The 'Labs' suffix is the new 'Zen-', and nobody is surprised

A short but widely-engaged thread pointed out the ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs naming pattern and asked whether any of them were inspired by Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve, Ocean's Thirteen. The comment that resonated most drew the explicit comparison to the 'Zen-' prefix era, noting that startup naming trends cycle and are usually dumb in retrospect. Someone tried to register sixsevenlabs and was too late, which is either a tragedy or a bullet dodged.

This is a lightweight observation but it points at something real: naming trends signal herding behavior, and herding behavior in naming tends to correlate with herding behavior in business strategy. When everyone's name sounds the same, it's worth asking whether everyone's pitch deck looks the same too.

The thread is lighthearted but the underlying anxiety is about differentiation and the difficulty of standing out in a market where every AI company sounds like a number followed by Labs.