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This trope of establishing businesses as either "a tech company" or $INDUSTRY needs to end. You either provide a product or service in a particular $INDUSTRY an

by mbesto 9y ago

This trope of establishing businesses as either "a tech company" or $INDUSTRY needs to end. You either provide a product or service in a particular $INDUSTRY and are technology lead, enabled or not. Netflix, Facebook, etc are "technology lead" businesses. Tech is not an industry, it's a medium in which a value proposition is delivered.

simonh 9y ago
This came up in a thread about banks. Some finance institutions, or at least their employees, nowadays explicitly talk about themselves as technology companies that do finance. I had an interviewer at Morgan Stanley say this to me just last year. I used to work on the Quartz platform at Bank of America. It's a fantastic technology stack including dev and release tooling, authentication and security layers, configuration defined infrastructure, custom GUI and web front end libraries and tons of other really cool state of the art tech. All the big banks employ many thousands of developers. A lot of companies are realising that for technology to be a competitive advantage it has to be more than just off the shelf. Banks are pushed this way partly due to regulatory pressure - they can't simply outsource their legal obligations or therefore the technology that implements them. But that's just an additional pressure pushing them that way. It's certainly not the only one. Nowadays lots of service companies are going this way.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  There also companies (like the one I moved to recently) that are old, established SME (small/medium enterprises - more medium in my case) who are in niches that just aren't large enough for off the shelf to work but not small enough to do without. I was talking to my boss the other day and he said that I was pretty modest compared to some of the programmers he'd dealt with at out sourcing firms over the years (they tried that first, it didn't end well), I think my response tickled him "I'm just a negative plumber with a keyboard, if I do my job right at this end shit doesn't come out the other". I think the hubris of "We must do world changing things/disrupt everything" to provide tangible value is a by-product of the hype around the startup scene and 'entrepreneurs' (that is people who set out to be an entrepreneur first and figure out at what later). I've never wanted that, I've only ever wanted to be compensated decently and work at a job where I can see measurable value in what I do, in my case that's writing production/factory management software that saves more money than it costs and makes the life of the end users more pleasant, it's also not particularly stressful and I go in at 9 and leave at 5 every day with complete technical freedom and time for that rarest of rare things, documentation. After spending the last 5 years in high pressure, insane demand environments I'm never going back, I'll go do something else before I go back to that, it's simply not worth it (to me).
csomar 9y ago
What about a company specialized "say" in web socket. That is it provides Web Socket related products and consulting. Doesn't that make it a Technology company?
MediumD 9y ago
I agree with you 100%. However, the $INDUSTRY label that a company receives, is often a huge factor in its valuation. Compare the forward P/E of Netflix vs. other entertainment companies getting into streaming. Netflix receives a significantly higher P/E due it being considered (right or wrong) a 'Tech' stock with more growth potential.

by mbesto 9y ago

simonh 9y ago

This came up in a thread about banks. Some finance institutions, or at least their employees, nowadays explicitly talk about themselves as technology companies that do finance. I had an interviewer at Morgan Stanley say this to me just last year. I used to work on the Quartz platform at Bank of America. It's a fantastic technology stack including dev and release tooling, authentication and security layers, configuration defined infrastructure, custom GUI and web front end libraries and tons of other really cool state of the art tech. All the big banks employ many thousands of developers. A lot of companies are realising that for technology to be a competitive advantage it has to be more than just off the shelf. Banks are pushed this way partly due to regulatory pressure - they can't simply outsource their legal obligations or therefore the technology that implements them. But that's just an additional pressure pushing them that way. It's certainly not the only one. Nowadays lots of service companies are going this way.

noir_lord 9y ago
There also companies (like the one I moved to recently) that are old, established SME (small/medium enterprises - more medium in my case) who are in niches that just aren't large enough for off the shelf to work but not small enough to do without. I was talking to my boss the other day and he said that I was pretty modest compared to some of the programmers he'd dealt with at out sourcing firms over the years (they tried that first, it didn't end well), I think my response tickled him "I'm just a negative plumber with a keyboard, if I do my job right at this end shit doesn't come out the other". I think the hubris of "We must do world changing things/disrupt everything" to provide tangible value is a by-product of the hype around the startup scene and 'entrepreneurs' (that is people who set out to be an entrepreneur first and figure out at what later). I've never wanted that, I've only ever wanted to be compensated decently and work at a job where I can see measurable value in what I do, in my case that's writing production/factory management software that saves more money than it costs and makes the life of the end users more pleasant, it's also not particularly stressful and I go in at 9 and leave at 5 every day with complete technical freedom and time for that rarest of rare things, documentation. After spending the last 5 years in high pressure, insane demand environments I'm never going back, I'll go do something else before I go back to that, it's simply not worth it (to me).

csomar 9y ago

What about a company specialized "say" in web socket. That is it provides Web Socket related products and consulting. Doesn't that make it a Technology company?

MediumD 9y ago

I agree with you 100%. However, the $INDUSTRY label that a company receives, is often a huge factor in its valuation. Compare the forward P/E of Netflix vs. other entertainment companies getting into streaming. Netflix receives a significantly higher P/E due it being considered (right or wrong) a 'Tech' stock with more growth potential.