How we name a company

Douala — Every company we start gets its own name. Blacksilver appears beneath it, smaller, as in “Ocheso, a Blacksilver company”, and never inside it.

That arrangement does two jobs. A young company can lean on a parent that is visibly accountable for it, which matters when its software holds results or decisions people care about. And each launch builds the parent’s name without the parent having to say anything.

Four rules for the name itself

It’s coined. One word, easy to say, and ours to own, with a clean path to a domain and a trademark.

It’s on-theme, not on-the-nose. A name should hint at what the company is for without naming its category. Nothing in any of our names, or anywhere in our copy, borrows the language of wagering or chance.

It leaves room to grow. A name that says one commodity or one city traps a company in its first market.

It clears four checks before we adopt it: a trademark search; the domain and social handles; its meaning in the languages of the markets we serve; and confusion with anything else in the family. And “Blacksilver” never appears in a company’s name.

What that looked like for Ocheso

Ocheso hides the word chess in plain sight: o-CHES-o. It carries faint echoes of oche, the line you compete from, and ocho, Spanish for eight, as in the eight-by-eight board. Say it oh-CHESS-oh.

It doesn’t say chess outright, and that turned out to matter. Ocheso’s plan settled early that it is a platform for skill-game events, with chess the first game on it, not its identity. It now runs checkers as well as chess, and the name didn’t have to change to do it.

The name was settled on 15 July 2026. The working name before it was retired everywhere the same day: in the plan, the code and the site.

Then the lockup

A name is only half of it. Every company gets three fixed ways to set its wordmark with ours:

• Primary: the company’s wordmark, with “a Blacksilver company” beneath it in small capitals at about 40% of its height, in silver-grey. For websites, decks and product headers.
• Compact: “Ocheso · Blacksilver” on one line, for footers and tight spaces.
• Standalone: the company’s wordmark alone, inside its own product, where nobody needs telling whose it is.

The endorsement is never above the company’s name and never larger than it. It sits beneath, in the same place for every company, so the family reads as a set. Each company also gets its own accent colour on the shared obsidian and silver. Ocheso’s is blue.

Five steps, every time

1. Brief: who it’s for, what it replaces, and whether it may grow past its first market.
2. Name: a shortlist against the rules, the four checks, one name.
3. Lockup: the wordmark and its three arrangements, from the shared kit.
4. Endorse: “a Blacksilver company” on its site, in its product and in its legal footer.
5. Cross-link: the company is listed on our site, and its footer links back to us.

Ocheso’s site carries the endorsement and links back to ours.

Why our second company has no name yet

Our second company is in internal testing, and we describe it on this site without a name. That’s deliberate. A name used in public before launch is a name half spent: the handles can go to someone else, and early mistakes attach to it. We’ll name it when it launches, after it has cleared the same four checks.