Lexicon Branding's David Placek: the .com domain is overrated, and AI can't pick the right name for you

An independent voice. That would be a lot of fun. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of [music] thousands. And let's bring in our next guest from the Reream waiting room. We have David from Lexicon Branding. David, how are you doing?

I'm doing great. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to have you. Uh, is your 2026 off to a good start?

It is. We're very busy.

It looks like it. Walk us through who you are, what you do, and what's behind you.

Okay. Okay. Well, I'm the president of Lexicon, Lexicon Branding. Um, and we are in the business of developing brand names and naming systems for new companies and new technologies. And we do it really for people, our clients all over the world.

Yeah. Uh we have an interesting process here that combines really a creative layer

with an engineering layer. And that engineering layer is a combination of linguistics and cognitive science that puts more objectivity into both developing names and importantly selecting them. And the names behind me on the wall are names that everyone on every name on the wall has been invented by uh by lexicon. Uh when is is the right time to meet a founder like six months before they start the company? Like when like what? Because I imagine a lot of these companies I I can see from I think some of them some of them come to you after they've started after they're already in market and they realize for some reason or another you know we need to we need a new name and then they come to you and then there's like some some constraints and it becomes harder, you know. Walk us through like the the ideal process. Yeah, the most people do not, you're absolutely right, do not come to us six months before they really started the company. We suggest that they come to us as they approach that series A uh funding.

Oh, interesting.

By that point, uh by that point, they really know who they are and where they're going for for the most part. And so, we can work with that information. Um now, before that, you know, sometimes they they land on a great name. I mean, you you This is something that you can get lucky. Um, not everybody needs a lexicon to to come uh to to work with, but most [clears throat] of the time um as you approach that series A is a good time to take a look at your name and we do that consulting all the time where hey, is it time for us to change our name?

How much uh how how do you uh how do you handle the domain side? Because I talk to I I oftentimes, you know, Angel and like 60some startups, maybe 70 at this point, and oftentimes they'll have what seems like a great name

and maybe there's no trademark issues with it, but for some reason or another, the dot is taken and they will just never get it, right? Because it's some hundred-year-old company and you just have to assume they've been operational for long enough. They're they're maybe you're public or privately held.

It's like a super rich person that just is like squatting on it. No. So, how do you how do you navigate that? Because I feel like one part of the naming process that I appreciate is you have these incredible constraints already. It's not like an open canvas because you have trademark constraints, you have domain constraints, and then you have a bunch of other kind of like less uh clear constraints, but just like it has to make sense, right? And so in the naming process, you're trying to like kind of combine all of those into a short list of things and then hopefully it has to like feel good and sound good and and do all those other things.

Well, the URL should [clears throat] be the least important uh constraint uh in in this process. Um, and we have research that we've done several years ago, and actually just this morning, we're about to launch another study that I think is going to once again provide evidence that the URL is really no longer that important. Really, I mean, the search

domain domain brokers hate this one simple trick,

which is so which is so funny. I mean, that's very I mean, I I I can't wait to read the study because it's it's so counter to uh uh I've always felt like domains domains are the element of your branding that you have like the least amount of control over but have an incredible impact. Everyone's seen like a be if you see a beautiful website

and then the domain is something something triblank.io io it just screams like because there's so much subconscious

branding uh and marketing that people are getting from every time I go to a big company's website they have a.com it sort of trains people uh but but what what's the data that shows that it doesn't really matter.

I think that's probably you know given what you you the two of you do it's it's probably a little inside baseball because we're not finding that on the the consumer end or the customer end. um they're just looking at this as an address. Um the analog is a zip code. Uh and actually we found evidence that consumers like the idea of something that says what is this? You know, um and look at the companies that have done well. You know, Lucid is a client of ours, Lucid Motors. They don't have Luc. It's not Lucid.com.

So, I think it's less important uh for the consumer and the customer than it is to perhaps Part of part of part of it for me is somebody that's helped name a number of companies and I just enjoy buying and finding and buying domains. I've just always appreciated it is that I appreciate the how hard it is to get a great domain. And so when a a founder comes and is pitching me and they already have something great, it just shows like a level of agency and ability. Maybe they didn't know a great broker or maybe they didn't even use a broker, but they figured out how to get it. And so it kind of says something about them. But uh but I but I agree there's a lot of context where it totally uh doesn't matter.

