The Orthogonal Bet: The Art of Naming

Danny Crichton:
Hey, it's Danny Crichton here. We take a break from our usual risk-giving programming to bring you another episode from our ongoing mini-series, The Orthogonal Bet hosted by Lux scientist and resident Samuel Arbesman. The Orthogonal Bet is an exploration of unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Take it away, Sam.

Samuel Arbesman:
Hello and welcome to The Orthogonal Bet. I'm your host, Samuel Arbesman. In this episode, I speak with Eli Altman, the managing director of A Hundred Monkeys, a company that specializes in the art of naming. More specifically, A Hundred Monkeys works with clients to come up with the perfect name for a company or product or whatever you might need.
The art of naming is something that I find fascinating. Throughout human history, the power of names is something we see in stories and religion. A name when well-crafted, is able to draw upon emotions and associations in supremely magical ways. I wanted to talk to Eli because he has been immersed in this field for decades, growing up with a father who specialized in this.
I wanted to learn about this art and how it works, the kinds of names that make sense, how experts in naming balance competing considerations when coming up with a name and even the different species of names. Eli and I had a chance to discuss the hallmarks of a good name, the importance of writing and storytelling in naming, AI's impact on naming and much more. Let's dive in.
Eli, great to chat with you and welcome to The Orthogonal Bet. It's a lot of fun. Before we kind of get into the details of naming and branding, kind of mechanics of all that, my sense is you've had a pretty unique path into this field itself. I'd love to hear about how you actually got into this world.

Eli Altman:
Sure. When I was growing up, my father was initially running an ad agency and then he eventually left that ad agency to start a naming company. He realized that in advertising, he wound up doing a bunch of naming, and one day he just sat down and looked at, oh, we actually generated 50 names for things.
And it was a part of the business he really enjoyed, so he started A Hundred Monkeys in 1990. In 1990 I was six, and so I grew up with a naming company in the background, and he was very happy to have me and my brother participate.
On long car rides, we'd sort of sit in the back with our own yellow notepads and come up with names for things, and then most of them I'm sure were pretty bad, but every once in a while he would write something down and when you saw that, you knew like, oh, okay. I actually came up with a good name.

Samuel Arbesman:
That's fantastic.

Eli Altman:
That's how it started. I took my first independent project when I was 16.

Samuel Arbesman:
Wow.

Eli Altman:
Yeah. Paid part of my way through college doing that. Went to design school because I thought I wanted to be a designer. I did want to be a designer, and then after school I got hired as a brand strategist for a bigger design agency called Meta.
They knew I had this naming background, and so eventually they wanted to have me run naming projects there. After a little while of doing that, it sort of felt like I was veering back to the naming path that I started on, so came back to A Hundred Monkeys, this is maybe 15 years ago. And then my father retired and I've been running the studio for the past 10, 12 years.

Samuel Arbesman:
That's amazing. Do you think the fact that you initially wanted to do design, was it one of these things of I have to run away from my roots even though I feel like design is not so far away or it was one of these kinds of things where naming was just not what you initially thought and you had to make your path back to it?

Eli Altman:
It was always a very small world as far as I was concerned. I don't go to naming group meetups or really engage with the community that much. Maybe that's my fault. Maybe I should, but I sort of believe in target fixation to some degree that if you spend a lot of your time around other people who are doing the same things, everything just kind of starts to look and sound the same.
And so I was always into art, into graphic design, drawing, painting, still had that going on, and also no naming programs at universities. I still took a bunch of writing classes and stuff like that, but probably as close as I could get.

Samuel Arbesman:
You mentioned this naming community and you said it's kind of small, but how big is this industry or this community?

Eli Altman:
We have on our site, we have a list of our competitors which is ever expanding, and we get people who ask to be added to it. It's a little bit like being an influencer or something. If you want to say you're a namer, there's no authoritative body that needs to okay you.

Samuel Arbesman:
Like there's no guild or membership or anything like that.

Eli Altman:
Yeah, yeah. You're in, you did it. So yeah, I mean, I don't know. There's definitely some people out there doing good work, but there's also just a whole bunch of people who it's like a side gig or a little thing they're interested in. There's a lot of stuff out there.

Samuel Arbesman:
To relate it to that, I mean is, I don't know, frustrating maybe is the wrong word, but how do you feel about the fact that probably at some level people think, oh yeah, I can name things, I've come up with and even though there is clearly, and I want to get into this more, but there clearly is an art and a process to naming things well, but do you get pushback or do you kind of find it frustrating that everyone kind of thinks, oh, this is something that can be done? How do you respond to that?

