Did I say it was the end goal? It's merely a metric for a young company. What it means is that enough people have decided that there is a future that current revenue, growth, and expectations are being met or substantial. Raising $53 million dollars isn't easy. So I can say capital raised is a metric on which to base a judgement.
Your statement that it "absolutely will hurt adoption" is unqualified and nothing but opinion. And what exactly is "more successful?"
The handful of people who won't try this because of the name won't matter to their bottom line. If it's good enough then for even a large majority of those they'll end up using it anyway.
Pretty much any reasonable definition will do. For example, higher adoption is one metric that can be used to define success.
> Your statement that it "absolutely will hurt adoption" is unqualified and nothing but opinion.
It's an opinion that a lot of people share, judging from the HN threads I've seen about CockroachDB. And really, I shouldn't need to defend the idea that having a name that disgusts people will hurt adoption. It's just common sense. The only real question is how much damage will the name do? The better the product is, the more people will forgive things like bad names, but there will definitely be at least some level of damage.
In addition, if there's multiple products in the same category that are fairly close in quality, then subjective things like names will matter more. Maybe CockroachDB is significantly better than the alternatives right now (I really have no idea; this product category isn't something I know anything about), but if so, surely it won't remain "significantly better" forever. Other products will catch up, or other products will be created to compete, and we'll end up with several products that are similar, and once again, naming will become more important.
And finally, you're completely ignoring the fact that a lot of decisions about tech stack aren't actually made by technical people. They're frequently made by managers rather than engineers. And when the decision is made by non-technical people, marketing (e.g. name) is very important. Heck, even when the product is made by engineers, marketing is important, because that's how you convince the engineers to spend the time investigating the product to see if it lives up to its claims or does what they need.
Speaking as an engineer, if tomorrow I suddenly have the need for a cloud-native NewSQL database, I'm probably not even going to look at CockroachDB, simply based on the name, unless someone else convinces me that it's clearly superior. I find the name very off-putting and I'd rather not be confronted with the mental imagery of cockroaches any time I use the product.
You're missing the point. Saying "they raised capital" is not a good counterargument to "it will hurt adoption". Your response would be a good counter to "they will never raise capital" or "no one will use this".
You can't know how many VCs didn't fund due to the name or how many tech decision-makers at companies will pass on this product due to the name. That being said, I doubt it will be/was significant in any case.
Your statement that it "absolutely will hurt adoption" is unqualified and nothing but opinion. And what exactly is "more successful?"
The handful of people who won't try this because of the name won't matter to their bottom line. If it's good enough then for even a large majority of those they'll end up using it anyway.