A brief history of how the tech world’s biggest names mean almost nothing, and now mean everything.
Nvidia just became the first company in history to hit a $4 trillion valuation.
It did it faster than Apple. It overtook Microsoft. It left Amazon, Alphabet and Meta in the dust. On paper, it is the most valuable force in tech.
The name Nvidia is drawn from invidia, Latin for jealousy or rivalry, the kind that festers. In Roman mythology, Invidia was the goddess of envy, said to have serpent’s teeth and poison in her breath.
Fitting, for a company whose performance is bound to provoke exactly that.
Now contrast that sinister intentionality with the most famous typo in the world: Google.
It’s a well-known story. The name was meant to be googol, a mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros, but it was mistyped by Sergey Brin, a grad student at Stanford, while looking for a name to replace Backrub, the original name of the search engine.
What’s less well known is that googol itself was entirely made up. It was coined in 1938 by a 9-year-old boy named Milton Sirotta, the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner had asked his nephew to invent a name for a number too big to fathom.
So yes, the company that organizes all human knowledge is named after a nonsense word invented by a child, but misspelled by a grad student registering a domain.
The randomness is not the bug. It is the pattern.
Google was a benign accident.
Nvidia was a blade pulled from a sheath.
And then there’s Zynga, a company named after a dog. Zinga, an American bulldog, to be exact. She was the playful companion of founder Mark Pincus. The red dog silhouette became the company’s logo, face and unofficial spirit animal.
Zynga didn’t want to organize the world or dominate chipmaking. It wanted to make games people couldn’t stop playing: FarmVille, CityVille, Words With Friends. Playfulness was the driver.
The Arbitrary Power of Names
What links these three names — Zynga, Google and Nvidia — is not strategy. It is arbitrariness.
None of these names explain what the companies do. But over time, they absorbed meaning. They became verbs, symbols, mascots, stock tickers and punchlines, not because of what they meant at the start, but because of what the companies became.
In any industry, a name doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to survive long enough to mean something.
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