Jake & JZ

This might be our most tactical episode ever. If you’re starting something new, check it out! Not to brag, but it’s FULL of proven tactics for making big decisions about new projects.

This week we also answered our very first audience question. Thanks 1sam1216! Have a question for us? Send it to hey@jakeandjz.com.

On episode 7 of Jake & JZ, we talked about:
📩 Get an email about every episode at JakeAndJZ.com
💸 Learn more about our seed fund Character Capital
🥸 Find Jake on LinkedIn and X
🤠 Find JZ on LinkedIn and X

Chapters
0:00 Jake finally reads Anna Karenina
8:10 We visited Google again and gave a talk at YouTube!
11:00 Presenting the Foundation Sprint for the first time
14:00 Helping a founder build something new from day 0 in healthcare
18:05 Should he go direct to patients?
19:30 Design Sprints give you a chance to try something risky and non-consensus
20:35 A lot people told us not to write a book, so we prototyped it
22:10 Prototypes aren’t just for customers; they give founders a chance to see their idea live!
24:30 Our first audience questions!
25:20 Audience question: Do you have a method for naming companies?
26:05 History of the Name Sprint from Google Ventures
28:50 Walkthrough of our Name Sprint for Character Capital
29:45 Step 1: Note-and-Vote on themes of potential names
34:30 Step 2: Note-and-Vote on actual names (as many as possible)
36:40 Jake did not vote for Character
37:45 Step 3: Multiple rounds of voting to narrow down the set of names
38:35 Step 4: Plotting names on 2x2 charts to evaluate brand fit
39:20 We chose Character even though it didn’t fit our abstract brand values
41:05 Step 5: Vetting final names with the pub test (aka the shaky cell signal test)
42:30 Step 6: Final checks (web test, domain, trademark)
44:30 Empty vessel names
47:00 Collecting aspirational domain names (including jakeandjz.com!)
49:55 JZ’s Wisconsin accent
50:30 Lantern Ventures: a free brand for any VCs who love camping
51:30 We chose Character Capital because we had conviction, not consensus
52:45 A special thank you to Laura Melahn
53:30 Jake recommends Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (the book, not the movie)
56:00 JZ recommends NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts
57:15 NPR Tiny Desk is the new MTV Unplugged

Creators and Guests

Host
Jake Knapp
Host
John Zeratsky

What is Jake & JZ?

Weekly podcast about startups, design, marketing, technology… and anything else we’re thinking about. 🤓

Hosted by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, co-founders of‍ Character Capital and bestselling authors of Sprint and Make Time.

Jake (00:00)
just finished reading the book Anna Karenina. I don't know if I'm saying it right. Anna Karenina. Do you know? you know? don't know that. Okay. Yeah. This is by Leo Tolstoy in case anyone's in case they're multiple. Yeah. He's, he's also pretty well known in case. yeah. In case you're wondering which Anna Karenina, because there's so many talking about the one by Leo Tolstoy.

JZ (00:04)
Okay, yeah, yeah, I also don't know, but I have heard of that book.

I've heard of him too.

Right, yeah. The original or the cover?

Jake (00:28)
Well, it's probably in the public domain. know, you can probably write your own remixed version of it now copyright free. Let's take a few. Yeah. Leo's Leo's not around to do anything about it, but God rest his soul. But I, this is my second attempt at reading it. And I made it through this time, but the first time I was in college and it was kind of a formative experience for me.

JZ (00:33)
Just change a few words, copyright 2025, Jake Knapp.

Jake (00:54)
I was assigned to read the book in a, I mean, not just me, the whole class was assigned to read the book in this. God, I can't even remember what the title of the class was. College is a bit of a blur for me, not for any fun reason, just because I was so executively functioning at that stage in my life. But did have this class and get the assignment to read this book. And if you've ever, if you have seen Anna Karenina,

physically in person, it's an impressive book. It's like, mean, I don't know, I read it on the Kindle just now, so I don't know the page count, but it's a lot. Like I'd read for half an hour and it would have gone up like 1 % in terms of how far I through the book. Yeah, it's gotta be 800, 900 pages or something. And I did give it like a decent try to actually read it when it was assigned to me, but it was just clear.

JZ (01:27)
Yeah.

You're like doing the mental math. You're like, at this rate, it's gonna take me a

Jake (01:48)
like as I saw the timeline of when I needed to be done, it was not gonna happen. then I was really bad at procrastinating and I suppose I still am, maybe have not gotten over that, but it got to the point where I was, it was the night before the paper was due and I really had only read like 50 pages, maybe, because I also just couldn't get into it. It's a bit slow. And I, and so I came up with this thing though that I think was really,

JZ (02:07)
Hahaha

Jake (02:15)
I think was pretty clever, which was, okay, it's the night before, it's like 9 p.m. I'm like, I'm gonna go to the bookstore, which is open late, at the University of Washington. I'm gonna go to the U bookstore there and I'm gonna get the Cliff Notes, okay, so that's not great. I had this other additional idea, which was I went to the video store, which, know, dating me a little bit, but I went to the video store by Blockbuster and I looked and there were actually two movie versions of...

JZ (02:42)
Wow.

Jake (02:43)
And it turned into because I mean, it's an old book, right? So there's like one with maybe like credit Garbo or something. mean, it's like, you know, like a black and white with like. Actresses, actors, or you're like, yeah, I think I've heard their name. And then there was a newer one. two videos. And so starting at 9 PM, I, I read the Cliff notes.

JZ (02:50)
Yeah.

Wow.

Jake (03:04)
I or skimmed through the movies and probably 3 a.m. I started writing the paper the book to the different versions of the movie.

JZ (03:16)
That was approach you were taking with your paper. Yeah. Which is really good. That's a really clever approach, because you're able to sort of obscure the fact that you didn't actually read the whole book.

Jake (03:17)
that was the conceit. That was the plan.

Thank you. Thank you.

you reduce the surface area that you have to talk about the book itself by, you know, down to like a third. And then it's all in reference to the movies. I mean, it was, was, if I do say so myself, it was a stroke of genius. And so I this paper and I like, as this day is dawning, I'm like finishing it up. run, and this is again dating me, but I had to like go to the library to print it out, you know, like I had on a disc or something.

JZ (03:33)
Right, yeah.

Yeah, totally.

Jake (03:56)
And then anyway, I turned it in and I got a really good grade on the paper and I had a friend in the class and I remember showing her like, Hey, look, I got a better grade. was actually a jerk about it. But, then at the end of the semester, there was a knowledge level test on everything that we'd read. And I just, I was just destroyed, you know, I just, cause I didn't, I just hadn't read. So anyway, I passed the class, but it wasn't great. But I finally, felt like I really had to read the book.

