The physical services provided by these startups are fronts for erecting a mass surveillance infrastructure that collects user data. When you reach a certain point, you become a data company regardless of what particular service you started out providing.

Amazon sold books. They collected enough personal data and built out their infrastructure enough that it allowed them to branch out into...everything. Facebook was a glorified online forum. Now they are minting a new currency and working on the frontier of VR. Uber was a taxi company. Now they are into computer vision, AI, robots, mapping, etcetera.

That's the model that these companies are trying to follow.

Delivery of this kind is a three-agent problem: the company needs to coordinate between the restaurant, the driver, and the customer to make the whole thing work. This includes matching the customer to a driver who is in a good position to deliver on time. Keep in mind that the dispatcher, restaurant, driver, and customer may have no prior relationship.

You can do that at a small to medium scale without a lot of technology, e.g. taxi dispatch in a city can be operated by a small group of people in an office. But to scale such a service across an entire country, or the world, operating 24/7, is a massive coordination problem where technology can have a huge impact.

Well, you can watch 100km from point A to point B. Or you can ride a horse. If you're rich enough, you can get someone to carry you on their back or you can buy a car to make the whole thing easier because of the technology breakthrough in transport.

That doesn't make Ford or Honda a tech company. They're automobile companies and Postmate is a delivery company.