Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

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> while the technology is important and can give an edge, it is not the main value in your business.

Going out on a limb here, but I've been searching for a way to define this for a while, but... maybe those aren't tech companies? I'm talking about companies like Snapchat or Uber or AirBnB which, while they do exist as smarphone apps and lean heavily on the Internet, which unarguably involves a lot of technology, but they're brands, and not tech companies. Nothing wrong with that, but there are "tech" companies where the tech is the value... there are just a lot of non-tech "tech" companies, a majority of them B2C.

Companies that are doing things that humanity previously hadn't done are tech companies. Intel, as an early semiconductor company is, at least originally, a tech company. SpaceX's technology is the company. Regardless of who ends up winning, self-driving cars are going derive a lot of value from their technology in the form of patents.

Intel and SpaceX are less vulnerable to competition because it takes hundreds of billions of dollars to compete with them (nonetheless, they do have competitors). This is not the case with anything that's in bootstrap or even VC territory.

In principle, the same concept applies, it's just that it's too expensive for new entrants to come in to those industries, so they mostly don't have to worry about it. It should also be noted that businesses in other industries often attempt to install similar barriers to entry for themselves; suppressing competition is a huge part of remaining the big dog.

I hate to say it, but "tech companies" are "patent companies". If you have a patent on the technology and someone decides that it's not worthwhile to try to work around it, they'll license the patent, or maybe even buy your company if your patent portfolio is strong enough. In terms of an unpatented innovation by itself or actual software, it's not worth much on its own.

SpaceX's technology is not building a >$10B launch backlog and pulling in over $1B in funding. The SpaceX brand and culture are bringing in the right people to build the technology and the right customers to buy it: this path towards success, by definition, started before the technology was complete.

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