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Comment by boh | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible that just having an app doesn't make you a tech company? Anyone else ready to think Uber might just be an overvalued taxi company?

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I read somewhere that there are different levels of "tech" company. A truly tech company would work without any human intervention for multiple days without breakdown. A non-tech company involves human in every tasks required for work. Most of the companies fall somewhere in between.

Ride services/Food delivery company cannot function without humans.

Are there any companies that work for days without human intervention?

Online digital content, like paid courses or an author selling their own books, may come close once a sufficient amount of marketing material is out there. Email funnels can be automated, blog posts can be scheduled (and recycled), payment gateways and whatnot can handle the actual transactions.

Simple apps and games don't necessarily need to keep getting better all the time; a successful one could likely coast for some time without needing much intervention.

google search, netflix, facebook, gmail, roomba, apple, microsoft, slack, youtube, AWS, wordpress, github, jira, the list goes on

I'm not convinced any of those would last even hours without an army of SRE's holding them together.

They all have support. True. However at my gig at my previous Job I have gone many opslead shifts without incidents. In fact most incidents were because someone added something new. During code freeze, we coasted multiple weeks without incidents.

SREs job is exactly this. Prevent future incidents. Prevention is much cheaper than cures (mostly)

Blogs for sure

So I guess SpaceX, Tesla, Intel, Apple aren't tech companies.

Agree with this rhetorical question. What mlboss said should just be "automated company" not necessary a tech company.

With that definition, it's also unreasonable to me that 100 years ago, there wasn't any tech company

the definition of 'tech' has been hollowed out for a while. Almost all software 'tech' companies are actually just market-makers or middlemen rather than actually driving deep process innovation that delivers extreme efficiency gains. Uber, Airbnb's etc.. model is basically regulatory arbitrage by externalising costs that taxi companies or hotels have to take on themselves to the detriment of workers and the environment.

You’re assuming Uber behaves worse than a taxi company, but that’s giving too much credit to the taxi company. They’re just a mini-Uber with a medallion, they don’t necessarily take care of the drivers or the cars.

The degree of techness of a company is a function of how long it can survive if you start firing their IT team.

"Tech" is simply a company that you can convince VC's to throw money at in the hopes of unicorn valuations in 18 months.

Because we all know that VC's don't invest in non-tech companies anymore.

Where I'm from, the government bought back the taxi licenses from taxi drivers and changed the law so now Uber doesn't have an advantage over traditional taxi companies.

Do they even appropriately license now? Gig economy is like Napster but with actual victims.

Can't speak for Uber... but yes. Just having an app does not make you a tech company. Tech companies tend to build stuff.

They are a logistics and pricing company. If they would license this tech they'd be rich beyond belief. They companies could really be Uber-for-X.

That's an interesting thought experiment.

At the high level, Amazon is also primarily a logistics and pricing company.

They could also license their tech (or white label it a la Shopify) and make a lot of money, but they realized at some point that owning the user relationship was key to unlocking more value than just owning the tech.

I think Amazon is licensing that tech to all 3rd party sellers now right?

Most companies prefer logistics/pricing models to be profitable. Being a pump-and-dump for VCs isn't something they can license out.

Isn't that just tuning compared to the race as a loss leader for market share?

No. This isn't a software company.

Uber isnt a software company?

I'm not sure they'd make as much as owning the network end to end. Vertical integration is hot right now, see Apple. Uber already has delivery via freight as well as getting into air delivery, so why would they need to license it? It just makes more sense to keep the tech proprietary and use it for their various enterprises.

It's tough to say, I think profitability would come faster than being a taxi company with an app (disregarding freight and air for now). But I think there is a much wider prospective customer base and recurring revenue licensing the tech stack as a SaaS. And that's not to say they have to give up Uber as a taxi company while they do both. It's a much more reasonable moonshot than the autonomous driving experiment they did that killed someone moving fast and breaking things. I see a lot of value there.

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