You and I was like, when I met my wife, she was like, that's such a great book. Like you had the opportunity to read it and like talk about it in a class. You're such a jerk. And, so I, I finally, later, I was like, I'm going to do it. And, read it and it is a really good book. It is a really good book. but no professor should assign that to, you know,

JZ (04:42)
Yeah.

Jake (04:48)
however old I was, 19. Like there's no way it would have made sense to me or I would have read through it,

JZ (04:50)
Yeah.

and regardless of how mature or organized you were, it just feels like a lot of book for a semester. It's like, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So how long did it take you to read it this time? Yeah.

Jake (05:01)
Yeah. And it was one of three books. Like it wasn't even the only book we had to read. was like, come on. What, you know? Yeah. It took me really long time. It took me longer than a college semester.

JZ (05:13)
Yeah, has this been your main book that you've been reading?

Jake (05:16)
It's, it's been my before bed book. tried to read fiction right before I go to sleep. just made for whatever reason for my brain easier to fall asleep reading fiction. And it's, it did often, it put me right to sleep. it, know, sometimes they weren't the most valiant reading efforts. It's not always like a page turner, although there are a couple of scenes in there where it's like really intense and there's this like horse race where anyway, but, the thing that was really cool about it is it's.

JZ (05:19)
Okay, cool. Yeah, cool. Yeah, I do the same.

Yeah.

Jake (05:45)
It's very well written. There's he's got great Leo Tolstoy. call him Leo. He's got great insight into the human experience. And you've realized a couple of things like one, I mean, it's, you know, it's set and I suppose was contemporary times, like the 1800s. You're like, wow, like people's experience is still, we're still are thinking about the same things. We're still struggling with the same things. And

JZ (06:07)
Yeah, yeah.

Jake (06:11)
you know, however much technology or whatever else changes, like a lot is still the same. And then it's also cool because is time travel. Like you really get to sort of inhabit these people's lives in 18th century Russia. mean, you know, we can't even travel to Russia now if we wanted to, like, you can not only let alone go back in time, like 150 years. So cool. So yeah, it was fun.

JZ (06:20)
Yeah.

Yeah, amazing. Well, you did a recommendation at the beginning this time.

Jake (06:34)
Well, should we record a podcast here?

yeah, I did. Well, yeah, I, I would recommend it if you've got a lot of time to have a lot of time, but also, yeah, yeah. Above the age of 40 and you have a lot of time, go for it. I'm going to reserve a, a pallet cleanser recommendation for what I'm reading next till the end. So that's a teaser for the end of the episode. Stay tuned.

JZ (06:40)
Or are you not recommending it? Per se. Okay. Yeah. You're ready. Yeah. If you are above the age of 40.

Okay. Okay. Sounds good. So stay tuned for that. All right. Should we record this thing? Sweet.

Jake (07:05)
Let's do it.

JZ (07:28)
Hi, welcome to Jake and Jay Z episode number seven. This is our weekly podcast about startups, design, technology, marketing, other stuff that we're thinking about, talking about, reading about, watching, learning about. That's Jake over there. I'm Jay Z. We are the founders of Character Capital, the authors of Sprint, Make Time. This is our podcast. And if you want to get our weekly newsletter with the latest podcast episode and

Jake (07:38)
Yeah.

JZ (07:56)
some other cool stuff that we found in the past week, please go to jakenjay-z.com.

Jake (08:02)
Well, welcome to the show, John. Thanks.

JZ (08:04)
Yeah, welcome to you. Last week, I was gonna say last week was fun, but that was this week. We both traveled to the Bay Area and I guess we were in Silicon Valley, technically. We were in the real deal, the place where the...

Jake (08:10)
Yeah.

yeah, what are the boundaries of Silicon Valley? Where geographically, where does it end?

JZ (08:21)
I, that's a really good question. sort of assume like San Mateo to San Jose ish. Yeah. Well, we were in Palo Alto. Well, we stayed in Palo Alto. And the reason that we were there was we gave a talk at YouTube and it was for one of the design teams at YouTube. And it was, it was really fun. We went back to Google for the first time in a while.

Jake (08:28)
No, it sounds right. Okay, yeah.

JZ (08:49)
Both used to work there. I worked at YouTube, not in this office, but I worked at YouTube like 15 years ago, which is really crazy to think about, but it was fun to visit again. What did you think of the experience, Jake?

Jake (09:01)
It was, it was fun. It was weird because I hadn't been back to Google. It'd been a few years for me since I'd been in a Google building. And was funny. were in Mountain View. They were having this big offsite. Usually I think of YouTube headquarters at San Bruno, but they were having it in Mountain View in this big building that's down by Moffat field where they have the NASA.

JZ (09:04)
Yeah.

Jake (09:24)
the cool NASA stuff. like across the street, you've got like Humvees and like giant satellite dishes, like you would see in, eighties movie. It's like a big, yeah. Like the one on top of the secret government department of energy building and stranger things. Like they have that satellite dish. But, but yeah.

JZ (09:31)
Yeah, I was going to say like a James Bond movie or something.

Yeah. Yeah. The kind of satellite you don't want to get too close to because you know that there's going to be some pretty serious radiation. Also, remember we drove past the, maybe this is what you're going to say. OK, it is what you're going to say. I won't steal your thunder.

Jake (09:48)
I felt like we were maybe too close even across the street.

Yeah. No, no, say it. Yeah.

JZ (10:02)
Well, we drove past this like sort of open lot. had chain link fence around it with like barbed wire on the top. inside the lot, it was they were testing the Mars Rover that was like all these like boulders strewn about sort of, guess, trying to mimic the terrain of Mars. And it's just right there. mean, it's like it's sort of tucked away because it's not it's not really near like anything else other than Google. But

Jake (10:15)
Yeah

Yeah.

JZ (10:31)
It's crazy. just, you just drive right past it. It was really cool.

Jake (10:35)
It is crazy. It's so crazy and so cool. And they must have like gazillion acres there on that thing. And it was so cool that that was just right by the edge where we would drive by on the road. Maybe they just put it out there until it'd be like, no, we're doing cool stuff here. was fun to be fun to be at Google, fun to be at YouTube.

JZ (10:44)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jake (10:54)
And fun to try a new talk. You and I did a new talk. we were talking about the foundation sprint. So first time giving a talk about how it works. Had to figure out how to explain a bunch of new concepts. And I always enjoy the process of giving a talk for the first time, but it's painful because you have a lot of untested experiments in there and you don't know what's going to happen. So.

JZ (11:21)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I think maybe in the first or second episode, we talked a bit about Character Labs, this program that we run with founders who are just starting their new companies. So they're usually in the first couple of months of starting a startup. And we actually created the foundation sprint for Character Labs because we had been, after we started Character Capital, we were investing in these early stage startups who were like,

Jake (11:24)
It's good though.

Yeah.

