To be a successful technology start-up these days, you need a few ingredients: money, a novel idea and a catchy name. By late 2014, Beepi had achieved the trifecta. In less than a year, the Los Altos, California–based start-up had amassed $79 million in funding and a $200 million valuation. The company’s guiding idea — that the process of buying and selling a used car was needlessly difficult and in dire need of improvement — allowed investors to situate Beepi within a fashionable narrative of disruptive innovation. (Who better to disrupt than used-car salesmen?) And Beepi’s name observed the two- syllable rule made safe by
