ElevenLabs was a commercial version of 15.ai. It's crazy, because 15.ai could have had the venture-scale outcomes if he'd fundraised and turned it into a SaaS product. He was in the right place, right time, with tremendous attention, but missed the opportunity.
The other "labs" followed the trend. The {number}labs / {number}.ai domains all quickly got squatted.
I was in the same space and watched it happening. I launched FakeYou about the same time as 15.ai, but 15 had the backing of 4chan and a better model. I still made it to 7M MAU and a million in revenue despite that.
Just last year, Fish Audio picked up where 15.ai / FakeYou / UberDuck / Weights.gg left off and made it to $20M ARR, which is a lesson about abandoning under-served markets when you still have tremendous gravity.
For context, 15 was some brony tf2 player who cracked deep voice synthesis in order to make My Little Pony characters say funny things. He then offered this for free on his site. It was never a clever branding thing, it was just his username.
It's funny seeing HN types being genuinely confused as to why someone would just make interesting things for the sake of making them, and then offer them freely for the good of others. He used to be on HN, there's good insights in his posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=15ai
^ Zach is the founder of Uberduck, which was massively popular. He got into YC with it.
More story:
ElevenLabs launched a few years after FakeYou and Uberduck. ElevenLabs got a lot of attention for their remarkable zero shot model, but their pricing and enterprise focus created an enduring niche.
Companies like Musicfy.lol were what ultimately drew the ire of the music labels and created a lot of friction for consumer UGC audio tools. They ruffled feathers and that created headwinds.
I distinctly remember talking to their founder on a Monday at Founders, Inc. in SF. They were in talks with a16z to raise $10M or so after their first few weeks of wild success - viral marketing and clever positioning for the first RVC music models. By that same Friday the music labels had them shut down the majority of their offering and the funding offers fell apart.
A year or so later, Suno and Udio ultimately took that side of the market. They were more consumer-friendly than raw vocal models and appealed to a broader set of users. Both companies launched to great success despite the risk of lawsuits.
15.ai, FakeYou, UberDuck, and Weights.gg (a latecomer) all gradually wound down due to the founders being pulled in different directions. Weights.gg joined OpenAI, Fifteen.ai became anti-AI and built an art community website, I went into movies/film, and Zach (Uberduck) forged a new path too.
ElevenLabs kind of lost the plot with audio. They've been building a bigger, more comprehensive offering that has scaled their revenue well beyond just TTS and audio. But it also left something of a void to fill.
Last year, Fish Audio launched in our old segment (consumer / UGC TTS fine tunes and zero shot) and built a massive user base and revenue stream. The market was wide open for it. They raised a $40M seed round.
>It's crazy, because 15.ai could have had the venture-scale outcomes if he'd fundraised and turned it into a SaaS product
Or equivalently could have gone down as a "deepseek" moment in TTS if the model was open-sourced (I don't think even a paper was published). It's a bit strange, he never made any profit but also never ended up publishing anything even after it was shut down.
This world of cheap (vc) money, huge private equity sells and high revenue early in the products development phase is so distant to me(geographically and even more so, mentally), I need some help deciding what to do with my project and I'd really appreciate if you could DM me
Rebranding a domain with traction is a mistake, in retrospect. I think Magnific is learning this lesson now after undergoing a change from the popular FreePik.
I'm a filmmaker and I wanted to get into video models, and FakeYou felt more like a pivot to UGC video (vo.codes was too audio centric) that I could ultimately swing me into cinematic video. I was too slow and that was not a good choice.
But Higgsfield and Bytedance showed you can be late and still win a lionshare of the market.
My video product launched in February and is at $5M ARR / 67% MoM growth.
We're in use by a few film studios and some pretty popular AI artists. There are a couple of theatrical releases coming out that use us, but I can't talk about it. (Under NDA for the individual projects.)
It's at $5M ARR and growing 65% month-on-month by word of mouth.
ArtCraftX (launching soon) is a new UX that lets you bring your own compute from every single platform and vibe code your own workflow UX. You can clone the repo and easily add/remove things you want. It's okay that people can bring competitor compute - we'll be generous and open.