JZ (11:50)
man, they kind of need something that comes before the design sprint, right? They're not to the point where they know what they're doing, they're sort of on the track and they just have kind of problems to solve or big questions to answer or ideas to test. They've got some foundational stuff they wanna figure out, like what segment of the market are we focused on and what's the sort of white space in that market to solve problem for customers in a unique way. And so the foundation sprint is

is like how we do that with startups. And it works really well. I mean, we've now done it with, 30 to 40 startups. But we've never like talked about it in detail. Like we've mentioned it on the podcast. Like we've talked, we talk about it with startups, we run it with startups, but we never talked about it publicly and really tried to explain it to people, try to show them how to do it.

And so was really cool to have the opportunity to do that for the first time.

Jake (12:46)
in this talk, they were, they were very curious to learn about decision-making as it relates to the way that we work. And so there are a bunch of new decision-making methods that we have in there. The design sprint is very much about decision-making and the foundation sprint is too, but we had to create a few new formulas and recipes for making decisions. So yeah, it was fun to step back from it a little bit and say, okay, if you're talking about this in a room.

for people who are not necessarily going be running a foundation sprint right now. It's not the startup founders.

JZ (13:18)
Right. And we're not going to be there to do it with them. Like we hope that they can go and do it on their own. That's the big leap.

Jake (13:22)
Yeah.

definitely looking back on it. This is always true with any talk. I always look back and think, hmm, could have done that part a little better. I thought it was good. It was a good first waffle off of the waffle iron.

JZ (13:40)
Yeah, definitely. And a bit of a teaser, I guess, is that we will at some point, we will share more detail, more of that kind of detail, probably here. I mean, I think we have some, templates and resources that are helpful that I think we can talk about and share, but, not today. Another time. The other thing we did when we were out in Palo Alto was we met up with a founder in our portfolio.

Jake (13:51)
Absolutely. Yeah.

But not today, but soon, soon but not today. Yeah.

JZ (14:08)
that we have been working with. We just invested in this company couple of months ago, and we've been working a lot with him recently. And we just finished a design sprint with this founder, with this company. And I it might be kind of cool to talk about that a little There's a specific point that I want to make that's about the kind of risk that you can take.

in a design sprint that I think most teams would not talk themselves into taking if they were working in the typical business as usual fashion. need to keep this person anonymous for now, but like give us a little bit of background on types of problems he's trying to solve with his company.

Jake (14:43)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, worked on major project that came out of Google recently, like within the last couple of years, he was kind of a co-founder of this project. has a lot of very specific, technical expertise and he also has experience with.

building healthcare products and has worked at a very successful startup prior to Google that was in healthcare. And so he's at this great intersection of tremendous technical capability and vision into what can be done with technology, with AI, and also this understanding of the realities of the healthcare system. then you put those two together and it's like, there's a lot of potential.

But because there's so much potential, I think this actually challenging for, can be challenging for a really capable founder in a field where there is a lot of opportunity and a lot of things that are not great, suboptimal in the way the system works. You know, in healthcare, there's so many places where things could be improved and where, you know, it's...

The data is complicated and the, you know, the experience for the patient is not great. And the experience that the physicians have is not great and they want to do more for the patients. And yeah, anyway, you guys probably get the idea if you're, if you're listening, if you've ever been to a doctor ever that like, hopefully it was good, but probably could have been better. so in that space of, exactly what form should this, should this product, this company take? And this is a really fun time for.

JZ (16:16)
Yeah.

Jake (16:32)
for you and I, think, because we, in working with him, get to help him experiment, form the ideas of like, what's a reasonable experiment to take? What's a good hypothesis? That's foundation sprint stuff. And then, okay, now let's put that hypothesis using a design sprint. Let's put it into a prototype, put it in front of customers. So in this first example, what if we built something and it was something that patients chose to use? So the target customer's patients.

What does that look like? And as, as you were saying, because you can, with a foundation sprint, really quickly identify the hypothesis with a design sprint, we quickly like put that hypothesis in front of your customers. You don't have to be so dead set sure that you're headed in the right direction to try something. And I think that's, that was, that's what's really cool about it because the first attempt here.

may or may not have been in the right direction, but it wasn't very costly to him.

JZ (17:34)
Yeah, and I think this is particularly interesting because like you said, this founder has worked in AI and he's worked in healthcare. And so he knows a lot and he knows a lot of people in that field. And he's specifically working in the field of oncology, cancer, where there's a lot of data, more than I think other...

parts medicine and healthcare. There's just a tremendous amount of data and a lot of the care decisions are really about like sort of crunching that data, figuring out the best course of action. the interesting thing is like, so as he's been talking to people starting this company, everybody's like, don't go, don't focus on the patient. Like not in a bad way, that sounds bad, but like don't try to go like direct to patients, like go through the insurance companies or go through the...

health networks or go through the doctors, like go to the oncologists and like sign a pilot with them, which is probably all like very reasonable, very smart and well-informed advice. But when we ran the foundation sprint, there was kind of this kernel of, of conviction, this, this spark of passion where this founder was like, you know what? That's probably right. That's probably good advice, but, I

really believe there's an opportunity here to go directly to patients and to give patients something that's going to help them get better care, get better sooner, feel better, have an easier time with this very difficult thing. was kind of this, I could just imagine an alternate universe where he was starting this company and he wasn't running design sprints. And he'd be like, well, everybody says I should not do this. Everybody says I should just go and like focus on the oncologists.

I'm just going to do that. It seems reasonable. It seems like the sensible thing to do. And again, like we don't know if this approach is going to work. I think having a chance to take a shot, having a chance to actually try something that's kind of risky, that's kind of different, that is non-consensus just feels like it's, it's worth doing. It feels like if you can.

Constrain that and bound that so it's not going to use up all your money and all your time. You can do it in a design sprint. It feels like a really special shot worth taking.

Jake (19:49)
Totally. You can just say, okay, well, I'm going to call time out from logic, from conventional wisdom. just say, what if everyone's wrong? What would it look like? just test that conventional wisdom. And conventional wisdom sounds derogatory. I think conventional wisdom in this case is very wise. It's based off of the

JZ (19:56)
Right.

Jake (20:15)
lot of experience people have had.

JZ (20:16)
Yeah, this is not like, you know, asking a random person on the street. These are like super experienced, smart people working in this field.

Jake (20:24)
And I share the conventional wisdom in this case, you know, I kind of think like, this is a hard way to go. And I don't know if it's going to make as big of a difference, but the cool thing is it's driven by what the founder wants to try, what the founder wants to experiment with. remember back when we were, you know, just playing toying with the idea of like, should we write a book about the design sprint? And I remember talking to people about it in a certain window when it was like,

You know, so this idea like, should, should we try and do it? And I remember a lot of people just say like, no, no, don't bother doing that. That's not, it's not worth it. It's a lot of effort. It's not going to move the needle. You know, don't, don't do it. And then I remember like, you know, putting together a prototype of it. And you remember looking at that prototype, you know, we, we like wrapped a fake, like a printed out, you know, just like a cover that, that I had mocked up in keynote and we printed it out and we put it around like a

JZ (20:51)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's not worth it.

