We Can’t All Be MoFos
We recently started doing some work with the law firm Morrison Foerster, and I was delighted to discover that the good people who work there refer to themselves as MoFos (and I bet you wouldn’t have guessed than a prestigious international law firm was the denizen of mofo.com…but be careful not to add an ‘s’ to that – whoops).
Anyway, when the MoFos we are working with realized that fact so delighted us, they sent us a bunch of MoFo swag. Now our CLO Taylor (who originated the relationship) and the rest of us (but mostly Taylor) fight about who gets to drink coffee out of the MoFo mug.
Semi-related, if I have a nit with our name Permanent Equity, it’s this: it doesn’t easily lend itself to a clever demonym like MoFos. The best I’ve been able to come up with is PEër, (which despite having a clever connection to “peers,” sounds less like a colleague and more like a bodily function) and Permequian (which sounds too much like someone Arthur Dent would have met hitchhiking across the galaxy). And while there were all sorts of issues when we called ourselves adventur.es (throwback alert), I did like the potential of referring to ourselves as “Adventurers,” though maybe that’s corny.
I’ve written previously that culture is shared. Specifically, shared language, shared experiences, and shared standards. And what that all comes together to create is shared identity, which is a really hard thing to pull off. So if you have that, it would be nice to be able to put a name to it.
But we can’t all be MoFos.
– Tim
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