| Ben Thompson wrote an interesting article "What Is a Tech Company?" on Stratechery [1] recently where he discusses the trademark characteristics of tech companies and makes a convincing argument as to why Uber could be considered one: > Note the centrality of software in all of these characteristics: > - Software creates ecosystems. > - Software has zero marginal costs. > - Software improves over time. > - Software offers infinite leverage. > - Software enables zero transaction costs. > The question of whether companies are tech companies, then, depends on how much of their business is governed by software’s unique characteristics, and how much is limited by real world factors. ...
> Uber, meanwhile, has long been mentioned in the same breath as Airbnb, and for good reason: it checks most of the same boxes:> - There is a software-created ecosystem of drivers and riders. > - Like Airbnb, Uber reports its revenue as if it has low marginal costs, but a holistic view of rides shows that the company pays drivers around 80 percent of total revenue; this isn’t a world of zero marginal costs. > - Uber’s platform improves over time. > - Uber is able to serve the entire world, giving it maximum leverage. > - Uber can transact with anyone with a self-serve model. > A major question about Uber concerns transaction costs: bringing and keeping drivers on the platform is very expensive. This doesn’t mean that Uber isn’t a tech company, but it does underscore the degree to which its model is dependent on factors that don’t have zero costs attached to them. He walks through a few other examples as well (e.g. Netflix, Airbnb, WeWork, Peloton), would definitely recommend reading the whole article. [1] https://stratechery.com/2019/what-is-a-tech-company/ |
[0] https://stratechery.com/2019/neither-and-new-lessons-from-ub...