ah-kwe-eh

On this the 15th anniversary of it’s incorporation, this is the origin story of the company (name) Acquia. Executive summary: It’s an unaccented (and unwritten) word from the Navajo Code Talker’s Dictionary meaning “Locate” or “Spot”.

First a bit of history. From 1995–1997 I worked at ON Technology. I would characterize the company’s business as a “portfolio of products” software company, first establishing a customer relationship with network (server) managers in businesses, and then selling them more things from an ever-increasing collection of software products that we built / acquired. Call it a “portfolio of software” play.

In 1997 I founded my first VC-backed company, Pingtel. By the time the company was acquired we had pivoted to using an open source business model, providing support-for and add-ons to our open source core.

From 2004–2006 I bootstrapped an (unsuccessful) group productivity software company. Inside the product I used at least a half a dozen amazing open source projects, but usually couldn’t find a company “responsible” for the project, the way we were at Pingtel. This was a pain point for me. Don’t people say “Start your business by finding a pain point?”

So in 2007 I had the idea to combine elements from my experience into a new startup providing commercial support for a portfolio of open source projects. My thought was to (a) find a single successful and growing open source project that was completely community-built around which I could build a Pingtel (/RedHat) style company to provide support to businesses relying on the software. Then (b) once we had a seller/customer relationship with that business customer, add support for additional open source projects a’la ON Technology.

While socializing the idea (before actually raising money) I connected with Michael J. Skok at North Bridge Venture Partners (the firm is now winding down; I’m not sure how long that link will remain working. Michael has since founded _Underscore.vc.) Given similar experience in his professional background, Michael resonated with the idea, and invited me into NBVP as an Entrepreneur In Residence in January 2007.

Over the next 2 months, I scoured the landscape of open source projects to find one that could be the anchor of this startup. I narrowed the choices down to two areas: some one of the many open source web content management projects (Drupal, Joomla, Plone, etc.) and Lucene, the text search engine.

In early summer that year, it started to look like this could be a real company, and it was time to incorporate. I needed a name. An awesome marketing VP from Pingtel had told me a company name needs to meet a variety of criteria (most of which I had met with Pingtel):

• Start with a letter early in the alphabet. You’d be AMAZED how often this is important, since so many things end up with companies listed alphabeticallly. (Obviously failed at this with Pingtel.)
• One word is better than multiple words. Why? Logos are best when they are a stylized version of the company name, making multi-word names challenging.
• It’s not an english word. This is helpful for domain name purchase price, as well as for uniqueness.
• It’s fun if there’s an easter egg in the name — some hidden meaning that can be extracted if you dig enough.

So where to find such a word? Over the years I’d discovered the story of how the Navajo native American tribe was useful to the US Marine Corps during WW II because theirs was not a written language, and was relatively unknown. This enabled the military to use it (and the Navajo peoples) for secure vocal communications, especially after injecting it with some word substitution. Post WW II, the US published a phonetic version of a “dictionary” used by the code talkers.

I had always wanted to use those Navajo words for a name of something — a product, company, or …. Here was a prime opportunity. Given the above criteria I started searching the code-talker word list to find something — anything! — that could emerge as a name.

The english word “locate” was assigned to the Navajo word “ah-kwe-eh”. (The strict translation of the Navajo word is (to) “spot”). Ding, ding, ding, ding! We have a winner. It fits all the criteria:

• Starts with an A. WIN!
• One word. WIN!
• Not english. WIN!
• Easter Egg. WIN! What’s the Easter egg? I was trying to “spot” the project I was going to build a company around. Plus, my two core open source project areas could both rationally be tied to “locating information”. Web CMS projects are all helping website developers built sites that let visitors “locate” the information they’re seeking. And Lucene was a search engine, helping “spot” words in a corpus. WIN, WIN, WIN!

The only remaining question was how to spell and pronounce it. If you followed the link to the Navajo Code Talker dictionary, you’ll note two things. First, there’s no accent on any of the syllables. Bummer. I’ve gotta pick my own pronunciation, because I’m unlikely to find a Navajo speaker anytime soon. Second, there is a slight difference between the voicing before and after the “kwe” — there’s an “ah” and an “eh”.

Now comes one other Easter Egg: At the time I was incorporating, I was beginning to bond super-well with Dries Buytaert, founder & project lead for Drupal. And Michael & I were concluding a few things: First, we felt we could disrupt the open source web CMS mayhem by using capital as a weapon to drive visibility, investment, and adoption of Drupal — and banishing most of the other choices into oblivion. Second, Drupal is (and was then) an amazing project, with an incredible community that would prove to be decisive in banishing the rest of the open source players. Third, Dries was (and is) incredible. My desire to co-found a company with him was growing by the day. Finally, the Drupal logo was a stylized droplet. (There’s a good story behind this, as well as a ton of community-created variations of the drop called Druplicons, which showed how much the community loved the drop.)

Hmmm. Drop. Ah-kwe-eh is very close to “aqua”, which is often represented by a water drop. So if I riffed on the word Aqua, I might be able to pull the Drupal “drop” into the company logo somehow.

The obvious thing was to spell ah-kwe-eh as Aquia. But — bummer; a Japanese manufacturer had a toilet model with that name, and the domain name was taken. Solution? Simple: Add a “c” before the “q”, making Acquia. It was also a double-win; the domain name was cheap and available, and it moved the word earlier in alphabetical company listings.

So, the result — Acquia — fit all the constraints, had tons of Easter Eggs, and the domain name was available and cheap. (For the record, I put the emphasis on the first syllable, with decreased emphasis sequentially on the next two.)

After a night or two of sleeping on the name, trying it out on a few others, and (importantly) mentioning it to Dries as the name when I was visiting him in Antwerp (he had no objection, though he didn’t know much about marketing at the time, and so didn’t have a lot of insight), it stuck and I proceeded to incorporate using that name. (And shortly thereafter, I went all-in with Dries & Drupal, and never looked back at any other projects (for several reasons).)

Since then, there has been a fair bit of confusion about how to pronounce it (who knows if I have it right!), what it means, and whether it’s good or not.

But the “goodness” of the name is less important than how amazing the company has become. I’m proud of what we built — funny name and all.