Startups don’t just need a name—they need a strategic advantage.

For years, Lexicon has helped startups grow by creating brand names that challenge the status quo and generate early market share. SONOS, Vercel, Lucid Motors, Braze, and Impossible Foods are all startup brands we helped to create.

Lexicon’s experience and the company’s creative work have given us a front seat to the success and failure of many Silicon Valley startups – giving us a perspective that no one else can offer.

Phase Change is a scientific phenomenon where a substance transitions from one state to another, such as water changing from liquid to gas or solid.

A phase change is the instant a thing becomes something else entirely. It never happens gradually; it waits at a threshold for one final charge of energy. Phase Change Ventures exists to supply that charge: creativity, hard-won business experience, and capital, brought to teams standing at the edge of their own transformation.

Just as matter undergoes distinct phase transitions, startups go through critical transformation points that require different amounts of energy (creativity and capital) and exhibit different properties and challenges at each stage.

Our creativity has a source. It comes from Lexicon, where we’ve named dozens of startups — and to name a company is to understand it at its origin, before it has become what it will be. Having stood at that threshold dozens of times, we’ve learned to recognize the teams who cross it: founders whose reach exceeds their grasp, who are relentlessly curious, who see what others can’t yet see. Genius begins with individual brilliance, but innovation is a team sport. When we find that team, we add our energy and our capital to theirs — and stay until the new state holds.

Phase Change is a metaphor for identifying significant product opportunities and as a metaphor for investing in startups where we can deliver both creativity and capital.