Why is Ludwig named Ludwig?

“Why are you named Ludwig?” is by far the question that we get asked most often by journalists, investors, partners and users. After having answered it hundreds of times, I decided I’d make a post.

The most urgent topic to discuss on a hot day

Catania, June 2014: the sun was shining outside our accelerator and it was a brutally hot day. It was the dawn of Ludwig, actually that day Ludwig didn’t exist yet. Back then it wasn’t much more than an idea for a phrase search engine that would help people write better English and a bunch of friends from school that were starting to work together. We had reserved the meeting room for two hours and the first hour and a half had already gone by. During that meeting we had already made plenty of decisions about the product and the actions that we would take. There was only one thing on which we got stuck: the name we would give to our prospective company.

The air conditioning would have done its job if it hadn’t been for the heated debate which ensued over that point. I thought it was a trivial thing to discuss. Naming a company is not naming a baby. In fact, unlike babies, products can change their names pretty easily. The most urgent thing was to prove that the product we had in mind would be loved by someone, not to come up with a fancy name for a product that didn’t exist yet. Nevertheless that detail sucked all of our attentions and mental energy. We all wanted to find a memorable name but I guess we were too tired to come up with something we would consider remotely acceptable. Still, in that precise moment and for the four of us, that was the most crucial issue facing humanity: an issue that embodied the most intimate essence of our startup, of our culture, of who we were and of the solution we wanted to build and give to the world. We were looking for something so symbolic that could be the sum of all these things.

As a consequence, that day both the walls of the meeting room, and the startups sitting beyond the tiny glass that separated the meeting room from the common space, heard hundreds of ludicrous names. The more effort we put on finding a name the worst the result. Some of those names were so bad that could have destroyed the most successful business alone. The worst name I came up with was “Hector Corrector”, can you imagine anything worse? Roberta doesn’t mind forgetting about that one. Federico’s favourite was “Correct.ly”, but we all coincided that all startup names terminating with “-ly” sound terribly lame (our personal opinion). Francesco said he would have picked a clean name, but instead of proposing something simply limited himself to bash everyone else's proposals. After having heard and scrutinized hundreds of names, Roberta had an illumination and uttered the word “Ludwig”.

Ludwig-Wittgenstein-1240

Who’s Ludwig? Roberta and my cognitive biases

She explained that Ludwig was a tribute to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951): the philosopher, logician and engineer, putative father of Philosophy of Language and one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century (contrary to popular belief, we're not named Ludwig after Ludwig van Beethoven). Roberta was the only person in the room that could have come up with such a name. She is a philosopher by training with a specialization in cognitive science, i.e. she studied Wittgenstein and read the Tractatus. At some point in her career, her curiosity lead her to study Management and Economics and to earn her PhD between the University of Messina and the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, but she is still a philosopher at her essence. This is particularly apparent when she argues with me: it doesn’t take long before she says I’m wrong because of some cognitive bias I never heard of –according to Roberta, unlike other human beings, 70% of my body is made of cognitive biases.

Why we liked Ludwig

We fell so much in love with this name that we would build our company and identity around it. It was simply a perfect match:

Ludwig Wittgenstein inspired us with a quote from the Tractatus logico-philosophicus: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” [1]. We are very aware of this and in fact we created Ludwig to tear down those linguistic limits. Our mission is to free 2 billion people writing in English from their linguistic limits so that they can focus on what really matters to them.
We all loved the idea of giving a personal name to our service. Ludwig sounds like the name of the friend that helps you when you are in trouble with your writing: it’s an intimate friend.
It is also an intellectual reference for those who are able to appreciate it and doesn’t disturb those who don’t get it.
Our Ludwig Wittgenstein, was born in Austria and emigrated to Britain: he studied, researched and taught at the University of Cambridge and was somehow a precursor of our Erasmus generation. We are university researchers ourselves and we resonate well with other scholars and researchers that spent their life traveling the world in their pursuit of knowledge and of learning new languages and cultures.
Despite the fact that the German name is probably not the most appropriate for an English writing service, in our ears it conveys the idea of effectiveness (Italian common stereotypes about Germans come into play here).
It’s a sticky name and everyone remembers it after having heard it once.“Why are you named Ludwig?” is the kind of ice-breaking question that we get most often and gives us a lot of room to answer basically whatever we like (and also kind of a heads up that journalists didn’t do their homework in most cases).

An eerie coincidence

As soon as we searched for the name “Ludwig” on Google, we discovered that the same name had been used between 1977 and 1984 by a German-Italian serial killer duo to sign their crimes. It was a sad discovery but most of us weren’t even born in 1984 (I was) and we decided we would keep on being Ludwig, no matter what. They used such a name for bad and we would use it for good.

Fun fact

Roberta was on the stage (she is the one sitting on the right) at the “.it30 Awards Ceremony” in Milan, presenting Ludwig (a picture of our team in the screen). As a part of the show, Joshua Held, a famous cartoonist was drawing satirical cartoons live (the guy drawing on the left).

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