What does the fox say (about startups)?

Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close What does the fox say (about startups)? 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Perched atop each desktop computer at the office of Secret, the anonymous social network, is a plush rendition of a red fox.

In the company's small South of Market space, co-founders David Byttow and Chrys Bader point out the stuffed animals. The red fox is Secret's logo, but it's more than that. The fox is the company's mascot - its spirit animal, if you will.

"Foxes are the best," said Byttow, when asked to explain what, exactly, the fox says about his startup. "Also, their qualities map onto our internal team virtues."

Secret, which was started in January, is not the only startup to find an affinity for the fox. The cute but cunning animal is seemingly having its moment.

When statistician Nate Silver's data journalism website, FiveThirtyEight, went live last month, he discussed the symbolism of its highly stylized fox logo (dubbed "Fox No. 9").

Popular proverb

The fox, he said, is a nod to a proverb often attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus of Paros. "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing," a much-cited interpretation of the saying goes. Silver takes this as a sign of the fox's deftness.

"We take a pluralistic approach, and we hope to contribute to your understanding of the news in a variety of ways," he said.

And there are more foxes still. Food.ee, a Vancouver food delivery startup developed by the creators of HootSuite, uses a graphic, fluffy-tailed red fox for its logo. HitFox, an incubator founded in 2011 for big data, game and advertising companies operating in San Francisco, Berlin and Seoul, brands itself with a minimalist traffic-cone orange fox head.

"A fox is nimble, smart, fast and likable," said Oliver Kanders, head of marketing for HitFox. "We highly identify with the animal."

Mozilla's Firefox, of course, is the old guard of fox startups. The Web browser's original logo, a phoenix, was replaced with a fox circling the globe when it renamed the browser, originally called Firebird, early on. (There has been some confusion about whether the logo depicts a fox or a red panda, nicknamed a firefox, but Mozilla confirmed to The Chronicle that it is indeed a fox.)

The appeal of the fox, especially for tech companies, is obvious: In modern Western culture, they are typically regarded as sneaky and clever. With its bad-boy vibe, the fox is kind of like the hacker of the animal kingdom - but it remains unthreatening and cute.

"They are thus perfect for tech companies, who tend to think of themselves as creative, clever, crafty, cool, with an antiestablishment edge, and what have you," said Stephen Brown, a researcher at the University of Ulster in Ireland who studies the anthropomorphizing of brands.

Symbols as shortcuts

Jill Avery, a branding expert at Harvard Business School, said that symbols - especially those with well-worn narratives - are shortcuts for a company to convey what it's all about to a consumer. The fox's familiar mythology makes it a prime candidate for mascot duties. It's worth noting that there are fewer animals than might be expected in tech logos.

"The fox branding trend fits in with other branding trends like dropping vowels or misspelling words as they all try to achieve the same objective - to create resonant meaning for the brand by borrowing and leveraging iconography or semantic devices," she said. "The challenge of the tech space is humanizing a brand, and animals in general are humanizing."

The fox is also seen more favorably than it once was.

"Generally, they are now viewed as less evil," said Brian Cypher, a research ecologist at California State University Stanislaus who studies foxes. "In the 1990s, they were viewed as devious, stealing all the eggs from the hen house. Now they're just viewed as really neat critters."

Cypher notes that it's the red fox (native to California, though not Silicon Valley) that we most often see in branding. The species is most common in nature, he said, and also more clever than other types of foxes.

A creature of mystery

In the fox-versus-hedgehog paradigm, though, those in academic circles debate which animal is really superior - Archilochus' words have been handed down in fragments, and their meanings can be unclear. The fox is a creature of intrigue and mystery, and interpretations of it go both ways.

"Urban foxes in particular are increasingly seen as vermin, as dirty dumpster divers, as snatchers of babies. The same, I suppose, could be said about tech companies who dumpster dive into our digital lives, snatch our data and devour it, before selling our souls to the highest bidder," said Brown. "The cultural meanings cut both ways, I suspect."

At Secret, Bader and Byttow initially used a cat for a logo. The cat, though, conveyed the wrong message (the logo looked weird, and cats can be kind of polarizing) so they went searching for something else. As soon as they started studying the fox, they were sold. Bader said he spent an entire work day reading about foxes and came away impressed.

Avery noted that branding is also about tapping into a cultural moment - that's why, for example, we might be seeing more fox-y companies after the viral success of the "What the Fox Says" music video.

"Maybe it's the year of the fox," she said.