Think of it as "ComfyUI, but comfortable" and geared to high-volume creators rather than hobbyists. It's written in Rust.
Critically, people should be able to not only own their apps, but be able to deeply customize them.
I've also built an open source FAL/OpenRouter which I eventually want to build RunPod/Featherless (fine tunes) features into. It's called "Foundation", and it's in private beta but launches GA soon. I think it could have good positioning vs. Stripe / OpenRouter since it's open source and is meant to be extensible. Fully BYOK, too.
I'm looking to hire someone to help me build a social layer for creators that ties all of this together. YesAnd got funding to pursue this, but I think they're taking the wrong approach. I think it should be open and hackable. More like Github, but still artist friendly.
A lot of platforms either target B2B enterprise (Runway, Krea) or UGC / "everyone can be a creator" (Higgsfield, OpenArt), but I think creators look more like the Github set. Intentional, and in need of tools they own.
I think this is the most obviously AI designed website I have ever seen.
From the nonsensical logo, the bland generic design language, overlapping support chats to mix and match of different landing page patterns. Misaligned avatar circles.
At this point, naming conventions in AI startups are starting to read like a sequence counting exercise. Focus on core API reliability over branding gimmicks.
Maybe soon they’ll be effectively disposable enough to start using the naming strategies of Chinese Amazon resellers of generic crap. Like “The mission statement of GLUFDRAWNBY labs is…”
Wow, haha I just created an LLC that is a "<number> Labs" company. I don't plan on raising VC or anything public with it, it's just a name to release apps on the app store under.
I was trying to come up with a name and it was exhausting, everything was taken, I was trying "clever names", eventually after strategizing with ChatGPT it gave me the suggestion along the lines of:
"Many people just use their initials, birthdate, or area code, plus the word 'software', 'tech', or 'labs'"
I got lucky when registering an LLC last year for some contract work because despite having a relatively common first and last name, no one had named an nLLC that in my (very large) city. At some point during the process, I had to pick an officer title for myself for some paperwork, but there didn't seem to be any guidelines or restrictions on them, so I just put down my name for that too; I figured that being Firstname Lastname of Firstname Lastname LLC is probably even more clear than "CEO" since it makes it even more obvious that I'm the only one in it.
> 6.90 CHF - locks your Mac's keyboard, trackpad and mouse and shows a black screen while you clean. Free 7-day trial.
> 4.90 CHF - opens macOS's color loupe on any pixel on screen and instantly copies its HEX, RGB or HSL code to the clipboard. History of your last 8 colors, with a real magnifier that zooms into pixels. Free 7-day trial.
That's weird that the more techy thing is cheaper.
Both of those are actually built-in but very poorly documented (or basically undocumented). Disable keyboard for cleaning : https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/448938 and for the color picker MacOS has "Digital Color Meter.app" preinstalled when its window has the focus hover anywhere on screen and use cmd+shift+c to copy the value (by default it uses RGB but in the View menu you can change it to hexadecimal, the values are then copied as HTML #)
Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?
Ted: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the exercise video.
Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Minute... Abs.
Ted: Right. Yes. OK, all right. I see where you're going.
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7.
Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
Ted: You guarantee it? That's - how do you do that?
Hitchhiker: If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".
Ted: That's right. That's - that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?
[Hitchhiker convulses]
Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
Ted: That - good point.
Hitchhiker: 7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.
I was trying to remember the actor/comedian who delivered this pitch. It was Harland Williams. I most remember him as the Pennsylvania state trooper from Dumb & Dumber.
A long time ago I used "23 Labs" as a funny name relative to my username. Fast forward many years and I considered actually using it. Apparently "[Number] Labs" is a very popular idea now...
Fwiw, ElevenLabs doesn't even make any sense as a firm, considering its TTS offering is extremely overpriced by an absurdly large factor. A large user would be far better off using local models. Even the OpenAI TTS is cheaper. There is no moat here such as with hardware.
The moat is marketing and good looking UI. They have been spamming Tik Tok et al. relentlessly and every lazy opportunist algorithm exploiter out there knows who they are, what they do, and that they can easily generate enough slop per cost to make their money back. So yeah, not a moat, but you're kinda missing the point. Just like Lovable is wildly over-priced, under powered, and has crazy levels of lock in built in (you can't even access your own supabase account that it uses for backend). It's not for you / us. Its for the masses who don't know (or want to know) any better.
