Why Scooter?

People often ask me why I called the company Scooter, usually once a conversation has gone from relative strangers to something more comfortable. Do you want the real story, I ask, or the fake one?

The fake one is something throwaway about the domain being cheap. The real one is better, and it's become a kind of icebreaker: people ask, I perform a little reluctance, then tell them the whole thing, and a surprising number remember it afterward. Oh yeah, Kartik, from Scooter. I think that's partly because the word is so unrelated to what we actually do that it leaves a small gap in a person's head, and the story is what fills it.

We wanted a name with nothing to do with sales and nothing to do with hiring, which, given how most companies in this category name themselves, is already a small rebellion. We also wanted a word that would mean roughly the same thing to someone in Mumbai, someone in London, and someone in Ohio, rather than something that would only land in one of those places. Scooter does that. It's not a word you have to explain twice depending on which country you're standing in.

There's a second layer I only noticed after the fact: Scooter rhymes with recruiter. Say it intentionally, Sales Recruiter, and you can't stop hearing it once you have. I didn't plan for that the first time the word came out of my mouth on some call, but I use it on purpose now, and there's a standing, half-serious plan somewhere in the back of my head about a jingle we could make out of that rhyme one day.

And then there's the plainest reason, the one that needs no explaining once you say it out loud: a scooter is quick. It's the vehicle you take specifically because you don't want the whole apparatus of getting somewhere: no traffic negotiation, no parking search, just point A to point B, zippy, unglamorous, efficient. We were pitching a ten-minute hiring process to people used to waiting weeks. The name was already halfway to making that argument before I said a single other word.

I like that the name doesn't try to look like what we do. There's a version of this company that would have called itself something with recruit or talent or hire baked into it, and I think that version would have been forgettable in the specific way literal names are forgettable: you hear them once and they slide right past you, because your brain already has a slot for what a word like that means and doesn't have to work to place it anywhere. Scooter doesn't have a slot. People have to actually ask about it, which means they actually have to listen to the answer, which means, if the answer is any good, they remember both the word and the company behind it as one single thing.