At Viaweb we invented a useful convention for referring to the contact for a given account: we called him (or her) John <account name>. It was based on the movie Buckaroo Banzai, where aliens trying to pass as human were all called John plus some implausible surname.
Users enjoy Paul Graham's anecdote about Viaweb's Buckaroo Banzai-inspired John account names because it shows how quirky inside jokes and traditions often lead to effective startup systems.
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@paulg so right now there's a John Stripe and a John Anthropic out there who have no idea
@paulg Wait, why is this convention useful?
@noahlt Otherwise you have to refer to them by their actual names, and not everyone is going to know that Joseph Donnelly is the contact for <account name>. Whereas if you say John <account name> everyone knows who you mean.
@paulg haha, I use the same idea to name the know-it-all expert for the problem or pain we are trying to solve.
John Invoicing John Follow-ups John To-dos
(actually “Juan”, being from Latin America)
@paulg John Bigbooté : "BigbooTAY."
@paulg What's the most creative 'John' alias you've seen in a sales pipeline that actually stuck and led to a closed deal?
@paulg The Buckaroo Banzai reference is a classic. We used a similar internal convention at my last startup, but we went with "Agent" for the primary contact. Makes the logs much easier to parse when you're filtering by name.
@paulg Day 33: Tried to make tea for guests like a normal human.
Poured the tea. On the guests. All of them.
The cup was fine tho. ✅
Has this ever happened to you? 👇 #NotARobot #AI
@paulg John Doe meets Silicon Valley lore still brilliant.
@paulg Probably the best way to understand what is happening in the world right now is as an alien invasion.
It's just happening silently and invisibly, and the aliens are "landing" digitally in data centers, and hopefully locally on computers soon, too.
@paulg Looking at that list, it's got a simply masterful assemblage of ideas in there. Common last names, weird nouns, fanciful terms, nonsense syllables. I'd love to see what a good LLM would make of attempting to create a distribution from which similar sets could be drawn
@paulg need a screenshot of the shop builder for viaweb, why is there not even 1 screenshot on the web?
@paulg Its a running joke with my friends, cause basically everything was invented by a guy name John <invention>
@paulg I like seeing PG all over the timeline again
Like Jordan coming back
@paulg One client can change everything. Keep showing up and don't quit a week before things start working.
This is not just a joke from a movie; rather, it is an early attempt to transform “the human inside the system” into a functional, traceable, and abstract role.
It is a very powerful idea in system design, but it must be used carefully so that the system does not lose its human dimension.
If you want, I can also connect this to how modern CRM systems are built or how identities are managed in today’s SaaS companies.
@paulg John Procurement has entered the chat
@paulg Tim apple
@paulg Great companies are usually built on a mix of obsession, systems, and weird little traditions. 👀