Jake (21:17)
book, you know, just like, what would it look like if you're holding this book and like, I do.

JZ (21:20)
And you still have that. I saw that when I was at your house earlier this year. I saw it. It's so cool.

Jake (21:25)
Yeah. Yeah, it is. It was cool. And it was like, I don't, you know, it just sort of, one of the things that can come out of that kind of effort is that even if, even if the customers don't react right to it as of, the founder, you might look at that thing and say, no, like that's, I think there's something there. I think that's it. You know, and looking back to the prototype of the book, it didn't have the right title. didn't have, you know, like so many things were different about it, but

JZ (21:49)
Right, yeah.

Jake (21:52)
thesis here is we're trying to spread this idea to people and give them something that they can use. A physical, you know, physical printed object of books actually feels like a special way to do that. And it might just as easily have not worked in reality, but like that moment was key. And there's, and there's some of that here too, for the founder. like, okay, you get to see it too. You get to assess your own intuition about.

JZ (22:16)
Totally.

Jake (22:18)
how excited you are about this thing. Does this feel like this vessel could be filled with the magic it needs to become a special product? And if you just listen to people's advice and then you try to come up with the perfect decision before you start executing, you probably won't take that step.

JZ (22:37)
This dynamic exists everywhere, this sort of consensus narrative. And part of what's so challenging about starting something new is that everybody will tell you to go talk to other people who have worked in that category. They've tried to solve some more problems. They've started some more companies, whatever, which is good. I mean, absolutely. It makes sense. Before you do a thing, you should talk to people who have done the thing or tried to do the thing.

there's almost always then this consensus narrative that you get from those conversations, whether it's, a partner at a VC firm, don't bother writing a book, or you're a founder working in healthcare, don't bother going direct to patient. There's a zillion things like that. I think it's hard without some sort of method or tool, it's hard to say, I'm gonna ignore those people and go my own way.

if we can give founders a little bit of a.

structure or a vehicle, if we can give them a way pursue the unconventional non-consensus approach, sometimes it works. And when it does work, those tend to be the truly unique, truly differentiated, really special and successful projects.

Jake (23:55)
you know, whether it works or it doesn't work, I think it's so much more satisfying in life to be able to explore the paths that you are excited about or intrigued about. And maybe those paths are often dead ends. And even if they're all dead ends, at least you took a step down that path or a few steps down that path. And you don't have to wonder later, you know, I am running this business. not exactly what I, yeah, you know, you can, you hopefully can then have more conviction that.

JZ (24:01)
Yeah.

Jake (24:25)
All right, if I'm gonna do this thing, this really is the best way to do it. So yeah, it was good. It was a good sprint.

JZ (24:28)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now that we've been making this podcast for a little while, a couple of months, this is episode seven. We have started to get some questions from listeners, from people watching, which is really exciting. We have a little bit of a mailbag forming, of things that I find pretty interesting. I'm excited to talk about.

And actually, if you're listening to this or you're watching this on YouTube and you have a question for us, something that you wish we would talk about, please send it to us. Send it to hey at jakenjz.com and we'll add it to our collection of other interesting questions and we'll do our best to answer it in a future episode. got a couple here that I thought would be fun to talk about. The first one comes from a YouTube comment, onesam1216.

asks, do you guys have a podcast on naming or renaming? Would love to see that.

Jake (25:28)
Yeah, yet, yet, but this could be it right now. So let's give the, we do have an approach to naming and we've helped to name a bunch of products and features and.

JZ (25:29)
Well, we don't have a podcast on it yet until now. Yeah, this is a self-referential.

Jake (25:51)
And we named character and we thought, you know, Hey, John and I were, we're chatting about this before we thought, let's, let's show you or, talk you through depending on whether you're on YouTube or on your, just your headphones. Let's talk you through how we named character, real quick and share this, process. So.

JZ (26:08)
goes all the way back to when we were at Google ventures and I don't even remember, Jake, do you remember like how this came up in the first place? When was the first time that a team was like, can you help me name my company or, or did we offer that? know that our, partners, Laura and Daniel were, were quite savvy about brand and about naming. so I, I know that they were having these conversations, but I'm trying to remember sort of what was the spark that led to creating the

the name Sprint.

Jake (26:38)
the first one that I can remember is what became Calico. Calico is a life science division of alphabet. And when they were spinning it up, just getting started, I suppose they must've come to Google Ventures to ask for some help with branding and marketing and naming.

And so, you and I and, Laura Milan and Daniel Burka, probably Braden Coates was, was probably involved as well. And we, of put together this process and I don't remember if that was the first time that we had done it, but remember we were thinking about things that Daniel and Laura had experienced because Laura's an expert in marketing who

worked at marketing at Google and worked at Google ventures with a bunch of startups. Daniel has a bunch of experience with design and brand. And there were things that agencies will do if they're working with a client to kind of establish what the framework, the sort of underlying framework of a brand is, which honestly to me, just is like, I'm just like, what? Like, what are you talking about? Like a framework for a brand? Like this is not, it sounds.

JZ (27:59)
Yeah, it sounds so abstract. It's like so hard to get your hands around.

Jake (28:03)
Yeah. And really the kind of thing where I would just normally be like, like I, I don't know what you're talking about. I can't help with this runaway. Where's the product, but, but, actually having worked with it a few times, I pretty quickly realized, there is something here. This idea of a framework it's, it's kind of a way for people to make decisions about brands.

JZ (28:10)
Yeah, whatever man.

Jake (28:30)
naming, even visual style, even marketing voice, things like this, to make those decisions easier, this framework is kind of something that helps you sort of put into concrete terms, into visuals, what are we all about? So rather than talking about it in the abstract, we just sort of quickly walk through how we did this for character?

JZ (28:51)
Yeah,

Jake (28:52)
okay. So for naming, we've got this kind of brand sprint framework established. And if you're curious about the brand sprint, by the way, can search online, you can search for three hour brand sprint, and you'll find a medium post. It's kind of a how-to guide that I wrote about, detailed. And lots and lots of people have used that to run their own brand sprints, but the name sprint,

JZ (29:11)
Yeah, super detailed. Yeah.

Jake (29:20)
is built on top of the brand sprint. It's a thing. You do the brand sprint first, you establish some, some framework that helps you, you know, say, okay, we're not that we're more like this than like this. more like that than like the other thing. And then you go into naming. So for naming, start off with themes. So, you'll see in this slide, it says character name sprint, but we didn't know the name was character when we started, I came back afterwards and wrote this into the slide. But the first step is coming up with themes. So.

