It's interesting how few companies are in the classical tech stack in any way, and how few are in the more retail/consumer oriented techie things like social media.
Many of these are just regular businesses quite far from the ostensible advantages of having rockstar technologists etc., obviously the medical tech notwithstanding, but that's another field altogether.
It's also interesting how many of these I don't think will every fit the mold of 'high growth' kind of startup, as opposed to more along the lines of 'great new businesses'.
Aalo parts are considerably too expensive - basically they are quite a bit more expensive than IKEA, but they don't like quite as 'finished' and don't quite have the 'finished/unfinished' look to suit putting even in a modern living room, I feel it still looks like utility stuff. And at those prices ... I've just personally had to deal with a lot of brick and mortar stuff, and the reality of 'price sensitivity' hits home really hard. People don't have money for expensive, unnnecessary stuff, 'retail' is not at all like Kickstarter.
Love people trying to make fake meat taste great. I have yet to see anything available that really works well. I suggest that once a fast-food chain picks up on it and 'regular folks' get a try, it might fly.
I suppose the meaning of "tech" is somewhat subjective, but to me it seems like most of the companies mentioned purely provide a platform or a service to consumers or businesses, largely with the motivation of selling a consumer something.
I guess I hoped there would be some cool startup working on non-linear optics that I've never heard of, or some bioinformatics startup changing the way we do medicine. Research spin-offs, I guess. I understand there's a lot more intellectual overhead in some of these things, and maybe they just aren't as glamorous or something, but I was hoping to see something along those lines.
Remember this is a list of startups which doesn't always imply technology. And even technology companies need people to manufacture and assembly stuff.
I think they were trying to ride the beyond meat wave, which is arguably at least a company based on a novel proprietary food production process (tech?). But I agree a lot of companies got the tech label without having the actual benefits of being a tech company meaning a software company (high margins, low distribution costs) which is what was really attractive about tech companies the last 10+ years.
The article says, "tech companies -- defined as those whose principal business is tech and its applications" but then their examples are companies that are largely shops. There's nothing wrong with shops(!!) but these people aren't developing any technology, and aren't really taking advantage of new technology any more tahn (and probably less than) Target, Wal-mart or McDonald's. Perhaps a better way to put it is we call UAL, AA, etc "airlines" rather than "aircraft companies". We don't call comcast, or sprint "tech" companies even though they have a lot of engineers on their staff.
In one sense, who cares? If these companies are successful and good for their customers, employees and investors that's great.
(of course to me Cummins engines and 3M are pretty high tech businesses too, even if little computation or electronics is discussed by them).
But I am quite interested in tech businesses and products, and this all seems a bit weird.
I agree. These are companies that just duct-tap together high tech, made by others. High tech companies are IBM, Intel, Sun, Oracle, etc, and those are firmly planted outside cities. A good rule of thumb is if the company consists mostly of 20 something hipsters, its not a high-tech company :)
Anything pitched as 'tech' that doesn't look or smell like 'tech' is basically the founders' way of saying
'we need a lot of money because we lose millions each year and are nowhere close to making a profit.'
That’s just table stakes for a generic retail store Just because I drive a car wouldn’t make me a car business.
I think of tech businesses primarily as those that develop novel technology and secondarily as those who use technology in a novel and unexpected way. In both cases technology is the differentiation.
The only novelty of this business is its message and while that might make a perfectly respectable business (I am not part of the target market so I can not judge) there’s no “tech” in their business plan. Think of it more like Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein: the clothes are made in the same factories by the same workers; the only differentiation is market positioning. Nobody would criticize them as not being “business” or even “clothes business” but their differentiator is marketing.
Whole Foods is shit - it's literally just a CostCo with fancier packaging that charges more - and that movie theater sounds like pretentious pap. This all sounds like overpriced crap even though I'm the target demographic.
Are you sure there's a magical market force whereby tech workers volunteer to be surrounded by overpriced crap?
To me it feels like no one in (big) tech is interested in building products _for_ the customer. They're only interested in building products for extracting money from the customer.
The idea of "charge what the market will bear" has been taken to an extreme by the tech industry. The combination of venture capital, non-ownership (SaaS everything), adhesive ToS, anit-trust levels of monopolization, etc. all work really hard to get customers locked in and dependent on half-assed garbage with a big feature list.
Everyone is building robots that hold you upside down and shake the money from your pockets while calling is SaaS. Boo!
I also think most of these businesses are over engineered. These aren’t really tech businesses. Tech is just a conduit. You really don’t need that many engineers and data scientists and UX designers for a rental service.
The problem with these businesses is that they raise money as “tech businesses”, which gets them much higher valuations, but also makes them spend way more on engineers to justify that “tech” tag.
I agree with much of what you're saying, but I don't think the "typical" tech company is anything close to the HN stereotype web start-up. Most tech companies -- and almost all successful tech companies -- are not just implementing some obvious, trivial web/social/mobile service and hoping to luck out on a quick acquisition.
Many of these are just regular businesses quite far from the ostensible advantages of having rockstar technologists etc., obviously the medical tech notwithstanding, but that's another field altogether.
It's also interesting how many of these I don't think will every fit the mold of 'high growth' kind of startup, as opposed to more along the lines of 'great new businesses'.
Aalo parts are considerably too expensive - basically they are quite a bit more expensive than IKEA, but they don't like quite as 'finished' and don't quite have the 'finished/unfinished' look to suit putting even in a modern living room, I feel it still looks like utility stuff. And at those prices ... I've just personally had to deal with a lot of brick and mortar stuff, and the reality of 'price sensitivity' hits home really hard. People don't have money for expensive, unnnecessary stuff, 'retail' is not at all like Kickstarter.
Love people trying to make fake meat taste great. I have yet to see anything available that really works well. I suggest that once a fast-food chain picks up on it and 'regular folks' get a try, it might fly.
reply