Branding, Waikiki-Style

How to give your startup's name that extra punch? Go Hawaiian!

By: Owen Thomas
Issue: September 2000

Naming your company is hard work -- you find a good domain name and then discover that it's already taken. So what's a startup to do? Like Pacific Rim warriors a millennium back, try raiding the fertile shores of Hawaii. Mellifluous yet obscure, the Hawaiian tongue seems custom-made for companies looking for a URL-friendly moniker.

Take Akamai, the content-caching startup born on MIT's campus two years ago. Its technology is cool, but its Hawaiian name (pronounced ah-kuh-my) has helped make it more memorable. The company -- whose name means "intelligent, clever, or cool" -- went public last year and is now worth $12.7 billion.

Not so lucky was Pupule ("crazy") Sports, a women's sports apparel and content site that was left dry when e-tailing's tide ebbed. Other startups donning Hawaiian names: Mahi Networks, named after the tasty fish; Ponoi ("self"), a New York privacy-software firm; and Kalepa Networks (a "kalepa" is a flag put on houses that have goods to trade).

Steve Manning, a principal at naming firm A Hundred Monkeys in Sausalito, Calif., isn't impressed by most of these names, though he concedes that Mahi Networks "is the nicest of the bunch." "I'm not sure what you can hang off a word that nobody understands," he says. "Everything sort of goes in waves like this." In other words, don't run out and name your laser-broadband startup Uli-uli.com ("brilliantly feathered gourd").

OK, but what about non-Hawaiian names? Like, say, eCompany Now?

"From our philosophy, that's the kind of company we usually end up renaming," says Manning.

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