A company whose revenue is primarily derived from a technology characterized by high margin, high scalability and low fixed costs. One could also say that such a technology should be the primary differentiator for the product. The products therefore tend towards software and hardware as applied to a pre-existing market, but that's not an ironclad rule.
So for example not Tesla (high fixed costs, low margin), not Uber (negative margin), and not Amazon (the retail part is low margin; AWS actually fits).
And things like Wish clearly only if we're talking gross margin, not operating margins. The amount of ads they're running is crazy.
Know this mostly isn't looking for an answer, but I think HN typically means something along the lines of:
"one with a significant development arm of their employees/business that is crucial to the company's success"
So any company run off an app or website that's complex and well made is probably a "tech company" even if it's in the business of cars, e-commerce, or widgets. There's no hard and fast rule here of course, but we don't need to pretend we don't know the gist of what people actually mean, even if "tech company" is a misnomer in many ways.
And what's the use of that point? If people say X and many understand it means Y, even though by a dictionary/older meaning it can mean Z, being pedantic and trying to fight the natural language shift doesn't really help anyone.
> Do you know of any publicly traded companies that split out IT in their financials?
No, you'd have to be familiar with their internal practices. But let's be honest, you're just being pedantic now. It's fairly obvious from the outside which companies are "tech" companies.
> Do you consider Apple, which builds consumer electronics (e.g. hardware engineering) a tech company?
First of all, about 25% of their revenue comes from software services, and iPhone is the only segment with more sales. More than 1/2 of their profit (because the gross margins are much higher) come from software services, so Apple is probably a bad example.
But yes, of course they are a tech company. One of the first.
If every human stopped working at the company for a day the product would still work (not a meatspace product). The company will typically have a high GAAP gross margin.
Yes, this is exactly what I meant.
It’s just missing the fact that the popularity of posting S-1’s in general might be changing so charting the # of posts may be different than the real # of “tech ipos”
this is probably a "backloaded" year given what happened to the stock market earlier in the year.
why more tech IPOs these days? tech companies are likely finding their stock to be valued richly and want to issue equity now (for the same $ amount raised) to dilute themselves less.
2017: 160
2018: 192
2019: 160
2020: 190 (YTD)
IPO proceeds year-to-date is $67.6b, the largest amount of the decade if you discount Alibaba's $25b IPO in 2014
[1]https://www.renaissancecapital.com/IPO-Center