Origins of the Tealeaf Name

I stumbled across an article recently comparing Tealeaf to Apple, Macintosh and Blackberry, well our name specifically, and it had me reminisce about the origins of "Tealeaf" and in turn our path to the name.

Looking for Names in All the Wrong Places: the Power of Borrowing Names by Burt Alper
BlackBerry, Apple, Macintosh. Some of the most successful product names and company names have unexpected roots. For a software technology that’s all about gaining insight into customers’ online experience—and foreseeing and managing future experiences—Tealeaf Technology is a disarmingly intuitive name.

Many people are aware that the core Tealeaf technology originated inside of SAP.   In developing employee self-service applications during 1996-1997, my team became frustrated at the inability to understand and recreate issues that happened at our customer sites, and I felt the obstacles affected others.

While we were at SAP, we called the core technology 'Project Blackbox'. The notion of employing a flight recorder for a transactional web site was easy to understand. With SAP's permission, we received the rights to spinoff the Blackbox technology as an independent, venture funded company in 1999. While we gravitated to the Blackbox name initially -- there were several key challenges:

• Many people associated the value of a blackbox, aka flight recorder as only providing value when things crashed. Our technology was designed to assist with finding and fixing application errors, not disaster recovery.
• There was a successful electronics company called 'Blackbox' -- so calling ourselves Blackbox Software was going to cause confusion.

Around the same time, with a maturing product we started giving our product components names. We quickly seized upon the notion that our capture of user sessions allowed a 'DejaView' like understanding of the user’s experience. People understood and loved the 'Deja' metaphor and soon we were calling the company 'DejaCube'.

Our original thought was that the 'cube container' would allow us to expand the product/messaging as the product suite was developed-- however when we did our first tour of analyst relations -- one analyst insisted that any company with the name 'Cube' in it -- had to be “simply” an OLAP analytics company, not where we were wanting to go.

We took that feedback to heart and we looked at many alternatives before deciding on Tealeaf, a name that conveys both our past heritage and future vision.  Of course, the WWW being what it was the domain was being squatted on; but getting the name at a reasonable price launched our company's brand.

In our company history, there have been some funny tealeaf anecdotes over the years.

To people within the United States, the analogy of reading the tea leaves to understanding web site experience is understood. However, in Germany -- they don't read tea leaves, they read coffee grinds. In the UK, where we now have a thriving presence, tealeaf is slang for thief.

-- Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO

Comments

[Laurel Sutton]

A great post, Robert! We at Catchword (http://catchwordbranding.com) have created many company names over the years, but Tealeaf is still one of our favorites, and we tell the story of its creation over and over. It was one of those names that captured the company's essence perfectly, and did it in an evocative, intriguing way. And you guys were so great to work with! And another fun fact about the name: Tealeaf was just about the last name to be added to the long list of candidates - the hands-down winner out of 2000+ plus names! We're so happy that the name has served you well.