What is “tech” anyways?

I think about a couple of things I have recently read or heard about funding and issues in the “tech” sector.

I thought about the companies mentioned and was surprised to see them included in the realm of “tech”.

Is AirBNB really a “tech company”? Is an outsourcing matchmaker a “tech company”?

If you work at Craigslist, do you work “in tech”?

I think some people have confounded a few different things, so perhaps we can do a little to clarify.

• Does “tech” mean “VC-funded”?

• Does “tech” mean some expectation to sell at some sort of multiple?

• Does “tech” mean working with software of any type?

• Does “tech” mean some sort of ability to rapidly scale across multiple markets?

• Does “tech” mean what some refer to as a “laptop job”?

• Does “tech” mean being on Zoom or Teams calls?

• Does “tech” mean someone at the company is writing code?

• Or is “tech” just referring to some kind of mindset?

I think from time to time doing a little gatekeeping may be necessary.

As someone with a background in statistics, a big part of that discipline is determining if something is in a group or not. The brand of “tech” is exciting, and it draws together normal people, policy makers, dreams, funding, and celebrity like few other things. But it is only a useful label if it stands out and remains something exceptional rather than the default.

Perhaps it is something of the essence of the business that makes something tech or not. Is someone a “tech worker” if they write code for a keeping track of inventory at a car salvage yard? Is someone “in tech” if they do sales for a company that sells online advertising?

The FAANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) are often described as “tech” but is Netflix really a “tech” company? They certainly advanced the field of recommender systems and require a non-trivial amount of software engineers (who build mostly on Amazon Web Services) to reliably stream interesting things to their customers, but the end product is still video entertainment.

What about “crypto”?

Blockchains are innovative data structures that have made huge impacts around the world. But are companies that help people buy and sell cryptocurrency actually “tech” companies? Many of these companies are AML/KYC endpoints with a bunch of logic for people to trade within their networks (while extracting a fee in the proess). They have to manage code that reconciles these trades and some management of user wallets. These are non-trivial coordination processes, but are they really in the same realm of “tech” as others? Should companies like Coinbase or FTX be included when people refer to “tech”?

Why even ask these questions? Does it matter?

I am not opposed to people feeling good about themselves nor intend to knock people down a notch. I ask these questions because I hope to clear up the intentions of leaders and policy makers. When policy makers talk about “tech jobs”, are they actually referring to specific industries or is this just another way for them to say “high-paying jobs”? I am recently more interested in this distinction as I see more and more companies moving away from actual innovation and option to outsource or just buy existing solutions. I have had a chance to live in a highly service society (the US) and to live in a place where things are actually manufactured locally (Turkey), and I don’t think it is a good thing for people to be so detached from actual production.