not losing sight of that piece and just throwing out things that feel too scary finding a name that's actually bold as you suggest.

Lenny Rachitsky:Infoseek that's such a descriptive name now that I think about it yes.

David Plasik:First off we we this pure human psychology we really humans only pay attention to what is new or what is different I should say right so if if you're looking at shoes and they're all black black black black and then the next pair of shoes is red that's the first thing you focus on and so that usually gives people permission you know they'll say okay I get that so so look for what is really different between the names that you have on your list but also what's different from what's out in the marketplace right well you know then you get a client like Microsoft saying well Azure is different there's going to be a lot of cloud stuff and there's a relevant point there Azure is blue and so there's a slight logical connection that I think gave them more permission to move forward with it frankly but listen this this is not an easy task I mean that's that's why we're in this business and why I felt we should be specialized because if you start doing design and or advertising or you know other things you you can't have the the intellectual engine you can't acquire the intellectual engine that that we have so I know it's difficult but it can be done and you just have to give yourself some time but stop evaluating suspend judgment and speculate that that's that's my number one advice to to people trying to do this on their own now how can you get help you can you can talk to your employees but it's not so much what do you think of this name it's what do you think this name could do for us that's a much better question right if you go out and talk to friends who don't work for your company there's a there's a fun drill that I suggest I said listen go out to them and say they'll know what you're doing and say you know what we just have a new competitor and their name is blank what do you think about that what happens there is you're not asking them to give you an opinion and to evaluate a name you're asking them then what does that name do for you the information you're getting is that that name they're telling you what that name does for them what how it helps them to imagine which is a fundamental role of of any name.

David Plasik:Slight tangent but I'm going to go to our kind of research we do mostly quantitative research now but for years we did qualitative work and we still do but what we found in we were always looking for the offset this way we're always looking for this answer from consumers if a consumer said well I don't really know much about that new product but I know that they're not like the other guys that's when we knew we had a good name because they were now what what happened there I mean the technical term that we use is we've that name will create a pre disposition to consider this product because they're not like the other guys as opposed to I already have something like that I don't I don't I'm busy I don't need another one of those things I need something new and different and hopefully better

Lenny Rachitsky:That's awesome that's a good reminder there's a quote that I found of yours that's exactly along these lines if your team is comfortable with the name chances are you don't have the name yet

David Plasik:Yes yeah and we and by the way the opposite of that is we look for polarization we we look for tension in a team about arguing about these things because we think that polarization is a sign of strength in the word and interesting story the person who taught me that honestly was Andy Grove over the Pentium name because and I learned a lot from him I always say this I I I you know I just was very fortunate to to work with him on on Pentium and CN and a few other things but when we when we went to you know an executive committee to present Pentium and by the way internally one of the names that makes sense here descriptive bunch of engineers pro chip hey it's professional it's premium and it's chip so it should be pro chip right okay so Andy had me give a presentation about the strengths of this thing and he said he said now let me tell you why I think this is the right name he said because I see the polarization here in it amongst people there's this you know pro chip over here there's the Pentium thing he said that tells me there's energy for Pentium here and he said that's why I think we should go with it and I've never forgotten that and so we do look for that and when we tell that story people say you know you're right there is I mean we are arguing about this and there is an intensity with the name and that's what you want you don't want to go out into the marketplace this very competitive marketplace regardless of the category with something that doesn't have a level of boldness or intensity

Lenny Rachitsky:That was an amazing story just again so kind of a a tip here is if half your team or I don't know some percentage of team hates it some percentage of your team loves it that's a good sign

David Plasik:Yeah it is it is look for that polarization that's what we look for

Lenny Rachitsky:I also love this tip of asking people if or hey our competitor just launched they're called Windsurf how your team reacts if they're just like oh wow that's a great name I'm I'm interested in that product that's that's what you wanna look for

David Plasik:Yes exactly yeah

Lenny Rachitsky:How important is the.com for the name you come up with I imagine it's really hard to get these days just what do you think about domain name when you think about naming

