Peter Thiel on why the name of your startup is predictive of success or failure “This is a slight aesthetic thing that I believe in very strongly: the names of companies are often very predictive of future failure or success.” PayPal and Napster are the first example Thiel gives: “PayPal was a very friendly name — it was the friend that helps you pay. Napster was a bad name — you nap some music, you nap a kid. That sounds like a bad thing to be doing, and it’s no wonder the government then comes in and shuts the company down within a few years.” “You want to be very careful of how you name companies,” Thiel warns founders. In the context of the sharing economy, he likes Airbnb more than Uber: “Airbnb sounds very innocent like this virtual bread and breakfast — this very light, non-threatening sort of company. Uber sounds like a bad name from Germany sometime in the 1930s. What are you exactly above? Maybe the law? This is probably something that, again from a regulatory perspective, I think Airbnb is a vastly better name than Uber.” And on the social networking side, Thiel likes Facebook more than MySpace: “You can say that all these social networks involve both reading and writing… Over time, reading dominates writing. Facebook was about learning about people around you — about their real identities at Harvard. MySpace started among wannabe actors in Los Angeles, and it was about them coming up with fictional narratives around themselves and a lot of other people in LA who are generally like that. And because reading dominates writing, Facebook would ultimately dominate MySpace. There’s a certain version where the whole arc of the company and the whole product arc was implicit in the names.” Source: @mercatus (Apr 2015)

Internal Memo to my staff. Consider this for your team and culture. "Yesterday I ran a little experiment based on the Hawthorne Effect (look it up). Clipboards, paper, pen, film, etc. The Hawthorne Effect states that people naturally perform at a higher level when they know their effort is being observed and measured. In football, that means players tend to run harder, finish blocks longer, pursue the football faster, and pay closer attention to detail when they know coaches are evaluating every rep. As coaches, we can use this to our advantage by creating a competitive environment where effort and execution are consistently measured. We did some of that yesterday by tracking receiver effort, charting play results, Brennon’s defensive grading, etc. Things like grading film, tracking loafs, charting wins and losses in drills, or recognizing players who consistently do things the right way, measuring outcomes creates accountability and raises the standard. So, moving forward, let’s keep in mind that competition brings energy to practice, and players quickly learn that every rep matters. We did this in receiver drills on Monday, the entire group running the cone and drive drill, had to catch 10 in a row. Several times someone dropped the ball, so I reset the count. It motivated collective effort and focus. Big picture, our goal is bigger than getting players to perform because someone is watching. We want to build habits of discipline, consistency, and excellence so that giving great effort becomes part of who they are. When accountability and competition become part of the culture, players learn to compete at a high level every day, not just when the spotlight is on."

Coaches—what are the biggest formulas for failure that you’ve seen?