To some extent, we can attribute the shift to a falling share of financing going to consumer-facing startups reliant on catchy brands. Imitation may also be a factor, as the most valuable unicorns today have serious-sounding names like OpenAI and Anthropic. Now that we're entrenched in the bland era, we thought it would offer a shot of entertainment value to take a look back at some of the sillier naming trends that have popped up over the past nine years that we've been chronicling such matters. Eventually, favored techniques for doing so became pretty familiar. These included deleting the 'i' and replacing it with a 'y,' and changing a 'c' to a 'k.' With these approaches, startups were able to secure names that sounded like common words, even if they were hard to spell. Animal names were in vogue for a while with startups developing both consumer-facing and backend technologies. The typical formula was also pretty straightforward: pick an animal and then add another descriptive...
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