David Plasik:I am so glad you asked this question because it is at this point it doesn't really matter at all the the the.com or URL address has become an area code and whether you're in 415 or 615 it doesn't really matter to people and now with AI you know search you know SEO is going to be less important right and so I just think the principle in play here is you got to get the right name first and then if you can get the com sure go ahead but if you can't there's ways around that you you know you can put a a prefix in front of it or a little word in front of it or after it or you go to AI or something something like that but the the principle in play is let's get the right name first for those who really and there are people who really get hung up on the com and they tend to be sort of older by the way and have in their mind sort of the hotness of the internet and having a com which did did make a difference twenty five years ago it's twenty five years now or thirty right the good news is because they're less valuable you can typically buy a URL if you negotiate the right way and have time for fifteen twenty twenty five 30,000 and you know we say hey if you can do that have fun I'd put the $30,000 into marketing

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome that's reassuring I imagine many founders just like goddamn it there's no names available anymore let me zoom out and just ask you this question as a maybe a closing thought to our conversation say you were just in an elevator ride with someone and I'm sure this happens to you or just like hey David I gotta come up with a name what what's your biggest tip for coming up with a great name what would your answer be

David Plasik:I'd go back to think about forget about the word think about behavior and experience and then the second thing from just a a creative help I'm a big believer in synchronicity and we try to sort of force synchronicity here and I'll give you a couple of examples of that but this this idea of connecting sort of dots you know two unrelated ideas together and so I'll say look if someone says well you know we're we make we make sailboats and I'm and I'm trying to I'm here in Sausalito guess that's why I thought about that but and I am trying to create a new a new name for my company that builds sailboats I would say forget about sailboats I would go and pick out some magazines about hunting or flight flight flying magazines and I would just look through those get a notepad out and and put out words that you like things expressions that you like so you're you're and then that synchronously I said I would bet you $5 that out of those two magazines you will get a word that you never would have thought of but somehow it would relate to sailing

Lenny Rachitsky:That's that connects very much to your story of how you have these different teams the teams that end up coming up with a winning name are the ones thinking about a very different version of that product yes so interesting okay David this was everything I was hoping it'd be I feel like we're gonna help so many people is there anything that we haven't covered or that you want to leave listeners with as a final nugget or piece of advice or story before we get to our very exciting lightning round

David Plasik:I I I'm gonna emphasize one point I think which is that I really would like the the listeners to really begin to think about how how valuable a brand name can be that is you're not just looking for a word you're looking for this experience right and and if you get it right not just a good name but the right name the value is almost unlimited right and so give yourself some time give yourself a budget give yourself the right resources to do that second thing is you know we try to really be helpful here and so I am always happy to talk to people about where they are in a process and if we can help or just give them a little bit of advice and we we schedule you know we call them office hours here we're judicious about it but we we are open to that it's just playing a long term game so I'd like to leave that with viewers also also we're about to book out your office hours

Lenny Rachitsky:I love that offer I think a lot of people are gonna take advantage of that that is super cool David with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round I've got five questions for you are you ready

Lenny Rachitsky:Yes, I'm ready.

David Plasik:There's a book called Resilience which was written by a former Navy SEAL and it's not about combat; it is just a tiny bit about being a SEAL but it is about overcoming things, right, and it's about tenacity. I think, you know, everybody in the world, we all have challenges and things and I do recommend that to people. The second book is Andrew Roberts' latest book on Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill is really one of my heroes. He was one of the most unusual, provocative statesmen, politicians of the twentieth century and here's another person that talks about tenacity and ups and downs and sticks with it. So I do like to recommend it. Some people just kinda, you know, tip their head and say, I don't know, it seems like maybe a boring book, but those are two books that I would...

Lenny Rachitsky:Ever say that Churchill's story is boring? That's absurd.

