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.