Which was obviously brilliant and they don't need me to say that. But, I don't think it's a tech company. Adding drivers is not necessarily that easy. I know there's a metric-fuck-ton of them right now. But bandwidth to send a copy of software and hiring a new driver are two different things. Same with allocating cloud server space and doing a background check on someone. I think the definition needs somewhere in there, humans cannot be the bottleneck. Uber's bottleneck is in drivers (and municipal policies), not getting people to download and sign up for their app/service.
I mean seriously. What scales easier? Getting people to download an app or hiring drivers across the country that don't shank their passengers? Yes they did a good job at hiring a fuck ton of drivers quickly. But Carnegie did a great job at mass producing steel when others said it couldn't be done. Didn't make that a tech company either.
Various businesspeople tried propaganda , buying politicians and so forth, this "gig economy" is the newest effort, it is going well. For them. Recommended reading: https://www.wwnorton.co.uk/books/9780393337662-invisible-han...
A tech company is a company whose product is "easily" scalable with a few taps of the keyboard and clicks of the mouse. A game development company is a tech company. Selling one, two or a few thousand units is not that big of a deal. Now, we can argue that scalability in terms of cloud services is an issue. Think Steam for video games. But generally, there's little difference "work" wise between selling 10 copies and 10,000.
A not tech company that uses a lot of technology, but again, is not a tech firm, let's say Haas. They build high-end CNC machines. Manufacturing one or two machines is not negligible. Well, kind of. Compared to them. They build like a few hundred a month. But lets say they want to build a few thousand. That's a big deal. That's more manpower. More equipment. More materials. More warehouse space. More planning. More everything.
But Autodesk selling Fusion 360 (modeling program for CNC milling) is a tech company. Because it's generally meaningless if they have 1,000 licenses a month or 100,000 licenses a month. Production wise. All the upfront work was done for the product and now it's a matter of people giving up their credit card numbers.