Eli Altman:
Absolutely happens all the time. We've been in this business for a long time and lucky enough to get the vast majority of our projects through repeat and referral business. I don't need to convince anyone that they should really name something or rename something or that their name's not good. Always happy to have the conversation, but at this point, my own sanity requires I just let it go.

Samuel Arbesman:
That sounds like the good attitude.

Eli Altman:
Yeah. I've had people tell me about just everything they've named and why it had to be and why their names are great. That's awesome. If you're happy with what you did, love it. I have no need to tell you, you could have done better.

Samuel Arbesman:
It's like you do you.

Eli Altman:
Yeah, exactly.

Samuel Arbesman:
Related to the fact that there is this real process and it is not something that you can just do in 15 minutes or whatever, maybe you can kind of give a taste of the process of naming a company or a product, and there is this very interesting, rich process.

Eli Altman:
The naming process has practical considerations and creative considerations. If I were to roughly break it into two categories, the creative considerations are things like how do you stand out? How do you say something interesting? How do you get someone interested? How are you memorable, searchable, right?
Then now we're starting to veer into more practical considerations. That's how you do in search engines, whether URL is a consideration, cultural and linguistic screening, is this a name that's going to need to work in a variety of countries, languages, and then the ever present one is trademark.
You want to have some legal rights to whatever you're coming up with, most likely, not always. Then there's various databases worldwide that you need to confer with, and then that process is like, we could talk about that for over an hour and it would be incredibly boring, but there's a lot of details.

Samuel Arbesman:
We can sidestep those details. Yeah.

Eli Altman:
Yeah.

Samuel Arbesman:
What are the different fields and domains that you feel like are relevant aside from the legal aspects?

Eli Altman:
It's a good question. It's really expansive. I think one of the things that I like most about naming is the project cycle is pretty short. We tend to work with a client four to six weeks. In that time, particularly early on in the project, we're learning as much as we possibly can about who they are, what they do, who their competitors are, what their company could be doing in three to five years, how they may or may not pivot.
All these things just to try to understand what the creative realities are of a naming project. It's great because you get to dive into all of these little esoteric areas, and typically it's at the cutting edge of whatever's happening because most of the people starting businesses or creating products are sort of in areas that are nascent.
So doing a lot of AI naming, so I have an opportunity to learn as much as I can about AI and how people are using it, and so it's a little school in that way where you spend a short period of time learning as much as you can about a little area, and then you're thinking about, oh, okay, well, what other ideas can play into that area?
Like cloud computing was another big trendy area for a while, and so then you're learning about meteorology. And so does that have anything to do with cloud computing? Not really metaphor aside.

Samuel Arbesman:
But it might evoke the right feeling, so yeah, therefore, yeah.

Eli Altman:
And then everybody does that, and so then you need to think about, okay, well what are other-

Samuel Arbesman:
Then you have one more step removed. Yeah.

Eli Altman:
Exactly.

Samuel Arbesman:
Oh, interesting. Okay. Are there certain types of people that are more suited for this kind of thing? Is it people who just love learning about new things like every few weeks? Is it people with particularly short attention spans? How do you kind of think about it?

Eli Altman:
We primarily look for good writers.

Samuel Arbesman:
Interesting. Okay.

Eli Altman:
Good writing is analog for good thinking because it's about how you lay out your thoughts and how you can move from one idea to another. I mean, in the end, we're for the most part selling words that already exist, so your ability to be able to tell a story about why that word or words make really good sense for someone's situation is most of the job.
You can pitch amazing names all day long, and if you're not good at the pitching part, if you're not good at explaining, that's probably more detrimental than not coming up with good names.

Samuel Arbesman:
Interesting.

Eli Altman:
It shouldn't be, but it is because you're asking clients to take a pretty big leap of faith that yeah, here's this word that you may or may not know before and here's why we think it makes a lot of sense. Here's what you can do with it. Here's the story you can tell, here's how you can relate it to what you're doing.
Here's how you get people to ask questions. It feeds into all these things, and that ability is really what it's about, so it's like writing, but then there's also this explaining and helping someone see themselves in it, using what they told you about who they are and what they're trying to do, reflecting that back to them through a name.

Samuel Arbesman:
You mentioned also that certain types of names almost want to raise questions or get people to ask questions. Is that a hallmark of a good name where there is a little bit of a mystery there where it's like, okay, this word makes me want to understand more about this company or this product?

Eli Altman:
I think that's generally the case. Generally, a good name should draw people in and get them to ask questions. Like using our company name, A Hundred Monkeys, as an example, if I meet someone for the first time and they say, what do you do? And I say, I run a company called A Hundred Monkeys, almost guaranteed follow-up question. That's kind of the beauty of it, right?