Back around 1994, I was 22 and had just moved away from my parents' home. I was renting a room in a 3BR house with roommates. We had pastimes like dancing to Deee-Lite, playing TinyMUD, and playing DOOM on a null modem connection with my 386. It turned out that one roommate had pastimes involving a pump shotgun he stored under his bed. But anyways.
I was eager, and knowledgeable enough, to register a unique domain name for the entire household. It wasn't clear how we'd use it, with no permanent Internet presence, and we didn't have any hosting, DNS, or BGP capabilities, but a domain name sure seemed like a nifty thing to have, and it was free. So I aimed to register under .ca.us.
Perhaps I was not feeling creative enough that week, or it was quite difficult to capture the zeitgeist of four completely different college kids sharing a house, but I decided that the best name for us was <street address>-<street name>.san-diego.ca.us. Fictitious example: 1234-main.san-diego.ca.us.
Another curiosity about this particular name was that it may have been on the cusp of standards compliance. In the original DNS specification, a label could not begin with a digit, mainly because of parsing from bare IP addresses, but as you can see, eventually it was permitted, and our domain registration went forward.
It was a real bummer, though, because our household domain name languished, as I argued with my roommates, and we had no means of even setting up email addresses, but for a few shining years I did own a wacky, unique, but very generic street-address-based domain name.
https://www.twelvelabs.io/blog/introducing-the-multimodal-ai...
> Twelve Labs and ElevenLabs are co-hosting the 23Labs Hackathon
I was confused why I was already on the list... this is from 2023.
Tried to register sixsevenlabs, too late unfortunately...
All of them copied 15.ai
ElevenLabs was a commercial version of 15.ai. It's crazy, because 15.ai could have had the venture-scale outcomes if he'd fundraised and turned it into a SaaS product. He was in the right place, right time, with tremendous attention, but missed the opportunity.
The other "labs" followed the trend. The {number}labs / {number}.ai domains all quickly got squatted.
I was in the same space and watched it happening. I launched FakeYou about the same time as 15.ai, but 15 had the backing of 4chan and a better model. I still made it to 7M MAU and a million in revenue despite that.
Just last year, Fish Audio picked up where 15.ai / FakeYou / UberDuck / Weights.gg left off and made it to $20M ARR, which is a lesson about abandoning under-served markets when you still have tremendous gravity.
For context, 15 was some brony tf2 player who cracked deep voice synthesis in order to make My Little Pony characters say funny things. He then offered this for free on his site. It was never a clever branding thing, it was just his username.
It's funny seeing HN types being genuinely confused as to why someone would just make interesting things for the sake of making them, and then offer them freely for the good of others. He used to be on HN, there's good insights in his posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=15ai
I got 99 labs but bringing value to society ain't one
I literally have no idea if this is parody.
Nope, not parody. Very accurate description of early-2020s consumer TTS websites.
^ Zach is the founder of Uberduck, which was massively popular. He got into YC with it.
More story:
ElevenLabs launched a few years after FakeYou and Uberduck. ElevenLabs got a lot of attention for their remarkable zero shot model, but their pricing and enterprise focus created an enduring niche.
Companies like Musicfy.lol were what ultimately drew the ire of the music labels and created a lot of friction for consumer UGC audio tools. They ruffled feathers and that created headwinds.
I distinctly remember talking to their founder on a Monday at Founders, Inc. in SF. They were in talks with a16z to raise $10M or so after their first few weeks of wild success - viral marketing and clever positioning for the first RVC music models. By that same Friday the music labels had them shut down the majority of their offering and the funding offers fell apart.
A year or so later, Suno and Udio ultimately took that side of the market. They were more consumer-friendly than raw vocal models and appealed to a broader set of users. Both companies launched to great success despite the risk of lawsuits.
15.ai, FakeYou, UberDuck, and Weights.gg (a latecomer) all gradually wound down due to the founders being pulled in different directions. Weights.gg joined OpenAI, Fifteen.ai became anti-AI and built an art community website, I went into movies/film, and Zach (Uberduck) forged a new path too.
