Choose your words wisely, they'll define your business

How you talk, what you name your company and features, and what you choose as internal shorthand is critically important to everything from your brand, to your culture, to the future of your product and the loyalty of your customer.

First, your company name...

It’s critical you pick something that can grow with you, where you are either defining meaning or choosing a brand broad enough to allow for growth beyond what you expect today. I also tend to think about spelling, old school SEO, app store discoverability, social handle availability, and how employees and partners might respond to the company before the brand can speak for itself.

A few months ago, I was sent a deck for a company and nearly didn’t take the meeting based on the name alone (a bit disparaging). Fortunately, it came from a trusted source so I did and I was pleasantly shocked to discover that the founders were down to earth midwesterners. The name started as a joke, I later learned. But sometimes jokes stick. Often, the first piece of brand copy you’ll ever write is your company name.

Next, the terms you use inside your start-up company...

When I attend board meetings in the early days after making an investment, I try to use my fleeting “outsider’s perspective” to assess internal nomenclature. In the post-board meeting notes I often send on to my portfolio companies, I will share my thoughts on language choices with founders – what’s confusing and what feels like inside baseball that likely will not be well understood by outsiders (including end-users, new employees, and future investors).

Why is this important? Well, when you talk about a BPP (business profile page) or a LAMD (LA market data) it takes these concepts and makes them unduly abstract, further removing your internal discussions from what really matters – your customers.

Terminology also tends to lead to the adoption of metrics around these terms (for ex: “How did the BPP convert?”) and can prevent analysis from evolving. So asking the question as to whether you should still define market regions LAMD or SFMD, may lead to a broader question around whether or not you are focused on the right grouping of data for a given stage of company. Perhaps the answer is yes, but it doesn’t hurt to regularly ask the question.

Finally, the importance of names inside big companies…

When I arrived at IAC in 2006, Barry Diller used to yell at me frequently and told me to stop sounding like a VC.

When I would say describe something to Barry at the time as “Teledoc meets Twitter, for Gen Z,” I would get (appropriately) blank stares. But it was worse than that. I spoke almost entirely in business school (or VC) sound bites: “economies of scale,” “efficiency,” “pivoting,” “rock star,” “MVP,” etc.

So, in my early days at IAC I literally had to relearn how to convey my thoughts and how to restructure my words. Other than trying to learn how to snowboard at age 25, it was the closest I have felt to being a toddler again, in all the ways that are simultaneously both good and terrifying. Before going into a Diller meeting, I would repeat a mantra that went something like this: “Speak like you would to your family in St. Louis.” This is part of Diller’s genius – he takes the complex and reduces it down to simple words and corresponding actions. He thinks like a consumer, like the mass market.

When I spent a summer at Microsoft in the early 2000s, I was literally trained on which words not to use (hint: those conveying market dominance, in a clear a sign of the times). In Redmond at the time, employees were being trained to attack, I mean, lightly pursue small pieces of big markets with heavy competition. I think this may have worked too well. Perhaps too much time focusing on words versus the actions that would change the words – how to create more openness, more big non-MSFT companies winning on top of MSFT, more experimentation, failure and success?

During this time at MSFT and in the beginning of my IAC hazing period, I felt like I was learning how to play a role, simply so I could do well in this new environment. It was like learning Mandarin, simply so I could do business in China. By the end, however, I was grateful for the training, because how we speak leads to how we act.

In the process of learning how to speak like a consumer, Diller taught me how to build businesses for consumers.

My pre-IAC words probably made me feel competent and safe, and perhaps provided a sense of belonging in my old company. But my time at IAC taught me the best way to belong anywhere is to speak in ways that are simple, specific, and inspiring. Over time, this allows companies to be more inclusive and also hopefully creates a culture that challenging stale language (and the processes/metrics that go along with this language).

Don’t just take it from me. Elon Musk has gone on on a similar tirade against what he described as, “particularly dumb” acronyms like HTS (for horizontal test stand) and VTS (vertical test stand). He wrote in a 2010 email to SpaceX employees:

“Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms, and people don't want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees...Unless an acronym is approved by me, it should not enter the SpaceX glossary. If there is an existing acronym that cannot be reasonably justified, it should be eliminated, as I have requested in the past.”

So rather than calling it a BPP, perhaps call it “the small business lifeblood” instead. If you do, you’ll be more likely not just to win small business customers, but to keep them when you visit and ask that pizza shop how its marketing lifeblood is doing.  

By the same token, don’t call it an MVP. Call it something that relates to your customer and something unique to your culture that makes prospective employees want to join, stay and understand what the product you’re building is trying to achieve.

Despite what LL Cool J might tell you, don’t call it a pivot, call it a comeback!