And if you look at the if you look at the wall back there, almost every single one of those companies got to the point where they could buy uh buy whatever domain they wanted, right? So it's like just

at a certain point.

Yeah. I mean the the Microsoft Azure one is hilarious because Microsoft owns Azure.com but reroutes it to azure.microsoft.com because they want you at the top level domain. How is has has chat GBT uh kind of made some clients uh kind of given them kind of the wrong lesson in branding? Because there's so much about that where like

traditional, you know, if somebody came to you and they were like, I'm going to try to make a consumer product. I want to get to a billion users. If I don't get to a billion users, I'm going to fail. I'm going to call it chat GBT. What do you think? You'd be like, you'd probably laugh him laugh him out of the room or or say, "Well, you really need to work with me. Well, the interesting thing about that question is more than 50% of our clients come to us having worked with Claude or Chad GBT to develop their names and they work with it. They find it frustrating that things just don't work together. There's no doubt uh those types of models can generate thousands of names. No question about it. What they can't do at this moment in time, that may change down the road, is apply the judgment and principles around this name is better than that name for you. Our philosophy is we're not in this business to create good names. We're in the business to create the right name. The the right name that adds immediate immediate value and long-term value because this the name should be the one thing that stays with you through your whole journey and nothing will be used more often um or longer.

So it makes it very important and at this point in time a chat or a claude just isn't uh up to speed to do that kind of decision making. uh walk us through the chapters of kind of even naming styles, right? Because we're at an interesting moment right now. People are putting GPT on the name on the end of things. People are saying the blank company of place, right? Like that's a whole new thing. I'm sure I'm sure that triggers

the browser company.

Yeah, the browser company of New York. A bunch of people copied that. And my take on that was always that was an amazing name one time because it signaled to insiders in Silicon Valley that it was just a novel kind of fresh take on the browser and it was the polar opposite of Chrome or Safari or some of these kind of like one word uh even though they did have a have a name for the product. So, and then you can think back like there was a era where like adding ly to the na to the end if something was was popular like what what are the different chapters and like have uh I'm curious if like the great brands have always kind of gone against the mold right because like would you uh and anyway so maybe extrapolate on that.

Yeah certainly well look the one of the most persistent trends or chapters as you call it in the industry is imitation. So someone comes out with something that ends in L Y and hey that's a good idea. Let's do So then you'll see four or five names out in the marketplace that end with LY. What's happening there is that that imitation doesn't generate the interest and the provociveness that a really well put together brand name

Yeah.

should for people. So we always advise people imitation is suicide. Uh your name should not look or act like anything that's out there in the marketplace.

Yeah.

How'd you get into this? What was the first brand name you did?

Well, I came from the advertising business. So, you know, great agency, Flick Building. And I just saw as we worked on on projects and and company identity that naming was going to become more and more important as as the world got more and more complex and more and more integrated. And so I took a flyer.

That's the simple u maybe boring story of how I got into this business. um relative to the first name we ever generated is it's a name that has long since uh disappeared. I think it was for United Technologies and we named a new um furnace noise uh uh reduction technology called whisper. [laughter]

Okay. Yeah. stuff.

What uh what what advice do you give companies that get to a scale where they have a brand name and then different product lines and maybe even kind of like sub companies? We're at this point right now where like look at a company like Claude has uh Anthropic Claude Claude Code uh OpenAI has you know ChatGBT they have uh the browser which I'm even just blanking on the on the name of it. They have codecs. They have

codeex desktop app.

Yeah. So, so different models in codecs. There's GPT 5.2. What framework you give? Because I'm assuming you'll work you'll work with a company to name the parent company and then you also work on the subproducts and then some cases the subproducts end up outshining the parent company.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, we we have an expression here we call uh clarity is the language of leadership. And what you see in that example you just gave me that there's really no story there. They don't have a common language. And so it's difficult for the audience, the consumers to really understand what are they doing for me? What is this company about? It's a very choppy thing. So a lot of our business coming to us now over the past year and a half and I think it's because of AI is clients coming to us and asking us to help them. I use the term straighten out their language and make it make sense

creating a creating a through through line.

