What interRel Actually Stood For
For 25 years, people would ask me what interRel stood for, and I’d tell them all the same thing: it doesn’t stand for anything, it just sounds techie. That was a lie. The true story involves a bad joke at a company meeting, a courthouse in Dallas, a paper check, a beluga whale, and about 200 people on Earth who would have found any of it funny. You are probably not one of them.
Start in the spring of 1997. I was working at a consulting firm called Pinnacle, which had split off from a firm called Technium, and would later rename itself Palladium after I left, which is a lot of names for one paragraph, but stay with me. The CEO gathered all 30 or 40 of us at a company event up in Chicago and announced we’d just had the best first year any company could possibly imagine, and that he wanted to say thank you. Then he held up a book. He thanked… our methodology. The methodology was why the year was so amazing. I turned to the guy on my right, Eduardo Quiroz, my old college roommate that I’d dragged into the consulting world (sorry, Eduardo), and whispered, “So if we all quit, would that methodology implement itself?” Eduardo laughed. That joke was hitting, so I turned to the guy on my left, a guy named Tim (Tim, if you’re reading this, hello), and ran it again. Tim laughed too.
And then all 3 of us immediately started looking for new jobs. Tim quit for a firm called Navigator (which also became a big Essbase shop, so the joke worked out for everybody). And I found a broker named Dan Barber out of the Northeast who had one Essbase gig for me, down at the check printer then called Clarke American in San Antonio, starting in May.
One gig, one consultant, no company. But you can’t send an invoice from nothing, so I needed a company, and I filed it on May 21, 1997, on purpose, because I turned 23 the next day and I thought it was cool to be able to say I started a company at 22. That’s the entire strategic reasoning behind the company I then ran for 25 years: the invoice needed a name on it and I wanted a fun fact.
The name took actual brainstorming, and I want you to know how close the world came to a very different timeline, because Eduardo and I were about an inch away from naming it Beluga Consulting. My nickname for my kid at the time was Beluga, as in baby beluga in the deep blue sea (yes, the Raffi song), and Beluga Consulting felt warm and memorable and slightly ridiculous, which is a fair description of everything else I’ve ever built. But we were Essbase people, and Essbase people build multidimensional database cubes, and there are design rules for well-optimized cubes, and one of the most important rules is this: avoid interdimensional irrelevance (it means exactly what it sounds like). So if you’re avoiding interdimensional irrelevance, you would obviously want to hire an interdimensionally relevant consulting partner.
We thought this was hilarious.
So the actual, legal, real name we filed at the courthouse in Dallas in The Great State of Texas was Interdimensionally Relevant Consulting Partners. While we were at it we gave ourselves a motto: “Reaching for Perfection, we achieve the impossible in record time.” It was originally “Achieving Perfection” but we decided that was a little too pompous, which is what you get from two pompous asshats in their early 20s who had no idea how hard building a company actually is. (Edward, you named a business after a cube optimization rule, gave it a motto promising the impossible in record time, and your one pompousness concession was swapping a verb? I’d tell you we grew out of it, but I named my current venture after myself, so.)
Interdimensionally Relevant Consulting Partners lasted approximately 2 weeks.
What killed it was the first check. Yes, a paper check, it was 1997. It arrived, I looked at the pay-to line, and you can probably see where this is going. “Interdimensionally Relevant” filled the entire line and then “Consulting Partners” wrapped down onto the next one, right across the space where the dollar amount was supposed to go. The name was physically interfering with getting paid. Also, somewhere in there, we admitted the harder truth: we thought we were being funny, but the joke only landed with people who happened to know Essbase cube design rules, and everyone else was just confused. So we abbreviated it to interRel Consulting: inter from Interdimensionally, Rel from Relevant, and the R stays capitalized forever because it was the start of the second word. Eduardo kept his Pinnacle paycheck until Clarke American needed a second consultant about 2 months in, then he quit and joined, and interRel it was for the next 25 years.
For a while I’d tell people the real story when they asked. If they were early Essbase people, remarkably geeky ones, they’d get it, and it was glorious! Everybody else’s eyes glazed over somewhere around the word “interdimensionally,” and I’d watch them regret asking. So somewhere along the way I switched to the lie: it doesn’t stand for anything, it just sounds techie. It’s a shorter answer and it makes people happier, and I’ve been giving it for years.
So if you ever wrote “interrel” or “InterRel” or “Interrel” in an email to me: now you know why I never corrected you, because explaining the capital R means explaining the whole thing, and now I’ve done that exactly once, in writing, and I can just send people this link forever.
What was your company almost named? I collect these now, so email me at Edward@Roske.AI and I’ll tell you whether it beats Beluga Consulting, which I still think about more than a grown man should think about a whale.
Asking good questions, Edward