Open the name. See the company.
Kai (开, to open) reads a company's name the way a name-reader reads a person's: on five grids, with a verdict and a forecast. It works for names from any country, and you do not need to read Chinese: every character on this page comes with its English meaning.
“The names of companies are often very predictive of future failure or success.”Peter Thiel, in conversation with Tyler Cowen
Thiel's pairs:
The ledger
| Name | Score | Verdict | What happened |
|---|
How Kai reads
- 天格 Sky · ceiling
- How large a company the name can hold. Borrowed words and coined words score high. Category words and naming fashions (.com, -ster, -ify, AI) fence the company into one product and one decade.
- 人格 Person · friend or foe
- Thiel's PayPal and Napster test. Warm words and soft consonants read as a friend. Menacing, illicit or domineering words read as someone to be wary of.
- 地格 Earth · sound
- Whether the name survives being spoken, in any language. Two syllables, open syllables, rhyme and alliteration help. Consonant pile-ups, th, and letters that change sound between languages hurt.
- 外格 Outer · the world's ear
- Thiel's Airbnb and Uber test, plus a red-flag screen. How the name sounds in a headline, a hearing or a courtroom, and whether it means something rude abroad. In regulated fields this grid counts double.
- 总格 Total · arc
- Thiel's Facebook and MySpace test. Whether the product's story is already in the word: a verb, other people, something you can say as an action.
- Score
- The five grids are averaged, then the distance from 60 is multiplied by 2.4 so differences show. A grid under 52 costs extra, because one broken grid can sink a name. Verdicts: 80+ Compounder 上上, 65+ Tailwind 上吉, 50+ Neutral 中平, 35+ Headwind 小凶, below that Marked 大凶.
- Free and paid
- The score, the verdict and the five grid numbers are free for every name. The reasons behind each grid, the forecast, the grid-by-grid comparison and the Eastern lens are the full reading, opened with a one-time Kai Pass that lasts a year.
- Scripts and languages
- Kai reads Latin letters with or without accents, and romanizes Cyrillic, Greek, Korean hangul and Japanese kana. For Chinese characters, Arabic, Hindi and other scripts, enter the Latin spelling. The red-flag screen is a short list across English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, Indonesian/Malay and Hebrew. It is a first pass and does not replace a native speaker.
- Eastern lens
- Stroke numbers from the capital letters, read against the 81-number table, and the five elements of the opening sounds (五音五行) set against the industry's element. This is tradition, shown beside the reading, and it does not change the score.