Yeah.

Yes.

Um what what else about uh these taxonomies? I'm interested like at the early stage series A how much are you trying to actually define a hierarchy of of product names and and what is the process of like working with you like? Is it, you know, there's like a specific sprint, specific deadlines you're paying up front, and you don't know what you're getting? Is there contingency? Like what what is the workflow to work with a company?

It's pretty straightforward. In many ways, this is really rocket science, but we we start with a real simple um work session where we're really asking clients four key questions.

And this always works. Um it's uh how do you define winning? If we get 10 people in the room, we're going to get 10 different answers, but we can sort that out.

Then we say, okay, if that's how you want to win, what do you have to win? That gives us things that the name doesn't have to, right? Then we say, okay, what do you need to win? What don't you have? Right? That begins to, you know, give us information about how that name might help them, right? Because a name should be a tool. It should be the foundation for success. And then finally, we say, okay, what do you have to say? uh would you like to say and between those four things we call it a diamond um we can then set up a what we call a framework or a creative framework which we don't even use the word objectives because we want that analog holds true we want a window that we can travel through and do a lot of creative work that's where the process begins

and then we work here with you know small twoerson creative teams and we have this what we call internally related this engineering ing layer where we're linguists. We're using you know company funded research on things like it sounds exotic but it's very fundamental sound symbolism letter structure and and fluency all those things then go into a funnel to help us select names.

Makes sense.

Uh what is the key to avoiding botching a rebrand? We saw [laughter] like nowadays products grow so quickly. We saw this with Claudebot which uh if you paid attention to that you would have seen like

okay Anthropic's going to have issue with this right it's like way too in in the same category sounds the exact same

very confusing to consumers so he quickly rebranded it then didn't like the rebrand then rebranded it again and and fortunately I think the product is exciting enough that the new name openclaw hopefully sticks and and uh continues you know the community just like keeps keeps the momentum but you're working with companies that are coming to you right when they're starting to get real traction

and they know they need to change their name, but they don't want to kind of destroy any brand equity that they've built up.

Yeah. Well, I think the biggest factor is that uh they under underinvest in name change. And I don't mean necessarily, you know, investing with a lexicon or or or someone else. they they don't sit and think through all the implications of doing this name change first from a what what's the message that we want to communicate because you do at some point have to say yesterday we were this and now today we're that and what is that message and then the second thing is lining up the resources the right the right law firm global language analysis all these things so you don't end up with something that's launched and then it turns out to I mean, you know, your mother's a a a bank

bank robber in [laughter]

just not a fun day.

Yeah. I mean, a good good example you did. So, you did Trip Actions to Non. Yeah.

Uh and that was an example. Trip Actions had a big brand, at least in in the US, and they didn't want to be explicitly known, I imagine, as just a place, just a travel booking site. They had to go through that. I remember they really paired

the rebrand. And I'm they paid paid you guys, worked with you guys, but then they also seemingly spent like5$10 million in a short period of time to like reintroduce themselves. Uh at least that was my impression as as just a as somebody in the target market.

Yeah, they did a fantastic job. They really did. And that name, it's a coin solution. We we made it up uh because the founder of the company having been you might say burned by trip action being so one-dimensional

so narrow said I want flexibility for the future and the best way to get flexibility is to make something up.

Yeah.

So that means we'll never run out of names.

That's right. We hope it we hope uh I I I I I have uh it's always been

uh every single time I've been working with a startup or trying to trying to name something you're sometimes you can just be hitting a wall where you're like I can't find for me it's like I can't find any domains in the space that I like. Everything's trademarked all this stuff and then and then there's always there's always a name. Uh you you might appreciate some of the history of TBPN. We started as a show called Technology Brothers. Then we had an issue where everywhere we went, people would say introducing the tech bros and we were like we knew this was our life's work and we were like I don't want to spend my whole life being introduced as the tech bros which was like the word that we were trying to avoid

with the original name. And so I was like I need a I want like a four or fivelet domain. It has to have TB in it. Uh and we ended up part part of TBPN. We're not a network. we we we look and sound like an ESPN or something like that, but our the logic was like if we name it like a network even though we're a podcast or a live stream, uh the comm's departments for big tech companies will be more comfortable putting their uh leadership teams on our show because it looks and feels more like television even if it is at the end of the day just uh you know 10 of us here in in a studio making uh something that looks like television. Yeah,

it does feel like you're a national network.

