Why on earth would you name a fintech company after a world-famous restaurant? Bonkers...

To those who have not seen the Grant Achatz profile in the Netflix series Chef’s Table (S02E01), I highly recommend it. One of my favorite episodes in the whole series. Excellent cinematography and storytelling. Obvious not the only reason Alinea is world famous, but definitely gave it a ton of exposure.

Possibly both have the same source (Latin) not a direct reference ?

They are in... completely different industries?

Sort of. The Alinea folks also started Tock, which is a tech startup.

I don't understand the downvotes you're getting or the negativity in the comments. I've never heard of Alinea - the restaurant before - and it's really strange that people are being anal about someone else using the name for a completely different industry - it won't be confusing to anyone.

Here's a simple test I always use when figuring out if a name is good and not confusing: Google it. If you search for "Alinea", what do you get?

Does that really work though? What about mega companies with very common word names? Segment, Zoom, Stripe, etc.

It would be a bad idea to name your next tech company "Stripe" (or your next restaurant, for that matter; ew.)

Ha! I guess my point was that when those companies started up, searching for those terms was bound to result in some businesses popping up, though I'm sure they made the call that "hey, they're not in the payments/analytics/whatever space, so no worries"

You might also take a look at your logo when you're thinking about your brand. It looks very similar to Aether Apparel: https://www.aetherapparel.com

So you deliberately gave your startup the same name as one of the most famous companies in another industry?