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Comment by nvm0n2 | Hacker News Reader

> in America's tech culture

To what extent were SBF and Ellison tech though? This trend of labelling more or less any new company that attracts VC funding as tech is bothersome. It's the mental loophole that allowed Adam Neumann to embezzle huge amounts of investor money too (but he did it "right" so gets away with it), by claiming that WeWork wasn't just an office leasing company but a tech platform. None of these people are engineers of any kind, none of them have developed any kind of new tech. They are just ordinary business types who run a business that happens to employ a few coders.

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Crypto is explicitly tech, and a crypto exchange lies at the intersection of finance and tech. It has never been a requirement that leadership of these companies be engineers (much to the dismay of any engineer hired at some of these companies).

It is fair to call FTX and WeWork tech companies because they built platforms, powered by the internet and apps to modernize legacy offline industries. That's been the definition of a tech company since the 90's dotcom boom.

What exactly was the tech platform that WeWork built?

I’d argue crypto is a commodity and that the underlying blockchain is the tech.

You can make a cryptocurrency without creating any new tech whatsoever. And you can create a blockchain without creating crypto.

This is why I think it's strange that Coinbase is considered a crypto company. It is/was a Ruby on Rails web app. Almost like calling the CME Group an agriculture company.

What platform did FTX create? Were there apps you could install into FTX?

FTX was just an ordinary financial company, AFAICT. It had a bit of software to run the order book, but wasn't run by technical people, had no R&D effort and no obvious reason to develop one, and so on.

WeWork was just a company like any other, I can't see a single factor that could make this be a tech company.

To me, at heart, a tech company must develop some new kind of tech and do so in-house.

Tesla is a tech company, not a car manufacturer -> common reasoning for Tesla market cap

You already mentioned WeWork. FTX is another example. Given how few "tech" start-ups and big tech companies actually produce technology as their core product, I guess the sentiment of SBF and FTX being somewhat symptomatic is fair.

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