David Plasik:I think so, I agree, I agree it's absurd, yes, yep.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah, he's so fascinating. There's a recent documentary I think that really showed me the yes, the character, yeah, yeah, incredible. Okay, what's a recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

David Plasik:For me, it's the Yellowstone series. We, we're very fortunate as family, we have some property in Montana and...

Lenny Rachitsky:You're living the life.

David Plasik:I'm, I'm, yeah very. Listen, I can't tell you how fortunate I am. I bought this property twenty-eight years ago so it was a lot cheaper than... in a snowstorm. It just felt right. But I think particularly the 1883, that the precursor to...

Lenny Rachitsky:I was going to ask if you saw that because that was incredible.

David Plasik:Yes, and then the after, 1923, which is the postwar. 1883 really gives people a sense of what it took by those early Americans to build a life in a place like... a beautiful place but a hard, tough place like Montana. And it's just phenomenal. The person producing and writing those things is incredibly talented, Taylor Sheridan I think is his name.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah, I love that. Like in the story, it's like Montana was the easy route almost from the journey they went on.

David Plasik:That's right. It's very true, yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky:Oh man, yeah, and like you almost don't even need to watch Yellowstone. Yellowstone just starting with 1883 is...

David Plasik:How it works I in fact I recommend people I say there's three but if you really want the the the truth about the American West it's it's 1883.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah I've suggested that on this podcast a bunch actually so I love that that's where you went next question do you have a favorite product that you have recently discovered that you really love maybe one you named maybe not well I didn't name it although it's got

David Plasik:A very good name to it we are a whole family I have two daughters and and my wife we're all fly fishermen and last summer really I bought this for myself but I gave it to my wife but it was one of those things that was present for her but I knew I was going to use it more and it's a it's a hardy it's an old British fly rod but it's a beautiful rod it's just perfect for the big rivers of of Montana so that's my my favorite purchase.

Lenny Rachitsky:That's the first fly fishing rod of the podcast excellent choice next question do you have a favorite life motto that you often find yourself coming back to sharing with friends or family.

David Plasik:I do I do and I it's it's a little longer so so I wrote it I I have it written here somewhere but it's it's the the quote from T E Lawrence Lawrence of Arabia Arabia here and if I can find it I should should be yeah I think it's a wonderful quote so I think hopefully your viewers like this here's what he said he said that all men dream but not equally those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men for they may not on their for for for they may act on their dreams with open eyes to make them possible I I just I read that years ago and it just it it it hit me pretty hard so so yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky:That is an amazing quote it makes me think about the the quote about the the man in the arena.

David Plasik:Yes yeah it's the same it's same idea it's just a little different yeah and I also think Lawrence of Arabia is a fascinating person to to to what he what he did so inspiring in some ways.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah an amazing movie okay final question let me just try this is there a name that you didn't name that you just like wow that was an amazing name I wish I had come up with that name.

David Plasik:I'll tell you there is one name and it's DreamWorks I think it's a wonderful name and it's somewhat of a somewhat ironic that the entertainment industry in general has pretty mundane names right so you have all these talented people and yet when you look at the names of production studios movie houses you know Comcast you know things things like that it's just it's very mundane here's DreamWorks just like Sonos check all the boxes compound dream you know you you expect something great from DreamWorks they've created an experience the experience of dreaming in a movie I think it's a wonderful name I wish I'd done it.

Lenny Rachitsky:That's such a cool answer David thank you so much for doing this this is incredible I learned a ton as I imagined I feel like a lot of people are gonna have a much easier time thinking about approaching this topic.

David Plasik:Well I certainly hope so I do it's been very very enjoyable very thoughtful and I have nothing but respect for the way you you do this and the talent that you have so very fortunate that we've come together and we we live in the same place so maybe we get together for a cup of coffee or something.

Lenny Rachitsky:Northern California for the win yeah thank you so much for being here.

David Plasik:You're very welcome.

Lenny Rachitsky:Bye everyone take care thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'sPodcast.com see you in the next episode.