Stripe founder Patrick Collison tells the story of almost naming the company PayDemon

This is also an embarrassing story. Devpayments. We thought it was super awesome. Cool name. The world didn't quite agree when we went to incorporate. It was rejected because we had actually checked, can you have a slash in the name? And you can, but you can't have a leading slash. But of course, being determined entrepreneurs, we overcame that and we incorporated as S L A S H D E V S L A S H. It was really bad. There were many problems with this name and we kind of eventually came to realize that we needed to change the name and we just couldn't come up with a good name. I guess many people have been through this. We were literally reduced to picking random words late at night. And one of the folks at Stripe had the bright idea of, well, why don't we just assemble a big list of words and email all of the owners of the.com domains again, just kind of reduce our search space a little bit. And so we assembled a list of like 100 words that all seemed like generally cromulent words and just emailed all the owners and only 10% of them responded. And of those 10%, you know, most of them wanted millions of dollars, whatever, right. And so we assembled a partial list that way. And then we also just kind of continued our own creative process. And so we came up with memorable names like paydemon with an A. Undoubtedly, we bought both versions. We still own both versions, actually. We thought it was super clever because we could have this awesome mascot, although maybe BSD confusion issues. We also really liked the idea of building things and the act of creation and so forth. And so we're kind of enamored with Pay Forge, this kind of blacksmith idea. And then of course, a friend pointed out that other connotations like, ah, good point, we're really struggling. And so the owner of Stripe.com generously responded to us and had an offer that was at least within our plausible budgetary range. But we couldn't decide between paydemon and Stripe. I swear I'm not making this up. And so this is the part where the kind of humility comes in. It's like, Jesus Christ. We decided that if we could not settle on a name by, I think it was December 20, 2010, we were just default to Stripe and we couldn't think of a more compelling name by December 20th. And so stripe it became. I was then reading the Little Kingdom by Mike Moritz, this kind of history of Apple. And apparently Apple went through sort of a similar thing where they couldn't think of a good name and so they said at sort of the same timeout, if we haven't thought of a better name by such and such date, screw it, Apple. And so we subsequently learned of some precedent.