JZ (29:44)
Yeah.

Jake (29:48)
we are looking here for not names yet, but themes that we think might be interesting places to explore ideas for names. And so as an example, some of the themes here that we ended up choosing to explore the theme of nature, know, are there words names that come from nature that might be interesting or the theme of wonder, like, you know, just the feeling of wonder what names

might be inspired by or be in the category of wonder. Perseverance was another theme. Questions was a theme, because we think about, you can tell by the way we've talked about things already today, we're often thinking about the questions that you can ask and the questions that you can answer when you're building products, building a business. is an example of a theme. Speed, travel, navigation. So,

JZ (30:38)
Yeah.

Jake (30:43)
These themes, none of those would necessarily make a great name itself. That's not what we're going for. We're going for a category of places where we can explore. And then.

JZ (30:52)
And if you're listening on audio only, what we're looking at here is actually a Google Slides presentation. It's a slide and there are essentially a bunch of sticky notes, digital sticky notes where we've one category or one theme per sticky note. And then we have some dots. We've voted on the ones that we think are the most interesting, the most relevant, maybe even the most

fruitful in terms of helping us think of names, but this is a really helpful step. mean, it feels a little, it's, I remember when we first started doing this, I was like, can't we just do the names? Like, why do we need the in-between stuff? Like we're trying to think of names. Why don't we just think of names? But it's actually really helpful because it's kind of like a low stakes warmup. It's sort of like, don't try to think of names yet. Like don't jump straight to like the hard part. All you have to do is think of themes. Like what are some general

Jake (31:28)
Hahaha

Yeah.

JZ (31:45)
themes or categories of names that might make sense for us. It's a great way to warm the brain up, to look back at the brand sprint stuff that you did and think about, what's the ballpark that we want to be playing in with these names?

Jake (32:00)
One of the big things that we're doing in any kind of a sprint, when we create it, when we put it together, when we're testing it out and trying to make it work is to take a challenging activity that people do and break it down into sub components. The components that we think will lead to a good outcome. And a lot of times those are, you know, it's like, what's the smallest

atom or molecule of progress that you can make. And let's put it in the right order. just to build off of that thing with, if you jump right to trying to come up with names, you'd probably be able to come up. I'll be able to come up with some number, two or three or four. I'll just be, yeah, what about that? could be this or this. But at some point, my brain will naturally go into this idea of themes. Like I'll think of one name. I might think of like, it'd be cool if it was called,

JZ (32:26)
Right. Yep.

Hmm.

Jake (32:52)
titanium or something, you know, that, and then it's like, well, what else? What's another name? And then I'm probably going to be thinking on the, so what else is like a, know, either like a, a metal or what else is a space age material or something, you know? And then, and so I, you, you could start with names, but you're eventually going to hit themes. So you might as well start with themes. So, so we have our, we have our themes. We do our usual note and vote, which means

JZ (33:03)
Right.

Yeah.

Jake (33:19)
across all of them, placing some votes and then placing a second round of votes and narrowing down and then moving ahead with those. then if we move to the next slide and we were just using slides at this point, cause this was, this was either like really early pandemic or before the pandemic. I don't remember really early.

JZ (33:37)
It was early pandemic and I don't think we had totally, well, actually I know what it was. You had created this template before you started using Miro. So I don't know, Miro probably existed, but like this template probably dates from 2018 or something like that. And Google Slides decent for this because you can look at one slide at a time. So you can sort of focus on like, this is the step we're doing right now. And the...

Jake (33:46)
Yeah.

JZ (34:02)
the design tools, if you will, the sort of desktop publishing, like draw a box, make some texts, like they're really simple. They're appropriately simple for what we're trying to do here. Like, it's not like trying to do this in Figma where would get tripped up in all of the advanced features. So anyway, that's why this is in Google Slides.

Jake (34:16)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's kind of Google slides can be like a very rudimentary version of Miro. Essentially we, we, we graduated to Miro after this, but you can make it work in Google slides. So we started listing off, you know, a bunch of names. So the next slide is just, I don't know how many there are here, but there must be 60, 70 names. And we've just listed them off query, tideline, sprint, valid, Porter, North Point, Shepherd.

JZ (34:38)
Yeah.

Jake (34:48)
And it goes on. There's, there are columns and columns of these names.

JZ (34:51)
Yeah, that's right. It's spelled in an odd way. Yeah.

And we did this via note and vote. Well, this, at this point, just note, because we were each working individually. So Eli, our co-founder, Jake, and I were each working individually. We were writing down our own ideas on paper. And then I think we just typed them all into this slide so we could see them all in one place.

Jake (35:17)
Yeah. So it was a secret. Nobody knew what the other people were coming up with. And put them all in here and then we have another one here where we had voted and actually bolded the ones that, kind of got a decent amount of votes. top candidates here now narrowed down out of that list of whatever, call it 70, 75 names. We've got query sprint, valid, decent, fix, lightning.

Guild, Envelope, Pointer, Lantern, Character, which has a lot of votes, but not more than anything else. There's a few others with that many. Character, Likely, and Nice. So any of these are meant to be the potential name for the company. So it might be, you know, Query Capital or Query Ventures or, you know, Sprint Ventures or Pointer Ventures. So we're thinking all of these are candidates. So we've narrowed down.

JZ (36:12)
Yeah, and this is sort of a helpful step to sort of a micro step that I think we had two slides previous was if whatever industry you're in, if there are like typical suffixes, if it's like, you for us, it's like, yeah, ventures, capital, VC, partners, group fund, in venture capital, are names of firms that have like a word and then blank ventures, blank that can be just to help you think.

bit more contextually like how are we actually going to use this name real life.

Jake (36:42)
And then we voted further down on those. we took just that set.

JZ (36:47)
This slide is really interesting to see where the votes are.

Jake (36:51)
Yeah, I did not vote for character, it looks like.

JZ (36:54)
No, no, you've done, you and Holly both double voted on Lantern. Lantern Ventures.

Jake (36:59)
Yeah, yeah, which, yeah, which still could have been an all right name, but it doesn't, it's not as good maybe on the pub test, I think.

JZ (37:08)
It doesn't hold a candle, pun intended to character.

Jake (37:12)
Yeah, I also double voted on Sprint. So I've put all of my votes on Lantern and Sprint and then one vote on Likely. And Eli's voted twice for character. You voted once for character, once for fix, once for Sprint, once for Likely, once for Pointer. So you spread your votes around. I've placed some...

JZ (37:32)
Yeah, it was not very incentive. There's that famous Eli Blea Goldman intuition though.

Jake (37:39)
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And then we move on to the next. This is just, I guess we've just collected the sort of winner.

JZ (37:41)
Double voting on character, he knew.