Yeah. So,

it is a mouthful. It is a mouthful, though. We're having to power through that.

Yeah. Yeah. The the the putting a P next to a B is always a choice. Uh it's, you know, the the the real lexicon heads would probably

It just inspires us to uh

uh I mean, last question for me because there's some breaking news uh going on right now, but uh what what do you think about uh a return to using surnames as company names, the Ford Motor Company, Walt Disney, the Disney company, uh that felt like something that was just right there on the shelf for founders to pull off and revive. I've starting to happen, but do you think that that's something that might happen? It takes

guts because you can't you can't

there's computing that's a quantum computing company public. There are some people that have done it, but uh do you think that that is something that would you would caution folks against or you would be in favor of?

I would caution to really take a hard look at that and it really depends on the person's personality, what the name is like. Uh is it easy to spell? Is it easy to say?

Yeah. The danger of course is uh something happens to the founder that is unoured now you have to you have to live live with that. So I think I think it's worth discussion and evaluation.

Yeah.

But I would probably push against it most of the time.

Yeah.

How many how many clients do you work with a year?

We'll do about 75 projects a year um in the naming area. And then we have a research group here that does the quantitative uh research for us also.

Very cool. And and and only some fraction of those are are technology companies. I'm I'm assuming you know a bunch of uh other industries will tap your expertise as well.

Yeah, we try to keep a balance but really uh 50 maybe 60% of our work is in technology at this point in time and we which I love it. So

everything is technology.

I love it. That's a good place to be and it's fun. I mean, these are all amazing brands. The Power Book, what a legend.

We see the future every week.

Yeah, that's it. It must be fun.

And we talked to some of the smartest people that can imagine as you guys.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Know, I can imagine.

Well, I've had a a couple people text me during the show asking for an intro. So, [laughter] you have you have quite a lot of demand. I'm sure more than you can uh fulfill, but uh we'll definitely send some people your way. And it was great to meet.

Yeah. We'll talk to you soon.

Pleasure.

Thanks so much for David. We'll talk to you soon. [applause]

Tomorrow, Cisco on February 3rd, the Cisco AI Summit brings together leaders from NVIDIA, Open AAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of the AI economy. The whole thing will be live streamed there,

and we'll be there with the giga stream

headed to the bay later today.

We have some breaking news. Uh first up, Palunteer beat earnings. Uh stock is up uh what is it up 6% already after hours. It's a $350 billion company. And uh this is the big one uh from Coli here just in SpaceX reportedly confirms XAI merger. Uh very exciting. This is uh hit the Bloomberg terminal as well. Um Elon Musk SpaceX confirms merger with XAI and company memo. SpaceX confirms plans to merge with XAI before the IPO. We were talking about this and and uh and sort of predicting that this would happen. Um, uh, SATS is up 2% after hours. I guess that's correlated there. Um, [laughter] what is that?

They just go up. Anything happens in space that's good, it just goes up.

SATs. What is SATS? I don't know.

Uh, isn't isn't

I don't know.

I thought that was uh that's Echoar. They hold

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They hold SpaceX stock. That's right. Um Elon Musk plans to merge uh SpaceX with space with with X AI uh in a deal that encompasses the billionaire's increasingly costly ambitions to dominate artificial intelligence space exploration. The deal was announced in a memo. Bloomberg earlier reported on the discussion SpaceX is planning an IPO that could raise as much as 50 billion and value the company at 1.5 trillion. Uh it's also discussed a possible merger with Tesla. Uh the there's a couple other data points that we should share. uh on Khi the which AI company will have the best coding model at the end of 2026. XAI is at 9%. You don't hear that much about uh XAI but that's that's higher than I thought. Anthropics leading at 54% then OpenAI 27% then Google at 14%. Of course this is in the the benchmarks on live bench AI rated by coding average. Um do that what you will. Um, but the real the real interesting data point about SpaceX is that according to Reuters and Tren Griffin on X, uh, SpaceX generated 8 million in EBITD DA.