ElevenLabs kind of lost the plot with audio. They've been building a bigger, more comprehensive offering that has scaled their revenue well beyond just TTS and audio. But it also left something of a void to fill.
Last year, Fish Audio launched in our old segment (consumer / UGC TTS fine tunes and zero shot) and built a massive user base and revenue stream. The market was wide open for it. They raised a $40M seed round.
>It's crazy, because 15.ai could have had the venture-scale outcomes if he'd fundraised and turned it into a SaaS product
Or equivalently could have gone down as a "deepseek" moment in TTS if the model was open-sourced (I don't think even a paper was published). It's a bit strange, he never made any profit but also never ended up publishing anything even after it was shut down.
He's seemingly anti-AI now on Twitter and recently built a "no-AI" artist marketplace.
His users convinced him to close 15.ai, so it's unlikely the model will ever see the light of day.
There are thankfully a lot of high quality open source TTS models now.
This world of cheap (vc) money, huge private equity sells and high revenue early in the products development phase is so distant to me(geographically and even more so, mentally), I need some help deciding what to do with my project and I'd really appreciate if you could DM me
You were a year behind 15.ai with FakeYou. I know, because I was six months ahead of you and didn't execute in time. Momentum is everything.
I wasn't after them, I just changed my product's name. They had monumentally better distribution.
I launched as vo.codes (and two prior names) before 2020 and later rebranded to FakeYou.
https://thenextweb.com/news/celebrity-voices-deepfake-ai-app
Rebranding a domain with traction is a mistake, in retrospect. I think Magnific is learning this lesson now after undergoing a change from the popular FreePik.
I'm a filmmaker and I wanted to get into video models, and FakeYou felt more like a pivot to UGC video (vo.codes was too audio centric) that I could ultimately swing me into cinematic video. I was too slow and that was not a good choice.
But Higgsfield and Bytedance showed you can be late and still win a lionshare of the market.
My video product launched in February and is at $5M ARR / 67% MoM growth.
I was six months ahead of vo.codes, well aware. Anyway, UGC was a good pivot and wish you all the best.
Are you still working on it?
I found my way to where I want to be.
I'm working on https://getartcraft.com which is open source:
https://github.com/storytold/artcraft
We're in use by a few film studios and some pretty popular AI artists. There are a couple of theatrical releases coming out that use us, but I can't talk about it. (Under NDA for the individual projects.)
It's at $5M ARR and growing 65% month-on-month by word of mouth.
ArtCraftX (launching soon) is a new UX that lets you bring your own compute from every single platform and vibe code your own workflow UX. You can clone the repo and easily add/remove things you want. It's okay that people can bring competitor compute - we'll be generous and open.
https://artcraftx.ai/
Think of it as "ComfyUI, but comfortable" and geared to high-volume creators rather than hobbyists. It's written in Rust.
Critically, people should be able to not only own their apps, but be able to deeply customize them.
I've also built an open source FAL/OpenRouter which I eventually want to build RunPod/Featherless (fine tunes) features into. It's called "Foundation", and it's in private beta but launches GA soon. I think it could have good positioning vs. Stripe / OpenRouter since it's open source and is meant to be extensible. Fully BYOK, too.
I'm looking to hire someone to help me build a social layer for creators that ties all of this together. YesAnd got funding to pursue this, but I think they're taking the wrong approach. I think it should be open and hackable. More like Github, but still artist friendly.
A lot of platforms either target B2B enterprise (Runway, Krea) or UGC / "everyone can be a creator" (Higgsfield, OpenArt), but I think creators look more like the Github set. Intentional, and in need of tools they own.
damn, what a rollercoaster you had there, man
SixSevenLabs btw seems really cringe, see https://www.67lab.ai/catalog/clawnexus
https://41labs.ai/
I think this is the most obviously AI designed website I have ever seen.
From the nonsensical logo, the bland generic design language, overlapping support chats to mix and match of different landing page patterns. Misaligned avatar circles.
I think the logo is pretty nifty actually. It's both "41" and "AI"
Yeah I guess I'm AI because I like it.