So what we're looking at here is we have like, there was a slide that had like 70 names on it with votes, and then there's a slide that has like, I don't know, like 12 names on it with votes. And now we're on a slide that has seven names with votes. So we're basically just doing subsequent rounds of voting. Each of us probably has four votes, maybe five votes that we can use here. And so we're forcing ourselves to narrow the field.

Jake (38:09)
Yeah.

And now narrowed once again and all of the votes now, I don't recall exactly what happened in between this stuff.

JZ (38:24)
It might have been the next day. We might have slept on it.

Jake (38:27)
We slept on it. Yeah. So now everything's on character except for one vote on lantern. Probably me still, but we're trying out, I think these different names on, some, the sort of two by two that comes from the brand sprint where it's modern to classic on one axis, expressive to reserved on the other axis. And we're looking for something that's really expressive and

JZ (38:31)
Hahaha

you

Yeah.

Jake (38:53)
Not all the way modern, but pretty modern. And that's our, that's our target, but character actually is classic and reserved quadrant. It's, actually in the opposite, it's almost as far away as you could get on this chart from where we had said we wanted the brand to be. So this was a, this was kind of a, a stumbling block, you know, for us to, realize our, our usual method that we would tell founders to use here.

JZ (39:02)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jake (39:21)
We've totally broken

JZ (39:23)
always this like translation from abstract to concrete and like abstractly when we said, what do we want the brand to be? We had said, well, we want it to be expressive and modern. That's those are two of the axes we're looking at here. If you go to the next slide, what were those like rebellious and friend, friendly, rebel and friend. Like those were other things we sort of wanted the brand to evoke. Yeah. And so when we, yeah, when we like looked at these in the abstract,

Jake (39:43)
And again, a character is the total opposite. It's authority and conventional.

JZ (39:51)
Like we felt one thing, but then when we looked at concrete names, we just, we, don't know, we just, think had a strong intuition that like character was the right name for us. felt like the right name for us, even though it didn't fit the abstract notions of what we thought the brand should be. It almost like forced us to rethink what the brand should be. Yeah, it was just an interesting, interesting way that the process played out.

Jake (40:18)
And in my defense, Lantern is very close, at least in these first two, to the target, the target green. And then we move, we move again. Now we're Elite and friend again, Lantern is right there. It's an elite friend. character is not totally, it's, it's, we, we plot it as elite, but more authority than friend because it doesn't sound particularly friendly. I think that's right. And then,

JZ (40:23)
Yeah. Yes. Yeah, well, you were spot on with that pic.

Yep. Yep.

Yeah.

No, yeah.

Jake (40:47)
and then I see some of these are like this says Eli's quick plot. where Eli is plotting things is a little different. Anyway, we, we did this exercise. kind of plotted it. And I think we, I think in the end we decided, well, that was interesting. Maybe the brand voice. If, if we're really excited about character, maybe we need to rethink the brand voice a little bit. and then we, we vet names by doing.

The pub test, the idea there being that if you're in a noisy pub, it's funny that this is called pub test. This, don't know who named it this, but it's yeah, because I would never say the word pub. it's very, very much too sophisticated for me, but if you're in a loud place, can you, I think of it as like the cell phone with bad reception test. You're talking to somebody and you're saying like, you know, my, my VC fund is called character.

JZ (41:17)
This must be a Danielism.

Jake (41:39)
Can they make out the word character? Is it just, is it a word that's easily hearable, easily sayable? And...

JZ (41:46)
It's very appropriate, Jake, you grew up in a rural area on an island. It's very appropriate that your test for legibility would be this shaky cell phone signal test. then Daniel grew up in Canada and now lives in London. It's very appropriate that his test would be the pub test. So you're both true to form, true to your background.

Jake (41:51)
You

Right. Shouting in the forest in a high wind. Can you name of your company?

JZ (42:12)
Somebody's on the other end of your yard, they're far away, and you're like, hey, it's character. What?

Jake (42:16)
So, so pub test is the first, the first test to pass. Does it match the brand? Does it.

JZ (42:29)
And that's what we're trying to do with those two by two plots.

Jake (42:32)
The quick web test, this means we're running a search online to just see what else is there that has that same name? And do we think that when people search for it in the future, they'll be able to find us if we're, you know, if we're character capital, is there other things that come up that are going to be confusing or that dominate that namespace? domain, is there a decent domain name available? What can we get?

And then a quick, if you get through all those, a quick trademark test to see if there's, before you would do like a really thorough trademark test, just seeing, okay, if I just look this word up, what's trademarked? Does it seem like that's going to be a problem? So this is quick vetting just to see, are these names still candidates? And we did this for character, which we were calling character.

JZ (43:22)
Well, one quick thing I want to call out here is that I think that it's really important that these tests come at the end. These vetting tests are at the end of the process because I have, before we started running these names, friends, and when I had tried to name things in the past, I was, thinking about the domain name and that kind of stuff. I was, I was thinking about that at the beginning, you know, as I was like, well, that's a cool name, but it'll never work because I can't get that, that domain or like I was sort of.

Jake (43:44)
Yeah.

JZ (43:50)
disqualifying ideas very quickly. And I think it's really helpful to take a more principled approach and try to figure out like what would be the best possible name. And then at the end figure out, can we make it work from a practical standpoint?

Jake (44:06)
It's a way to again, break apart that process that has to happen and put the right thing in the right place. And it's, it's quite natural to start the vetting process. Looking up domains is really fun for me anyway. Like I love to see, what's available. And, it's not a terrible way to think of names. You can just be in that mode and hit it lucky and be like, my God, this is a great.

JZ (44:25)
Yeah.

Jake (44:34)
Word, I can't believe this thing's available, scrap.

JZ (44:36)
Yeah, especially if you're going to go with like an empty vessel style name where it's like you choose a word that there happens to be like it happens to be like a five letter word with a dot com and it doesn't matter like what the word is because it doesn't mean anything yet and you're going to imbue it with meaning. That can be really fun.

Jake (44:45)
Yeah.

Yeah, an empty vessel name is means something that it doesn't mean the word doesn't mean anything to anyone yet. And you're going to fill the vessel with the meaning of, of what your name of what your, company, your product, whatever it is. So.

JZ (45:07)
Or it doesn't really mean anything in your industry. I was listening to a podcast and it was sponsored by Ramp, which is, like a corporate like spend management sort of business neo bank. And I was like, Ramp, like, how did think of that? Like, what does that even mean? Like, I don't understand what that word means. And Ramp obviously is like a real word that means things, but in their industry, doesn't mean anything. And so for them, it is for all intents and purposes, an empty vessel.

Jake (45:23)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, here we've got the, the vetting for character and ultimately we ended up calling it character capital rather than character ventures. If you're looking at the slide, you'll see like there's a little URL bar at the top that we've mocked up. Like what would, what would the website, the most likely domain that we found the best domain that we found, what would it look like up at the top?