Samuel Arbesman:
By design. Yeah.

Eli Altman:
Yeah, exactly. There are however situations where say your company has a large portfolio of products, if all of them have interesting evocative question grabbing names, at that point you could be prioritizing wayfinding, helping someone understand how all of these things relate to one another, in which case a bunch of names that are interesting and get you to ask questions might be counterproductive.

Samuel Arbesman:
So I know one of the things that A Hundred Monkeys has done, and maybe you in particular is created this almost taxonomy of the species of different types of names. There's Americana and I think high class gibberish and some of these other more poetic ones. I'd love to just hear a little bit more about the taxonomy of names.

Eli Altman:
Sure. Our taxonomy of names is I think entirely a post rationalization. That is to say that you look at all the names out there and you see 76 gasoline and Baby Earth have an Americana thing going on with them. I think it can be helpful with people who get locked into a particular way of thinking about how a name is supposed to be or what it's supposed to do.
It's just wink towards expansive reasoning that, hey, there's a ton of ways to solve this problem. There's so many different types of names out there, so yeah, maybe one of these work for you. I think with that said, we don't go in saying, oh, this project would be really good for high class gibberish, or this project needs a foreign name.
Almost exclusively, think about trying to understand the practical and creative realities of the project. What are we trying to get across here? What is the competitive market? Do people know what this is? Do they need to help understanding what it is? Just thinking through everything that you're trying to get across and then being really good editors because names can only get across one or two ideas well.
I think one of the biggest mistakes people make with naming is trying to make a name do too much. So we intuitively know that a word can only have a couple definitions, and those definitions also tend to be pretty close to one another, but somehow once you enter into the world of naming, it's like, no, I want to get across these eight ideas.
And individual words or two words are pretty bad at getting across multiple disparate ideas. Really focusing in on the Venn diagram of what do you need to get across and what can a name actually do because I think a lot of people try to get names to do things that they can't actually do. One example that happens to us a lot with that is trust.
A lot of people want names to get across the feeling of trust and names are just really bad at doing that because a name tends to be the first thing you run into with a brand and trust is earned over time. So if the first thing you're trying to say to someone is like, you could trust me, your brain immediately goes to why you shouldn't.

Samuel Arbesman:
It becomes like snake oil salesman kind of thing.

Eli Altman:
Exactly, and I think the perfect example of that is airlines where trust is paramount. That's the whole game, and you see how none of them name at all related to the idea of you can trust us, it's safe in our airplanes because it just gets people thinking about all the bad things that could and probably won't happen.

Samuel Arbesman:
Are there a lot of really bad names out in the wild, really popular names that we just don't even realize?

Eli Altman:
I think there's a lot of bad names out there, but they're not bad in the way that we would traditionally think about it. What makes names bad most of the time is that they're incredibly boring and forgettable. So the names that just blend in with the wall that you can't remember right after seeing them that have words like solutions and innovations and people's last names, all these things, they're anonymous and that tends to be what makes them bad.
When you hear bad names, you think about, oh, people making big missteps, or not realizing that something means something bad in another language, but the problem with calling those names bad is that those mistakes typically yield a lot of attention and attention is good. So in that sense, they're closer to good names than the just kind of anonymous fade into the background names.

Samuel Arbesman:
For example, like IBM, I mean now we just think of it as IBM, but International Business Machines, which also it sounds kind of like the generic ones. Are there certain types of those that are better than others?

Eli Altman:
I mean, there was a time when you could do that, right? General Electric, imagine being able to do that. Is IBM a good name? No, but do they need it to be? Also, no. Where names can be most beneficial is getting things off the ground, going from zero perception to a reasonable amount of perception.
If you're a 200-year-old company that has pedigree, it's likely just not a concern for you, and then you'd think, oh, well, should you rename IBM? Like no, but there's more contemporary examples. I remember getting interviewed when the iPad came out.
Is this a good name? Also, no, not really, but back to our thing about wayfinding, they have a system. That system starts with an I. They have a lot of names that fit into the system. Did it get to the point where iPad is just a part of our zeitgeist and vocabulary and people know what it is and it works what it means and you know how to spell it and where to find it? Yeah. Okay, so it did the job.

Samuel Arbesman:
Are there situations where companies that are like 100 or 200 years old come to you and say, we want to actually create a new name, and you have to kind of talk them down from that?

