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

Summary

David Placek, president of Lexicon Branding, built a business around a problem most founders ignore until too late: picking the wrong name and spending years paying for it. Lexicon's portfolio includes PowerBook, Lucid Motors, and Noni (formerly TripActions). The firm combines creative work with what Placek calls engineering, drawing on linguistics and cognitive science to test not just whether a name sounds good, but whether it fits a specific company at a specific moment.

The ideal timing is Series A. By then founders know their direction well enough to give Lexicon material to work with. Pitching earlier means the brief is too loose. Pitching later means trademark conflicts, entrenched associations, and the need to rebuild an audience all narrow the options.

Domain extensions

Placek rejects the conventional insistence on owning a .com as a deal-breaker. Lexicon's research, launching soon, shows consumers treat domain extensions like zip codes—functional addresses, not legitimacy signals. Microsoft owns Azure.com but routes traffic to azure.microsoft.com. Lucid Motors doesn't hold Lucid.com. Neither company suffered for it. Placek argues the domain should be the least important constraint in the naming process, a position that runs directly against how investors and founders typically think about it.

AI's limits

More than half of Lexicon's clients now arrive having already tried Claude or ChatGPT to name their company. They come frustrated. The models generate thousands of names without strain, but they can't make the judgment call that separates a good name from the right one for a specific business. Lexicon doesn't sell name generation. It sells the ability to find the one name that holds through the entire company journey. That's where AI currently breaks down.

The naming process

Lexicon opens with four questions it calls the diamond: How do you define winning? What do you already have to win? What do you still need? What do you want to say? The answers create a creative framework, not a checklist but a window to travel through. Small two-person teams then filter candidates through sound symbolism, letter structure, and fluency research. The firm runs about 75 naming projects per year, with 50 to 60% in technology.

Portfolio naming and rebrands

As AI companies launch more products—Claude, Claude Code, Codex, GPT variants—a coherent naming system becomes a real business need. Without one, consumers can't form a clear picture of what the company does for them. Placek describes a growing share of inbound work over the past 18 months: companies asking Lexicon to "straighten out their language," building consistency across a portfolio that grew faster than the naming strategy could handle.

Rebrands most often fail from underinvestment, not in fees but in thinking through the full transition. Companies need a clear message bridging the old name to the new one and the legal and linguistic infrastructure in place before launch. The TripActions-to-Noni rebrand succeeded because the founder chose a coined word for maximum flexibility, ensuring the company would never outgrow its name. A significant marketing push to reintroduce the brand sealed it.

On founder surnames as company names—Ford, Disney—Placek is cautious. If something goes wrong with the founder, the company carries it permanently. He would push against it in most cases, though spelling, pronunciation, and the founder's public profile all matter.