What does this look like? Not really designed, but just instead of on a sticky note, what does it look like if it's in some kind of, you know, big slab typeface? and then, the Y this is a moderate match, how we conduct ourselves and the characters we'll work with fundamentally human concept. I'm not sure what fundamentally human. I think I actually, I do think I know what that means. We're kind of talking about.

Character is a very basic human thing. and so we'd say the why, cause this is something we've talked about earlier in the brand sprint works because it sounds elite, great on the pub test concerns, little pretentious or oriented on innate qualities of people rather than action. and then some vetting, trying to see like, what else is there that exists? And we've got a list of possible domain names that we could find that were available character.vc, which is what we ended up using character ventures.com.

JZ (46:17)
People. Yeah. Yeah.

Ha ha ha.

Jake (46:46)
character.ventures and character.partners. All those were available. So pretty, pretty decent domain availability.

JZ (46:52)
I ended up gobbling up some other ones too, like I think character.capital was available and I got that one, a few others, yeah. Every year when I get the flurry of Squarespace domain renewals and I'm like, what are all these domains? Why do I have hundreds of dollars of charges on my credit card for all these domains we're not using? Maybe some.

Jake (46:58)
nice, nice.

Yeah.

Yeah, throughout the year, it's like half-baked ideas I've had in the past. And then the occasional one where I'm like, okay, yeah, that's really, that panned out. do use that one.

JZ (47:19)
Well, a good example of that is Jake and Jay-Z. I bought that domain like ages ago. Like, man, maybe before MakeTime came out or something, like 2018, I bought jakenjayz.com because I was just like, you know what? Like that's cool. It's I feel like there's a decent chance we'll want to do something with that someday. yeah, know, eight years later of renewals, here we are.

Jake (47:24)
Hahaha

That's great. That gives me hope for all of those half-baked domain ideas that I have sitting on my...

JZ (47:47)
We can also invert it and we can, we can come up with business or project ideas based on the domains you own, if you want. It could be a fun exercise.

Jake (47:53)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Here we've nice dot investments. That was the best we could find, I suppose. which is not great. The, why not really a connection works because good word, simple, approachable, trendy right now. Concerns trendy suggests exuberant personality vetting. This is a Walgreens store brand. There's nice ventures. It's a restaurant management company.

JZ (48:19)
You

Jake (48:22)
but it's pronounced like the French city of Saint-Denis. So this is, this is a, you kind of see like, okay, here we do the vetting and it doesn't, it doesn't look so great for some of Fix ventures, great word, X sound, strong on the pub test. Concerns implies something is broken. Anyway, this is, this is sort of lantern. Let's take a look at This is because there's a funny, there's a funny little detail in here. The Y.

JZ (48:30)
doesn't pass. Yeah.

Jake (48:47)
illuminates your surroundings so you can move forward a light in the storm for entrepreneurs, a guide. And I think we were thinking about this, like we run these design sprints, these other kinds of sprints. want to, when we're doing that, the mode that we're in is, is guide. We want to be like a, like a guide or like a Butler who's helping the founder along on, on what they're doing, which is a slightly different take on the way we.

JZ (49:05)
Yeah.

Jake (49:15)
approach our founder relationship rather.

JZ (49:16)
Why do I keep laughing, Jake, because I'm just reading these notes on here. They're really funny. No, there's like three different things that have made me LOL.

Jake (49:21)
You know where it's going. Yeah. So.

Well, let's see, let's see what we've got. the Y for lantern illuminates your surroundings so you can move forward. A light in the storm for entrepreneurs, a guide works because it's flexible. Lantern.VC is an amazing domain. I must've written that. I'm not sure if it's an amazing domain, but I was really, I was, I was pumping up the sales here. I was selling it hard. I can call interns, linderts. man.

JZ (49:44)
You are selling it.

laughs

Jake (49:54)
I, I hope I, I hope I wrote that. That's pretty funny. Concerns. Hard to say for Wisconsinites. Will you, John, can you strip away any, any, any, any accent that you picked up from the West coast and give me the word lantern and pure Wisconsin.

JZ (50:11)
man, we see.

lantern. Did that come through? It's the lean-tern. There's like an extra y in there. There's like a lean-tern.

Jake (50:15)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's. Yeah, it's like, there's like, there's an extra syllable in L A N. Yeah. not modern or innovative, nostalgic week on the pub test. And that's certainly true. If you try to say lantern on a, on a shaky soul signal with one bar, that's, you know, that's not coming through. Not elite, not rebellious.

Just doesn't resonate for Jay-Z. Seems like a great name for somebody else who loves camping.

JZ (50:47)
Yeah.

Jake (50:50)
that's great. And it's true. know, we really, I don't know that any of us love camping. It's not, that's not us.

JZ (50:54)
No, but you can imagine like a VC called Lantern Ventures and like the photo is like the partner is like all wearing like, you know, hiking boots and like they're in the woods. That'd be great.

Jake (51:07)
I can't picture that very vividly. It's like a very polished photo shoot. You're like, are they really, are they really hiking? Their clothes look too nice.

JZ (51:12)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's like a pickup truck and tents in the background and like...

Jake (51:18)
It's like a cyber truck. Yeah

JZ (51:20)
Yeah. So pretty grand out there for any VCs who love camping, who love the outdoors, who are rugged outdoorsmen.

Jake (51:26)
Go for it. Go for it. These URLs are presumably still available. Well, so anyway, that's, that's what this looked like. And, that helped us feel confident in the name character. Both because, you know, you had a lot of conviction around it. Eli had a lot of conviction around it. And when you're making these kinds of decisions, we think that.

JZ (51:32)
Yeah, yeah.

Jake (51:54)
It's swell if you have consensus, but it's actually almost better if you just have one or two people who you trust who have conviction. That's better than having this kind of like, yeah, that's pretty good consensus among everyone. And I have felt good about the name character since we said it, in part because I knew you guys could

JZ (52:04)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jake (52:22)
feel that connection and just felt like it was right. So funny thing about names is the name eventually becomes the name and you stop thinking about whether it's the right name. And that certainly is true when you name a kid. It's true when you name a business. Hopefully, sometimes people end up changing the name of their business. If it's wrong, you'll also know that it's wrong, but character ended up feeling right. So that's how you do it.

JZ (52:44)
Totally. And Laura Milan, if you're listening, thank you. I'll leave it at that. There's a bit of an inside story there, but thanks Laura. Big help.

Jake (52:55)
Yeah, both on the process. She helped us quite a bit in forging that process, but also specifically with character, was quite helpful.

JZ (52:58)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was just going to say thanks to onesam1216 for posting that question on YouTube.

