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The One-Name Email, a Silicon Valley Status Symbol, Is Wreaking Havoc (wsj.com)
In Silicon Valley, first-name-only email addresses have long been the ultimate status symbol, indicating a techie was an early hire at a new company. Now that startups are growing, the one-namers are wreaking havoc -- and the competition to snag them is fierce. From a report on WSJ: When Peter Szabo heard he and his co-workers would receive new email addresses after his tech company was launched from an incubator, he ran to his boss and confirmed he would get the "Peter" first-name email address. After years of failing to arrive at companies early enough to bag the prized address, Mr. Szabo negotiated getting the single-name email at the earliest opportunity. "As companies get bigger, if you can be the original Peter, absolutely that's bragging rights," said Mr. Szabo, who is chief revenue officer of mobile-entertainment network startup Mammoth Media. "It's huge."
[...] Startups are growing faster than at any time since the dot-com boom thanks to a flood of venture capital. The system of using first names is leading to more email misfires at tech companies the more successful, and larger, they get. {...] Even techies are having a hard time figuring out how to disrupt the naming convention of corporate email. The growing pains usually set in when startups reach 25 to 50 employees, as names begin to overlap, according to Josh Walter, who has designed email services for companies for the past eight years. "That's when companies say, 'Oh no, what do we do now?'" Mr. Walter says. He is currently IT engineer at Second Measure, a Silicon Valley startup that analyzes consumer spending.
[...] Startups are growing faster than at any time since the dot-com boom thanks to a flood of venture capital. The system of using first names is leading to more email misfires at tech companies the more successful, and larger, they get. {...] Even techies are having a hard time figuring out how to disrupt the naming convention of corporate email. The growing pains usually set in when startups reach 25 to 50 employees, as names begin to overlap, according to Josh Walter, who has designed email services for companies for the past eight years. "That's when companies say, 'Oh no, what do we do now?'" Mr. Walter says. He is currently IT engineer at Second Measure, a Silicon Valley startup that analyzes consumer spending.
If you're flush with VC money, you obviously get your own domain name for your e-mail.
Anyone can afford the domain fee ($9/year) and the fancy Google or Office365 email service ($5/month).
VC money should be used for something more useful, like the lawyers at Boies that allowed Theranos to burn through $900 million on 10 years of vaporware without being publicly challenged (it's the same law firm that negotiated Harvey Weinstein's severance, that was hired by Oracle to sue Google over Android/Java, that was representing SCO in their UNIX lawsuits, that defended the Enron CFO, and that represented Big Tobacco when they appealed cancer lawsuits).
Other good uses of VC money is sexual harassment lawsuits (Uber), "company" houses in the Hamptons and LA (Mode media), worthless music streaming platform acquisition (Guvera) or decommissioned Soviet fighter jets (Terralliance).
lucm, indeed.