Or, just name your company quickly and move on. We lost a couple weeks early on to naming Matasano, and after some false starts, eventually gave up and thumbed through a list of exotic plants. By the time the book of plants had been opened, the naming premise had been accepted: we were done trying to find a semantically "fitting" name for the company. We just picked a plant with a cool name.

We ran into two "problems" down the road; first: it turns out that a "Matasano" is a "quack doctor" in South America, which we discovered shortly after hiring someone from Argentina. We quickly convinced ourselves that the irony was a value-add, not a cost.

Second, we kept getting confused with Monsanto. This sounds (a little) sillier than it actually is. A lot of our clients, particularly back in 2006-2007, were large enterprises where the staff was particularly likely to have some confusion. We had more serious conversations about renaming over the Monsanto thing than over the "quack doctor" thing.

Ultimately, we just got over it and kept plowing forward. Equity goes into your name; it usually doesn't get extracted from your name. There's some sense in picking a good name, but keep in mind that weeks of time --- which is what we were facing --- is a very steep price to pay for something that might only be marginally important down the road.

I submit that the term "Airbnb", while memorable, has very little intrinsic meaning to most people who rent out their places on Airbnb. Ebay has none whatsoever. "Heroku" was one of YC's biggest acquisitions; that name breaks one of the rules of thumb of this post (3 syllables, yet means nothing to its customers). "Stripe" and "Square" and "Paypal" are great names, but "Braintree" seems to be doing pretty well too, and if "Braintree" is OK, I humbly suggest that "Mindweasel" and "Thoughtpants" will work too.

This is a good post. All I'm saying is, be careful of the procrastinate-y issues that come up early in your company. They all matter less than execution on everything else.