Jake (53:08)
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, everyone keeps the questions coming. Hey, Hey at Jake and jay-z.com and you can send us more questions and you know, I spent longer answering that question than I think we meant to. think we should just do one question for today and call it good.

JZ (53:23)
Yeah, one question is fine. And do you have any recommendations for our dear listeners? Other than Anna Karenina.

Jake (53:30)
I do, I do have a recommendation because well, I'm going to go with my, my Anna Karenina palette cleanser, which, or Anna Karenina palette cleanser. hopefully if you speak Russian and are listening to this, you could write in and give me the proper pronunciation, which I realized if I was not lazy, I could probably find on YouTube in 30 seconds, but here we are. So here's the recommendation for the book I'm reading after it's a book I've read before many, many years ago, I read this book.

JZ (53:38)
Okay.

It's all Russian to me.

Jake (54:00)
And I loved it and it's short, it's fiction, it's fun, it's punchy, it's kind of a little spooky and scary, great sci-fi book. It is Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. And I'm reading it, I thought of reading it because my son is just picked up, he's written like a middle grade or young adult book. And so my son just got that from somewhere and I was like, hey, Jeff Vandermeer, well, cool.

Now, if you've seen the movie based on the book, Annihilation, try to wipe it from your memory and consider that the book is actually good. The movie is total trash, like dumpster, it's awful. And I read an interview, I saw it and I was like, what the hell happened here? And I remember reading an interview where the director said he

think he like didn't, I don't even know if he read the book or he read like part, he kind of, basically did what I did with Anna Karenina. He like didn't really read it. And then he kind of just like, was like based on his impression, his feeling of the book wrote this script. So it doesn't follow the book and it's like not good. And it's just incredibly frustrating. Cause the book is, I remember really enjoying the book, but it's been long enough that I've forgotten a bit what happens. And again, it's short. It's a thin book. You can read it in a snap. So.

JZ (55:07)
wow.

guys.

Jake (55:24)
So annihilation, Jeff Vandermeer, that's my rec.

JZ (55:27)
Awesome. It's sort of interesting to think about like making a movie or any derivative work that's like based on the premise of the source material, but doesn't actually pick up any of the story or the characters or anything. Yeah.

Jake (55:37)
Yeah.

It's a bold move to say, hey, you thought about this whole world a lot and created it and thought this was the story that should be told. But I think just on a hunch, I can do better.

JZ (55:49)
Yeah.

Yeah. Interesting. Well, I have a recommendation. And the backstory is that every three or four years, something reminds me that NPR Tiny Desk concerts exist. Have you watched these?

Jake (56:11)
You know, I've seen one, no, maybe two, the one, the first time I saw one that, it really stood out for me because it was the first time I had seen, I had not heard of Lizzo and it was Lizzo and it was, it was really amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It was great. She, she, she, I remember she starts this song and she pretends like she's out of breath and like, and then all of sudden she just like belts out whatever it was.

JZ (56:14)
man.

yeah. Yes. What a great introduction to Lizzo.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I don't, I mean, it's been around a very long time. I want to say like 10 years or more, but every couple of years, something reminds me, something bursts back into my consciousness. And I'm like, my God, NPR, tiny desk. Like, this is the greatest thing ever. Like, this is so life-affirming. This gives me so much optimism and hope and joy about.

humanity. And then I spend hours just like watching them like one after another. And this most recently happened to me on either Monday or Tuesday And I realized that it's kind of the modern MTV unplugged. Did you ever watch or was it? Yeah, was MTV or VH1? MTV. Yeah. Did you ever watch those? Yeah.

Jake (57:19)
totally. MTV, yeah. yeah. for sure. I mean, the Nirvana MTV Unplugged was just like, I had that, I watched it and I had the albums to listen to like a billion times. Yeah, totally. That was.

JZ (57:29)
I mean, so iconic, yeah. Yep. So to my mind, there are four iconic MTV Implugs. There's Nirvana, there's Eric Clapton, there's Morissette, and then there's Jay-Z with The Roots as his band. All four of those to me are like, they're just like, they're good on their own. If you never heard...

Jake (57:49)
Whoa.

JZ (57:54)
any of that artist's music in any other setting, you'd like, this is just legitimately good. But they're especially good because they really give you a different appreciation, a new appreciation for those songs, for that artist, that performer. And I think Tiny Desk is kind of the same idea, like to just see the rendition of some of these songs in a way that's like totally stripped down super impressive. And it reminds me of something that I heard a long, time ago. I used to play music. used to play drums and guitar or saxophone. And at some point somebody told me like,

the true test of a skilled musician is can you play quietly and it's still good? Because anybody can cut loose and sort of belt out or play the drums really loud or furiously strum on the guitar. You can get a lot of mileage out of just sort of drama and intensity, but if you can do it quietly and it's still good, you still maintain what makes that song good, then.

Jake (58:29)
you

JZ (58:52)
That's true skill. Anyway, Tiny Desk has that in spades.

Jake (58:56)
Well, what's a tiny desk show if people were gonna start with one? Are there one or two that you loved? that's good.

JZ (59:02)
The Lizzo one is There are two by Dua Lipa. if you like pop music, if you like Dua Lipa, her songs are incredibly catchy. They're really fun. And I think they fit that category giving new appreciation, a different appreciation for her and for her music. Those are both great. The most surprising one that I don't even know the backstory of, but I'm...

quite curious about is there's one with Sting and Shaggy. I don't know why. I don't know where they met. I don't know the story, but it's really special. It's really good. So that's what I'd recommend Lizzo, either of the Dua Lipa ones and Sting and Shaggy, but there are a ton. I don't think you can go wrong. think they're...

Jake (59:46)
So you can probably just like look for a musician you like it's probably on there at this point.

JZ (59:54)
Yeah, at this point, yeah, at this point, it's, yeah, it's been around long enough that it seems as though everybody's done it. I'm sure there's plenty of, of like famous artists who haven't, but anyway, highly recommended.

Jake (1:00:06)
That's a great example too of a, probably seems like it would have been a non-consensus idea. Like you can imagine the person being like, well, okay, yeah, we could have the person on live, but like, what if we put them in like a tiny desk? You know, like what? Like why a tiny desk? Like, there's nothing cool about that.

JZ (1:00:12)
Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah. Yeah. And when you is made to look like they're in a cubicle at the NPR office. It's one of those L-shaped desks that cubicles have. And everything's just set up there. So anyway, it's great.

Jake (1:00:28)
you

good stuff. All right. Well, till next time, maybe.

JZ (1:00:40)
Yeah, thanks for listening. Made it through another episode of Jake and Jay Z. It's our weekly podcast. This was episode number seven. Again, if you want to get an email from us every time a new episode comes out with a few extra interesting links of things that we have enjoyed, be sure to go to jakenjz.com and sign up there. Thanks everybody.

Jake (1:00:58)
Thanks for listening.