So, this is a typo.

This is a typo. It's 8 billion.

8 billion

on eB [laughter] cuz I cuz I read I read this and I was like, whoa, that's not

nothing. Yeah,

because 8 8 million is pretty marginal.

Yeah, I know. It's like

and I was like that is not everyone's been applying you know

the correct correct number is 8 billion in profit uh on 15 billion to 16 billion in revenue so 50% margins for space company is absolutely insane a lot of that's coming from uh Starlink obviously um Starlink is the main Musk's internet uh satellite internet satellite based internet system Starlink is the main revenue driver accounting for about 50 to 80% of the total revenue. The rapid launch of 9,500 Starlink satellites since 2019 has made SpaceX the world's largest satellite operator with only over 9 million users of the broadband internet service. And of course, uh it's not just, you know, individuals that have a Starlink that they throw when they're camping. It's, you know, companies and boats and yachts and planes. Now, there's a whole Super Bowl ad just about I think United Airlines has a deal. And so, they want people to choose United because Starlink is such a differentiator when you're getting on a long haul plane. There's not much there's not that much you can differentiate on. All the food is bad everywhere. It's terrible. All the planes are falling apart. Yeah. You feel you don't really feel safe on any air.

I agree.

So, one thing you could differentiate on is is if you can like if if you get food in first class, if you if you're allowed to bring it back.

Yeah, that would be a huge differentiator.

TBP and JetBlue.

They're moving slow on that front and so they have to differentiate on Starlink. But I do think it will be a real differentiator. Like if you're if you're choosing between American and New York, uh you're going from LA to New York and it's American or United and United has Starlink, that's a pretty big difference just to be able to properly properly use the the internet. Um anyway, let me tell you about Crowd Strike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. Crowd Strike secures AI and stops breaches.

There's one more interview uh sorry, not interview, but uh

context

context uh from Jensen. And we're going to pull this video up from Tay Kim. He highlighted it. Let's pull it up, John. I cannot wait to see your reaction.

Okay, I haven't seen this yet.

Uh, high yield also says, "If you bought the X bank debt and high yield bonds back at 13% yields, you've now parlayed your well your way into being a creditor to the largest IPO ever." What a journey. It is. It's such a crazy journey. Anyway, let's play a Jensen clip. And this year, this year is the year of the horse. So, it's going to be a very good year. And this year,

let's go.

I So, so it says that post is a It says It says that post is a joke. What about it is a joke? Is it AI? Is it fake? Did he actually say that? Did he say that a long time ago? The

fire is saying, "Uh, Jensen is citing the year of the horse, and you're bearish. I'm not a CIA body language expert, but look at the expression on his face. This post is a joke. Kind of.

Yeah, kind of. I don't know. Yeah. No, Jensen is uh is

I mean, we said this we opened the year with this. We said year of the fire horse.

Yeah.

Massive.

Also, I mean, he was he was he was seeing chugging beers, drinking champagne, uh giving celebratory toast. He's in that he's on cloud.

That was one of the the better calls.

Yeah. Um we're going to dig into that more. Uh so X X XAI just filed this with the Nevadaity Nevada Secretary of State website uh managing member they put SpaceX person uh on the on the on the silver flume filings. Andrew Curran says it's happening. Ken confirmed that the screenshots's real merger is effective. Uh SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies Corp is now the managing member of XAI Holdings LLC. Interesting. is prince. Um yeah, 8 billion in

the X in SpaceX stands for

X. Twitter now. It is a weird weird timeline, but uh it makes a lot of sense. I mean, managing five companies has got to be exhausting and difficult. Managing, you know, two there's some there's some economies of scale and, you know, now that you have the data centers in space uh thing and Starlink, you know, it is a communications company after all. Uh makes a lot more sense, you know.

I don't know. And I'm not going to say we called it, but we certainly were talking I mean we started talking about uh about this possibility at the end of last year. It felt like you know XAI didn't have the

traction to keep just continuously raising at a $200 billion valuation when you looked at its financial performance relative to

uh the rest of it. And so uh and and merging XAI into Tesla wasn't going to get a lot of

uh uh I think it would have gotten way too much push back. Also Tesla's obviously public so would had more scrutiny.

