I used to work at Blue Apron...sending people boxes of perishables is actually a very tough problem to solve and there was extensive tech powering the warehouse side of things. We had a fairly large engineering team working on these problems.

At the end of the day who really cares what is and isn't a "tech company"? Every company has a tech aspect to it these days.

How's that different from, say, the logistics of grocery stores? Yet Wegmans isn't considered a "tech company."

Most grocery stores use off-the-shelf tech for this sort of thing; our business model made a lot of that not feasible and there was a decision made early on to build it ourselves, if anything because the tech we developed could have its own value down the line.

If Wegman's was writing software like this (maybe they do! I have no idea) then I'd happily consider them a tech company.

But like I said, it's a silly thing to argue about anyways.

I used Wegmans as an example specifically because Wegmans is known for doing a lot of their own R&D to improve their operations. I don't know if they write some of their own software, but it wouldn't surprise me if they do.

If your company is in SF and funded by VCs you are tech by default, otherwise you aren't tech.

> At the end of the day who really cares what is and isn't a "tech company"? Every company has a tech aspect to it these days.

Because the way a tech company grows and a non-tech company grows are very different. Nike extensively uses software but you wouldn't call them a tech company, because their growth is limited by sales of their apparel, which is a physical good. 'Real' tech companies aren't typically limited by the distribution of their product (other than scaling issues and the like). There's (generally) nothing physical produced so there isn't a resource problem - growth can be much greater and faster.

That's right, 'real' tech companies such as Apple, Intel, Samsung, and many others can sell as many products as there are bits streaming across the network.

Fair enough.

I'll add the caveat that the product they sell or use for revenue needs to be the tech they are developing. So, once again, Nike sells athletic apparel, and while they use tech to do so, I wouldn't consider them a tech company. But Facebook and Snapchat don't sell a product (other than user info) but depend on the tech they develop to make money.

It's a fine line, but I think we can see what might divide tech and non-tech companies.

It matters because of the multiples you get on the market.

Others have already talked about Blue Apron. The NPR podcast How I Build This released an episode on April 1 with the Stitch Fix founder, Katrina Lake which was quite interesting.

Stitch Fix has quite a team of data scientists working on their recommendation system. They typically send about 5 items per shipment, so they need to be very confident the 5 will fit, you'll like them, and you'll like the price.

With Spotify or Netflix, the user can browse around and can skip between songs or shows quickly. If their recommendation engine wasn't phenomenal, it'd still be a viable product. Stitch Fix typically has 1 shot per month to sell you stuff you care about.

Is Spotify a tech company? I thought they were just sending an audio stream to subscribers with a website/app for searching?

Spotify is a tech company by all measures. Their core value propositions - recommendation engine, UI/UX, scaling responsive applications - those are pretty 'tech' problems.

And exactly the same can be stated for Blue Apron and Stich Fix, thus the point of my rhetorical question. Just because the two in question aren't as sexy as Spotify or Dropbox shouldn't exclude them from being considered a tech company.

I'd argue that the logistics of shipping perishable food is significantly more difficult than streaming an audio file, and recommending clothing to meet an individual's specific style/size/gender/budget is a lot more complex than applying publicly available [1] Netflix-style collaborative filtering to recommend music.

[1] https://www.netflixprize.com/assets/GrandPrize2009_BPC_BigCh...

Blue Apron and Stitch Fix aren't selling software/hardware as a customer-facing value proposition, so they're definitively not tech.

You definitely have to draw the line, or else every big company in existence is a tech company. Banks hire thousands of software devs.

Is E-commerce tech? Amazon has built out a ton of technology to scale their fulfillment operations and wouldn't be the company they are without it.

We are getting closer to the day where every company is a tech company. Marketing requires tech to do what is very complicated bidding and A/B testing. Most companies involved in sales are using CRM to understand how to better reach customers. This list goes on and on, as tech is embedded into everything people do these days.

That’s the point. Using tech isn’t what makes you a tech company, and never has been. Banks, airlines have been running cobol and what have you for ages.

When your product is software/hardware, then you’re a tech company.

Just so you know, 1.recommender systems != collaborative filtering. 2.RBMs are good only for certain situations like explicit ratings (where users provide direct feedback), its a really hard problem in implicit recommendations (which are most sites). See Bayesian Personalised Ranking Algorithm. 3. >I'd argue that the logistics of shipping perishable food is significantly more difficult than streaming an audio file. Thats exactly the point. I am not measuring hardness. But that looks a supply chain problem that a software engineering problem.