Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Simplistic answer, "They aren't hackers, they are business people."

I've noticed a strong inverse correlation between people building businesses with expected business practice, and the "tech" press. What Zulily is doing is not a disruptive technology, it is (potentially a disruptive business practice).

It is easy to forget when reading inside the tech 'sphere' that there are lots of things that have to get done everyday by businesses, and those processes can be improved or made more efficient with technology. The closest one I've seen here was 42floors which is trying to disrupt the commercial real estate market, but it isn't a "tech" play, it is a business practices play.

Creating a way to share a moment in time, an instant, right now while preserving that feeling of "instantness" that is a tech play. Eventually, perhaps after this second burst of activity, tech will be just as boring and all the cool kids will be doing bio stuff or space or something.

> What Zulily is doing is not a disruptive technology, it is (potentially a disruptive business practice).

You can say the same for Uber, but they get the standard tech coverage, unlike Zulily.

The key to Uber though was technology, a smart phone app that replaced both the hailing of a cab and the paying of the cab. It wasn't "just another hire car service".

As an example; If Zulily was using a web cam to snap pictures of your kid and send the clothes back pre-fit? That would be a technology angle.

No, its because people in SV use Uber.

Uber’s go-to-market product incorporated a distributed brute-force attack against one of the Traveling Salesman’s cousin problems – they’re a tech for that reason alone.

Chegg is kinda in the same boat as Uber (efficiency of scale with online approach), but even with IPO this week it got basically zero coverage.

I'd say the answer provided is so simplistic that it has very little explanatory power.

Commenters have already mentioned Uber and Groupon, but I'd go further and add YC love child Airbnb as well. They famously sold cereal to stay afloat etc. What does that have to do with tech hacking? Yet they have been lauded everywhere Zulily hasn't.

I'd be interested in how one separates a disruptive business that uses technology from Disruptive Technology? It seems to me there is a hair's breadth of difference between the two.

This is news for the simple reason that it isn't news.

Airbnb does put out highly technical blogs written by their engineers on how they tackled an issue, etc. Such articles in my eyes are relevant to to the "HN crowd" if you must say so.

In addition to those characteristics, Zulily is on well-trodden ground. There are thousands of niche online retailers angling for the breakout Zulily got, or not - maybe they are OK in their niche.

There doesn't seem to be a simple story why Zulily made it. It may be mostly an execution play. Zappos II? Seen it.

Agreed. I don't really see a tech angle to this story, other than the fact that it's a website...

Is groupon a tech company? They seemed to have a "tech ipo".

I guess I'd turn that around and ask if every online retail site should be considered a tech company?

Was Groupon widely covered by the tech press? That's not my recollection but I could be mistaken. One could perhaps question whether Groupon deserved the coverage it got as a "tech company", but that doesn't mean other online retailers should necessarily be covered by the tech press.

To the GPs point, groupon was a sucessful hack.[1] It had young neophyte managment and massive losses. VCs thought is was worth 10's of $Billions. It was covered like the next coming of Netscape...[2]

[1] The nature of the "hack" itself used digital media (email, digital coupons). The main breakthrough seems more of a social/business/marketing hack than anything uniquely driven by hard tech programming or engineering, though. Although I could be corrected on this latter point by someone with specific knowledge.

[2] Part of the story was very high growth and market penetration. There was much "its different this time" type discussion about how this was all enabled by technology.

yes, that's my question as well. Why do i even know about Groupon? It was a lot on HN. And everytime i was wondering why it was here.

This is a question we were asking in the mid-90s about lastminute.com.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com