Names
So how do you create a synthetic name these days. Well over the last twenty years, there have been some incredible trends. Right now, it is synthetic fun names like meebo.
Just a few years ago, it was names that were just fun like yahoo, amazon and google.
Then there was the era of the meaningful synthetic name like Compaq, Lexus, etc.
Before that was what I think of as the tech era, where everything sounds like computech, microsoft and so forth. Everything that micro something or compu something or something tech.
And before then that were the three letter acronym years where you took very boring words and made them cool so Digital Equipment Corporation was DEC, then there was IBM, NCR, CDC, etc.
Then there was the era of faceless companies like General Motors, General Electric, American Telephone & Telegraph, US Steel and so forth.
Finally, you have the era of the & Sons era, where you had people's names like J.P. Morgan Bank, Carnegie Steel or Ford Motor Company.
In the venture business, everything seems to sound like a tree (Sequoia, Oak, Evergreen, Madrona) or it sounds like a TLA (MDV, KPCB, TCV) or it sounds like