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Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

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Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#21
post #15
post #6

Congrats on the funding, but I'd like to know what prompted the name change. ZEIT sounded mysterious and edgy, while Vercel sounds like a company selling expensive handbags (to me).

EDIT: Not sure why, but from the article: > Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel.

Yeah but that's why they chose Vercel not why the name ZEIT had to be changed in the first place

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#23
post #20
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: Not sure why, but from the article: > Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel.

That's just marketing speak. It doesn't actually explain why they changed their name.

I mean it’s a complete and total wild ass guess but the obvious reason to change one’s name is if you’ve identified another entity that is using that name in a way which could prevent you from global exclusive use of the brand.

It’s the kind of thing that could easily have come up in due diligence for the large recent investment.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#24
post #18

“We decided to retain our signature triangle logo, although we have simplified it.” Is this satire? Can’t tell.

Same with this:

> Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel.

It also "strongly connects" to the words "vermin" and "decelerate".

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#25
post #17

The name "Zeit" was very confusing for Germans. "Zeit" is the regular word for time and there's also a newspaper called "Die ZEIT".

LOL, really? source? Is Germany a big market for them? Apple is also a regular word... its's the name of a fruit in English

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#26
post #19

Vercel CEO here. We are incredibly delighted to bring the new brand to the world and share the news of our funding. For everyone who's been on this journey with us so far, thank you, and we look forward to a lot more!

curious why was the name Zeit not preferred?

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#28

I've been a customer for 3 years. `now` has felt like such a great evolution of the Heroku experience, which seemed to stop evolving after it got acquired by Salesforce. Zeit focused on all types of applications when it started, not just static frontend and FaaS. I wish it would return to supporting apps beyond JAMstack.

^ The re-brand makes much more sense in this light - a young company that can still only focus on 1 product, needs a name that is associated with their current product, and not now v1 and v2.

But that was not the reason given - strange to cause such confusion.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#29
post #6

Congrats on the funding, but I'd like to know what prompted the name change. ZEIT sounded mysterious and edgy, while Vercel sounds like a company selling expensive handbags (to me).

The name change makes a lot of sense to me, tactically (no matter what you think of the new name).

ZEIT is associated with full-stack hosting including backend servers, which they no longer want to focus on to. To solidify their pivot to frontend hosting in their users mind, they rename to strip all previous connotations from their brand.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#30

Nextjs is most likely going to be the new Ruby on Rails. javascript all the way down, static rendering, PWA, server side rendering...everything baked in. This is a big backing for Next. However rebranding to Vercel is bad.

That's the objective of Blitz.js [1]: build on top of Next.js for a rails-like experience, but made by an independent open-source community.

[1] https://blitzjs.com/ - https://github.com/blitz-js/blitz

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