[bhartzer]

I read this and honestly thought that it's kind of bizarre that he seemingly "randomly" came out with this post. My first impression was that it was a publicity stunt by Verisign.

Nonetheless, Paul's point about naming is a good one. You have to have a good name. But, I see no evidence (and he didn't provide any) why the name has to be associated with a .COM domain. His only 'evidence' that he mentions is the fact that "100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name." This doesn't mean that 94% of the top 50 are right (in owning the .com).

[ghufran_syed]

Yes, you would think it would be easy to analyze two yc portfolios, one with .com, the other with every other domain, controlling for the time since formation, and compare results, both survival and valuation. That would probably be a lot more meaningful, since the most highly valued companies are almost certainly also the oldest (surviving) companies.

However, I do think the point he is making is correct, that there are a number of constraints, but that the optimal decision involves a different weighting of them to that of many founders (my interpretation). I would argue that the constraints for startup founders naming companies are: 1) short and easy to say & remember 2) available (cheaply) 3) domain (.com vs others) 4) intrinsically meaningful 5) related to the business

Some founders compromise on 3 and give more weight to 4 and 5: what I think he's saying is that 1,2,3 are much more important than 4 and 5, to the point that "almost any word or word pair that is not an obviously bad name is a sufficiently good one".