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Comment by msiemens | Hacker News Reader

A few German companies:

- Aldi (supermarket chain), founded by the Albrecht brothers, thus ALbrecht DIskont

- Adidas, founded by ADolf DASsler

- Mercedes-Benz, named by Emil Jellinek-Mercedes after his daughter Mercedes, initially with Daimler which then merged with Benz

- Audi, founded by August Horch. Initially founded as _A. Horch & Cie. Motorwagenwerke Zwickau_, he later lost the rights to the name "Horch". He named his new company "Audi", which is a translation of his name into Latin: in German, "horch" is the imperative for "horchen" (to listen), which maps to "audi" as the imperative for "audire" in Latin

And then there are a just a ton of companies named after their founders (Porsche, Bosch, Siemens, …) but I'm not sure if these count :)

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It seems like these are different than the ones in the website. These are not really "unexpected" in the way that "PageRank", which is an algorithm for ranking pages, turns out not to be names after the pages it ranks, but the Page that invented it.

The examples in your post are just the source of these names, which may be unknown to many, but are not unexpected.

I sometimes feel that German founders are too stuck on naming their company after themself, some of them really should have looked for alternatives, e.g. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppelfricke

I don't see the connection to German founders there, as many small / medium sized businesses like the one you linked are called after their founders everywhere (plumbers, printers, electricians,...)

It’s generally the result of them starting as personal or family businesses, so initially your brand is your name. Then the business grows so large the relationship inverts. It does not have much to do with germany really, it’s common the world over.

For example, just from US car brand, you obviously have Ford, but also Olds (Ransom E.), Chevrolet (Louis and Arthur), Buick (David), Chrystler (Walter), Dodge (Horace Elgin and John Francis), …

And I can’t fault a German industrialist from 1910 for not English-proofing his business.

It's not the lack of English-proofing, it's the connotations that this name has for Germans: "Sepp" is a very common and not really glamourous first name/nickname, and "frickeln" means tinkering or fiddling around with something (usually with the negative sense of tinkering rather than fixing it properly).

How long has it been like this though? The meaning of words change surprisingly quickly, but not as quickly as their second-order connotations.

Fun fact: It was originally legally mandated that if you form a business, it just be named after you.

Many do. The founders of Lidl bought the name from someone named Lidl. They were named Schwarz.

You can certainly argue that Adolf's diminutive has been used for Adidas: ADI DASsler.

I believe that's the case, it also settled any arguments over pronunciation - it's not A-dee-das as I used to think!

Rudolf let his greatest opportunity slide when he named his company Puma instead of Rudidas.

I was quite surprised to discover the source of the names of British supermarket chains Tesco and Waitrose.

Waitrose is a contraction of "Waite, Rose & Taylor" Tesco is the combination of a supplier's name, with the founder's (Jack Cohen) name. They also have a "Jack's" brand.

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