David Placek
Founder of Lexicon Branding (founded ~1982, Sausalito, California); 40+ years and 4,000+ naming projects. Named Powerbook, Pentium, Blackberry, Swiffer, Dasani, the Impossible Burger, Azure, Sonos, Vercel, Windsurf, and CapCut, among others. Employed 253 linguists over four decades; maintains a network of 108 linguists in 76 countries. Research partnerships with Stanford University Department of Linguistics and linguists from MIT and Berkeley. Background in advertising (6 years at a large agency before specialising in naming).
Lexicon’s distinguishing asset is a proprietary linguistic engine built on Sound Symbolism research and an 18,000+ morpheme database, combined with a three-team creative method and industrial-scale trademark screening.