Author here. Very surprised to see this here - my poor web server wasn't built for this! It's back up for now.
Missed the best name! https://1337labs.org/
(I'm not affiliated with this company and know nothing about it)
What I’m seeing is there are 29 available startup names just waiting…
After that we’ll have to expand to 3 digits, which will open the possibility of naming your company after hip area codes.
Yeah! 50 labs is still available. I know what I’m getting myself for my 50th birthday!
kennywinkerlabs
K9rLabs
this guy f3s
New OEIS entry: numbers used in names of startups followed by “labs”
Reminiscent of 22 Savage <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIz1HGNlTA4>, 23 Savage <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8JKly7sXpU>, etc.
https://gist.github.com/alexyorke/2b34de0856c143936c7f4deb6f...
At this point, naming conventions in AI startups are starting to read like a sequence counting exercise. Focus on core API reliability over branding gimmicks.
Maybe soon they’ll be effectively disposable enough to start using the naming strategies of Chinese Amazon resellers of generic crap. Like “The mission statement of GLUFDRAWNBY labs is…”
I used to work for a startup called 1026 Labs!
Amazon's hardware development subsidiary in Sunnyvale, California is Lab126. (Hi Mars!)
I see someone is implementing FizzBuzz in “startup funding rounds”.
Wow, haha I just created an LLC that is a "<number> Labs" company. I don't plan on raising VC or anything public with it, it's just a name to release apps on the app store under.
I was trying to come up with a name and it was exhausting, everything was taken, I was trying "clever names", eventually after strategizing with ChatGPT it gave me the suggestion along the lines of:
"Many people just use their initials, birthdate, or area code, plus the word 'software', 'tech', or 'labs'"
And I went ahead with that and called it a day!
I got lucky when registering an LLC last year for some contract work because despite having a relatively common first and last name, no one had named an nLLC that in my (very large) city. At some point during the process, I had to pick an officer title for myself for some paperwork, but there didn't seem to be any guidelines or restrictions on them, so I just put down my name for that too; I figured that being Firstname Lastname of Firstname Lastname LLC is probably even more clear than "CEO" since it makes it even more obvious that I'm the only one in it.
Doctors and dentist sometimes do that for their practices, but aren't the only ones working there.
> https://app.seventylabs.ch/
> 6.90 CHF - locks your Mac's keyboard, trackpad and mouse and shows a black screen while you clean. Free 7-day trial.
> 4.90 CHF - opens macOS's color loupe on any pixel on screen and instantly copies its HEX, RGB or HSL code to the clipboard. History of your last 8 colors, with a real magnifier that zooms into pixels. Free 7-day trial.
That's weird that the more techy thing is cheaper.
both of those things are available for free from others.
we can assume all of that is AI-generated rip off code anyways.
Both of those are actually built-in but very poorly documented (or basically undocumented). Disable keyboard for cleaning : https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/448938 and for the color picker MacOS has "Digital Color Meter.app" preinstalled when its window has the focus hover anywhere on screen and use cmd+shift+c to copy the value (by default it uses RGB but in the View menu you can change it to hexadecimal, the values are then copied as HTML #)
Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?
Ted: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the exercise video.
Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Minute... Abs.
Ted: Right. Yes. OK, all right. I see where you're going.
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7.
Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
Ted: You guarantee it? That's - how do you do that?
Hitchhiker: If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".
Ted: That's right. That's - that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?
[Hitchhiker convulses]
Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
Ted: That - good point.
Hitchhiker: 7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.
Ted: Why?
Hitchhiker: 'Cause you're fuckin' fired!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB2di69FmhE
from There's Something About Mary
I was trying to remember the actor/comedian who delivered this pitch. It was Harland Williams. I most remember him as the Pennsylvania state trooper from Dumb & Dumber.
why did he fire the guy who now obviously will go and make the 6-minute abs he proposed?
Reminds me of the PCB companies. 3pcb, 4pcb, 5pcb, 6pcb, 7pcb, ...
Finally, a periodic table of labs
All those cool domain names are gone now - the power of the hn frontpage!
Amazon beat everyone to the punch, with Lab126.