Yeah. But I mean if you just play out even like the non AGI vanilla case of the models sort of commoditize everything gets they they get to near the frontier and maybe one is better than the other for one thing. Um but at the end of the day it's like you know intelligence on tap. You're paying for tokens and SpaceX's tokens are cheaper because they're using solar and they're in orbit. Like there's a world where just on the pure economic

set to actually be a player in like AI cloud like there I I I see a world where they're like yeah we're really good at building infrastructure. We're going to we're going to build the infrastructure to power other people's apps.

Yeah.

Uh so I would expect to see some type of like enterprise AI offering from

SpaceX like in the near in the near future even potentially before

like there's really like data centers in space. Um, couple more post.

I just I I I love imagining the person who is just like the the longest tenure Twitter employee who's just like, "Yeah, I'm here. I'm I'm working at Twitter." And like, "Okay, now I work in at an AI lab. Now I work at a rocket company." [laughter] It's like such a funny twist in the in the career path, but uh you know, congratulations to everyone who held on and is now working at SpaceX.

Couple more reactions to Oracle. Matthew Zaitellin over at Heatmap says he's wearing the my the Nvidia OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI shirt. [laughter]

And then uh Alex over at 8VC uh responded to the Oracle's post and said, "OMG, this is literally bankrun language. [laughter] It really does really does weird read like that."

Oh no. Uh, and so

I mean the good thing is that it just feels like the like the the fear about adoption falling off has not really come to pass. And so like people need tokens. They're deploying them more and more. More more people are using LLMs more hours of the day. Everything's sort of like on track. Like the fundamental technology is is growing. And so would I be terrified of sitting on a data center that has the ability to inference just one of the many LLMs? Like it doesn't seem like the worst scenario to be in. We looked at the uh the gross margins seem good. Like a lot of the health checks of the ecosystem have been passing in my opinion. So uh

yeah, Oracle is already it's I mean we've already it's down almost 50% since the original

it's already sort of corrected. I wonder what the what the CDS is doing. But uh that's that's for another deep dive. Um the other the other big story today

down more than 50% since the original announcement. So

play that won't [snorts]

uh well up next we fortunately have somebody whose job is to make sure the demand is real.

Yes.

Uh and so he is supporting the supporting the the backlog.

Tibo from uh OpenAI. Um the the the other breaking news that we should talk about before he hops on is uh Bob Bob Iger at Disney he has told Associates that he plans to leave the CEO role before his contract expires. He said I'm taking all the IP. I'm giving it to OpenAI and then I'm out.

See you.

Uh I told Associates that he plans to step down as CEO and pull back from daily management before the December 31st end of his contract. Okay. So he's planning some summer moves. He's going to be in Europe maybe. Uh the entertainment giant's board of directors is planning to meet with him next week at its headquarters in Burbank where they were expected to vote on who should take the top job. In private conversations over the last few months, Iger has told people close to him that he's ready to move on from the grind of being CEO and was frustrated by conflicts at Disney's ABC network over the brief suspension of late night host Jimmy Kimmel. people who have spoken to him said the CEO has told multiple associates that he would like to spend more of his time and energy on other uh other things such as sailing his new and larger super yacht, the Aquarius. Let's go.

Somebody in the chat earlier was talking about the name of their new sailboat.

Yeah, got to come up with an innovative name if you're naming a boat.

Hiring Lexicon branding for your boat. You really should. Aquarius feels pretty like you know like tragic could come up with that name. potentially. Uh he said that he would also like to devote more time uh to work with his wife Willow Bay, dean of US USC Anenburgg School for Communication and Journalism and on Angel FC, the women's soccer team they bought in 2024. The final timing of his departure from the top job hasn't been determined yet and could change. He's expected to remain CEO for several months. What you got? Uh, Reggav always always one step ahead us in the chat

just shared uh, exclusive OpenAI is unsatisfied with some Nvidia chips and is looking for alternatives sources say. So, OpenAI comm's team fires back.

Okay.

Like, uh,

okay.

Somebody else in the chat was saying that Jensen is in his clip farming era.