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Peter Thiel: Your Startup's Name Predicts Whether It Will Succeed or Fail

By Peter Thiel · Startup Growth · 2 min read

Napster. You nap music. You nap a kid. No wonder the government shut it down.

Key Points

PayPal was a friendly name. The friend that helps you pay.
Napster sounded criminal. The government treated it that way.
Airbnb sounds innocent and non-threatening. Uber sounds like it's above the law.
Facebook was about reading and discovering. MySpace was about fictional self-promotion.

There's a certain version where the whole arc of the company was implicit in the names.

Your Name Tells the World Who You Are

Peter Thiel believes something most founders dismiss as trivial. The name of your company predicts your future. Not metaphorically. Literally.

It shapes how regulators see you. How customers feel about you. How the press covers you. The name is the first story people tell about your company.

A company name isn't branding. It's prophecy.

PayPal vs. Napster

PayPal. The pal who helps you pay. Warm. Friendly. Trustworthy. You want that company to succeed.

Napster. You nap some music. You nap a kid. It sounds like stealing. And the government came in and shut it down within years. The name told you exactly what would happen.

PayPal sounded like a friend. Napster sounded like a crime.

Airbnb vs. Uber

Thiel likes Airbnb way more than Uber as a name. Airbnb sounds like a sweet virtual bed and breakfast. Light. Innocent. Non-threatening to regulators.

Uber sounds like a bad name from Germany in the 1930s. What are you above, exactly? Maybe the law. From a regulatory perspective, Airbnb's name gives it a massive advantage.

Airbnb sounds harmless to regulators. Uber sounds like it's daring them to fight.

Facebook vs. MySpace

Social networks involve reading and writing. You write about yourself first. Then you read about others. Over time, reading dominates writing.

Facebook was about learning about real people at Harvard. Reading. Discovering. MySpace started with wannabe actors in LA creating fictional personas. Writing. Performing. The name that aligned with reading won.

Reading dominates writing on social networks. Facebook's name aligned with that truth.

The Whole Arc Was in the Name

Thiel makes a bold claim. You could have predicted the outcome of Facebook vs. MySpace just by analyzing the names. The product arc was implicit.

Most founders spend weeks on their pitch deck and five minutes on their name. That's backward. Your name is the most compressed version of your company's story. Get it right.

The entire trajectory of a company can be embedded in its name.