Eli Altman:
Yeah, I mean we've definitely had situations like that. Nobody cares as much about a brand other than right after you rebrand it, then everybody loves your history and loves what it used to be, even if they didn't care about you six weeks or a year ago or would never mention you or get on Twitter to talk about it.
So we live in a very reactionary society with regard to branding and rebranding, and that requires some patience, some perseverance in order to get through that initial hit. We try to be very honest with people if they want us to rebrand something that we don't think should be touched, that happens. Sometimes it's more of a marketing problem than a branding problem.

Samuel Arbesman:
There's almost this role of therapy in what you do where it's like making people understand what they actually need to do, recognizing names are not going to be able to do everything that they want them to do. Do you feel like that is an aspect of your job?

Eli Altman:
100%. We talk about naming as unlicensed corporate therapy all the time.

Samuel Arbesman:
Oh, wow, okay. That's amazing. There's a lot of trends in naming as well, and I see this particularly in the tech world. What are the different trends that you've kind of seen over your career and how do you think about this kind of trendy aspect in naming?

Eli Altman:
Going way back, I think the earliest trend I remember was Latin names. It's popular to have Latin derived names, and then I think after that, web 1.0 was kind of these combinations of colors and animals, red ant or blue moose or things like that.
Vowel dropping was the thing for a while. Flicker, Tumblr. Outside tech, there was recently a really popular one with, we call them blank and blanks, where you just pick a word and then have an ampersand to pick another word, salt and straw, things like that. But how do we think about trends?
I mean, I think that one, the goal is to outlast the trend. So if your name feels like it's of a particular time, then that probably won't age well. Some brands do escape these things, but I think for the most part the idea is to last a little longer than that. I mean names ideally should last the length of your business.
That doesn't always happen and that's fine, but trends are ephemeral by nature, so it doesn't really feel like those two things go together. And then there's also just the competitive reality of it. If the goal is to stand out, trends are literally about fitting in, so how do you accomplish both those things at the same time?

Samuel Arbesman:
And you mentioned names that are designed to last like the length of the business. When people come to you is there's just sort of this uniform sense of my product or my company is going to last forever? How do companies talk to you about that and how do you respond?

Eli Altman:
There's a thing with startups where to work at a startup, you really have to believe in what you're doing. Particularly if you're a founder at a startup, you probably left a much more secure environment in order to do this, and so you really have to believe in it.
And when you really believe in something, you get a little myopic in terms of what it could become, what you're going to do next, how it's going to expand. And I think a lot of what we try to do in those instances is think about good problems to have.
Getting to the point where your name might feel small relative to your 10-year global ambitions, that's a good problem to have. If you come back to us in 10 years because you are an enormous publicly traded business and you need to come up with a new name for one of your subsidiaries, awesome. That's great. Congratulations.
And so there's this balance that needs to happen where one, a name shouldn't really descriptively tie to your business services because that's a trap, right? You're just trying to say, this is exactly what we do and exactly what you do can easily change, but it also can't be about everything.
It can't be about these super broad concepts like connection or innovation or things like that because everybody's stuff is about that. And so you're really trying to find a balance between these two ideas. What's something that feels like it will be with you for the foreseeable future?
What's a way that you think about your work or an approach or an attitude that you feel like will be prevalent and really staying away from the very short and very long-term thinking. We don't want to just describe a little thing that could change and we don't want it to be so big that it could really be anything.

Samuel Arbesman:
That totally makes sense. You said you have several week-long engagement with the company kind of working on this kind of thing. It sounds like a lot of it in the beginning is kind of talking to them, getting up to speed about what they're trying to build, what they're doing, understanding the space.
Do you then just kind of go off, come up with names and kind of give them one? How iterative is the process or does it really depend on the nature of the engagement and what you're trying to actually do?

Eli Altman:
There's a balance for sure. The one universal is that hearing how a client responds to names is the most effective feedback we can get about what's going to work and what isn't. And so we try to get work in front of people as early and often as possible because hearing that feedback really tells us way more than asking them to describe it.
And do you think this kind of name could work? Because the problem is people will answer those questions absolutely, and they'll answer them with a high degree of confidence. They're not lying, but they don't actually know. And in a sense, that's the question askers' fault.
You can absolutely ask a bad question that gets a confident answer that sends you in the wrong direction, particularly with very creative work where there's absolutely no right answer. A really important piece is making sure that because garbage in, garbage out is the saying, so how do you get good useful information early?
And to us, the best way to get that is to put names in front of them. Those could be in industry, out of industry potential names for what they're doing and hearing how they react. How do they talk about them? One, do they go negative or positive first?
Are they thinking about why things work or why they don't work? Are they operating from a fear-based mindset? Another really important thing, if there's multiple people on a team who's speaking first? Is someone speaking authoritatively?