At this point I’m expecting FourteenLabs to show up with a $200M valuation and a mission statement about “redefining human potential."
https://www.linkedin.com/company/one-bit-labs/posts/?feedVie...
Three score and ten labs
Three score and seven labs /s
There’s still time to get in on the ground floor! What an opportunity
A long time ago I used "23 Labs" as a funny name relative to my username. Fast forward many years and I considered actually using it. Apparently "[Number] Labs" is a very popular idea now...
Oh well
There's always some kind of popular dumb naming scheme. I remember when it was prefixing "Zen-" to your startup. Some things never change
Remembr when it was missng lettrs out of wrds
miss.ng lett.rs
Zen-Eleven labs.
eZenElevenLabsify.io
.ly
dot com?
https://archive.md/BHilO
buying up all domains right now, thanks for making me rich
Nowadays, if you really want to sound modern and avant garde, try pitching a non-AI startup.
168labs.ai is still available. Great!
Hugged I think, no archives (org/today).
What about eleventyseven?
ok phew managed to archive it as the site came back up https://archive.is/BHilO
I did myself try a few increments above 11 once, but this takes it to the next level. Quality stuff.
Fwiw, ElevenLabs doesn't even make any sense as a firm, considering its TTS offering is extremely overpriced by an absurdly large factor. A large user would be far better off using local models. Even the OpenAI TTS is cheaper. There is no moat here such as with hardware.
The moat is marketing and good looking UI. They have been spamming Tik Tok et al. relentlessly and every lazy opportunist algorithm exploiter out there knows who they are, what they do, and that they can easily generate enough slop per cost to make their money back. So yeah, not a moat, but you're kinda missing the point. Just like Lovable is wildly over-priced, under powered, and has crazy levels of lock in built in (you can't even access your own supabase account that it uses for backend). It's not for you / us. Its for the masses who don't know (or want to know) any better.
gotta wonder if any inspired by Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's 12, Ocean's 13
I think the inspiration was the Arabic numerals.
No it was the word eleven and the word labs.
HN Hug of death
Yup. The site doesn't load.
Ironically (or maybe unironically?) I just started working with a friends company called fifteenlabs lol. Still pretty new.
57 could be a reference to the Chevy. Get it while it's hot... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957_Chevrolet
I'm disappointed that forty two labs isn't selling the answer to life, the universe and everything.
Back around 1994, I was 22 and had just moved away from my parents' home. I was renting a room in a 3BR house with roommates. We had pastimes like dancing to Deee-Lite, playing TinyMUD, and playing DOOM on a null modem connection with my 386. It turned out that one roommate had pastimes involving a pump shotgun he stored under his bed. But anyways.
I was eager, and knowledgeable enough, to register a unique domain name for the entire household. It wasn't clear how we'd use it, with no permanent Internet presence, and we didn't have any hosting, DNS, or BGP capabilities, but a domain name sure seemed like a nifty thing to have, and it was free. So I aimed to register under .ca.us.
Perhaps I was not feeling creative enough that week, or it was quite difficult to capture the zeitgeist of four completely different college kids sharing a house, but I decided that the best name for us was <street address>-<street name>.san-diego.ca.us. Fictitious example: 1234-main.san-diego.ca.us.
Another curiosity about this particular name was that it may have been on the cusp of standards compliance. In the original DNS specification, a label could not begin with a digit, mainly because of parsing from bare IP addresses, but as you can see, eventually it was permitted, and our domain registration went forward.
It was a real bummer, though, because our household domain name languished, as I argued with my roommates, and we had no means of even setting up email addresses, but for a few shining years I did own a wacky, unique, but very generic street-address-based domain name.
Ha, I also happen to be in the middle of trying to register a .ca.us domain right now! As you say, they can be very plain-looking but unique :)
And (unlike many of the <number>-labs companies) at least there's some logic behind using your physical address for a domain.
not very creative are we ?????
Not a fan of any company where the CEO is proud to have worked at Palantir and Blackrock. Meh and gross.
It's a kind of trend in the Silicon Valley to name startups with a number to make it abstract.
People argue that it make it more "memorable" than a "theme-based" name, because it's less expected.
But when everyone does it, it becomes less so
And all this time I had been calling them, "Elven Labs" in my head.