Samuel Arbesman:
What are the dynamics there?

Eli Altman:
Are they leaving space for the other person because this is in the end, most of the time it's like a group decision. So understanding their group decision-making dynamic will be incredibly important with regard to the success of the project. And so I kind of liken it to if I ask you, hey, what kind of music do you like?
Terrible question. What do you say? Do you say genres? Do you say one band? Because then you over index on that band, and then maybe they think all you do is care about the Rolling Stones. If I play a song for you and I say, what do you like about this? I'll get real information that will make it much more likely, if I had to pick another song that I think you would like, I bet my second guess would be much more accurate than my first.
And then I ask again and then we can get to a place where I can pretty effectively feel like, oh, okay, you're definitely going to like this. Music, another area with absolutely no right answers, I think is a pretty good analog for naming.

Samuel Arbesman:
I love that. That's a super fascinating way to think about this. Do you feel that generative AI and these large language models, it has any place in the naming industry? Is it helping some of the things you're doing? Is it problematic because it's kind of interpolating between other kinds of things and so is susceptible to lots of trends and trendiness? Is it useful, but only in a small way? How do you think about AI in the context of naming?

Eli Altman:
I wrote a piece not so long ago just called Why AI Sucks At Naming. The most important thing to me is AI is a tool, and historically there's lots of examples of people thinking tools are more than tools. So it can be and is a very effective tool for naming in certain circumstances.
It isn't a way to offload your decision-making onto a computer in order to later feel confident about it because technology made it. I use ChatGPT every week, and there are some questions I can ask it where it's much more effective than finding the answer with a search engine or other research tools.
For example, if I'm looking for what two languages have the same word for both, or how many of these languages have the same word for it? That's a hard thing to look up. I could do it before, but it would take time. AI is much faster at doing that, but what it doesn't do is tell me whether that's a good name or not.
That's my job. The ultimate security in this is that these AI companies are working with us to come up with names, and so if they believe they could do it on their own, then they would. And maybe some of them are. Maybe in 20 years I won't be naming because AI will be doing all the naming and I can go back to baking or something else I enjoy.
That's fine. I'm not looking to be above having my work replaced, but it's a tool. And unless you are well positioned to understand what of the output works for what you're doing, then you're just like an amateur golfer buying really expensive clubs.

Samuel Arbesman:
The fact that AI companies are still requiring naming services, I think is evidence enough that yeah, we are not quite there yet. We also mentioned that there's the therapy aspect of it, and that's very different than just coming up with a list of names. I mentioned bad names. Are there any really good names that maybe throughout history that just never quite landed or kind of found their moment? I mean, underappreciated good names.

Eli Altman:
Yeah, I mean, naming is an incredibly difficult variable to isolate. And I think you can say the same thing about logos, visual identity to some degree that there's terrible companies with really good logos or really good names and vice versa. There's great companies that do amazing things that just don't have the time, resources, energy, wherewithal to be able to come up with a good name or a good visual identity.
And so that's it. It's a piece of the puzzle, right? It's not a panacea. It doesn't solve all the problems. I see great names all the time and just keep track of interesting little things we found. We put out this, Zine makes it sound a lot smaller than it is, it's like three volumes of just found names, like things that we at A Hundred Monkeys that we found and we thought were interesting for one reason or another.
That's kind of the fun in it. We love seeing non-professional naming people take big swings. It's just really fun to just see people who are willing to take a risk, willing to try something interesting, not do the boring, easy, obvious thing. That has a certain feel to it that it's very hard to accomplish as a professional. Restaurants are a pretty good example here.
My favorite restaurants don't have a lot of what would traditionally be called ambiance because I don't really want to pay for ambiance or I don't want to be in a restaurant because they spend a lot of time, energy, money making it a really aesthetic considered environment. I want them to put the energy and love in the food. And you see this a lot with chain restaurants and things like that that maybe they hired a professional namer. Maybe that was us.
Maybe they hired a professional design firm, but it's like everything feels extremely considered and that could be a nice thing in an airport or something. But what I really like is to feel like somebody has their heart and energy in the right place, and that happens all the time with people who are not professionals.
And I love running into that. I love seeing stuff out in the world that is so obvious to me that no professional had any hand in it, and yet it just still feels interesting and original and like they care.

Samuel Arbesman:
I love that. That actually might be a perfect place to end. That was fantastic. So thank you so much for taking the time. This was a great conversation. I really appreciate it.

Eli Altman:
Yeah, happy to do it. It was great to meet you.

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