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Apologies for some hastily chosen examples. I think the point still stands if you consider the following companies: WeWork, Lyft, Snapchat, Pinterest, Dropbox,

• Balgair 5y ago
  Are the fake-meat companies tech companies? I thought they are more like contract manufacturers, brewers, or other industrial foodstuffs. No doubts on the access to cheap debt, though.
  • jdgoesmarching 5y ago
    WeWork was also never a tech company but pushed really hard to brand themselves that way. If evaluated truthfully as a real estate company, the money they raised was hilariously idiotic. So much of this world is driven by idiotic speculation based on slick websites and charismatic presenters.
    • Breza 5y ago
      I just finished reading Billion Dollar Loser and I think you might like it.
  • SeanAppleby 5y ago
    I think it depends purely on your definition of "tech". Impossible engineering soybeans to produce more heme to make fake meat behave more like meat is a technology, in that it is a novel innovation applied to solve a real world problem. But in modern common parlance "tech" tends to mean either that a company's offering is either entirely or heavily augmented by new software, or that the company has ties to a specific network of talent/investors/etc, or that the company has very low incremental costs per user. In those cases, they might not be a tech company.
  • technotony 5y ago
    There's a ton of tech behind Beyond Meat. Their core science is based on research from an RNA professor at Stanford. That proteomics research is the reason their burger tastes so much better than previous generation veggie burgers.
    • yissp 5y ago
      If you're referring to Patrick O. Brown, you might be thinking of Impossible Foods, not Beyond Meat.
    • 1_player 5y ago
      Tech company means they deal with software. Beyond Meat isn't a tech company. Or is pharma part of tech in your definition? What about NASA?
  • collyw 5y ago
    Marketing companies would be my opinion. Fake meat has been around for years, but has become trendy again in the last couple of years. (Maybe it's better now, but that is subjective).
  • Aicy 5y ago
    How are they not? It's technology innovations in food rather than electronics, but it's still technology innovations that are based around disrupting the existing industry.
• sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Why Dropbox? Did something change? I haven't paid attention for many years, but at one point is was an extremely profitable company.
  • nowherebeen 5y ago
    Cloud storage has become a commodity and cheaper elsewhere.
• danielmarkbruce 5y ago
  Would you have put Google and Facebook in this group when they weren't profitable? You are missing something - many companies have great long term economics even if they are losing money right now. Slack (if still independent) could easily be profitable - they just have to spend less growth (ie, largely they could cut their sales and marketing dramatically, along with other items). Snapchat the same, Pinterest the same. Some of the others I believe you might by and large correct. The general statement that lots of companies are giving away dollar bills for $0.80 isn't right.
  • mike_hearn 5y ago
    This is a common argument but would seem wrong to a lot of people. It's just unintuitive. Most people of our parents generation would find this argument slightly absurd, and our grandparents would find it entirely absurd. It sounds weird because it assumes that every tech business has either insurmountable lock-in or insurmountable first mover advantage, without explicitly stating that. To fill in that assumption requires a lot of cultural knowledge of tech - the vast majority of businesses don't have either. The problem is these assumptions are very likely incorrect for most modern "tech" businesses. It looks like over-generalisation. For example: 1. Slack has relatively little lock-in. The last company I worked for was in the process of migrating to Teams when I left. The justification was cost savings. Slack is trying to build network effects and lock-in with shared inter-firm channels, but most employees don't need to interact with other firms at least in today's business world, so even if Slack becomes the Bloomberg Terminal for the rest of us, it won't be the foundation of a huge business: only the people who need to communicate with other Slack-using firms will have Slack accounts and they charge by account. 2. Snapchat is a social network, and the iron law of social networks seems to be that they're at the top for only a relatively short period. Facebook is by far the longest lasting but even so, they've had to shore up that position by buying Instagram and WhatsApp. Snapchat's value won't last forever, so burning cash to get to the top in the hope of monetising it over the long run seem a bit optimistic. 3. Uber is basically a taxi firm. There is no moat there. Me using Uber doesn't really make it more useful for you, except in the sense that it attracts drivers. But drivers are capable of using multiple apps at once and switching between them. If Uber's prices were to increase really significantly, their market share would probably go into free-fall yet the hallmark of a company with lock-in is that they can charge very high prices for decades without facing competition. 4. Amazon was never able to convert high market share in retail to high profits. Its profits come mostly from AWS: a pure tech supply chain business. It's also worth noting that Google and Facebook became profitable quite quickly relative to the sorts of companies people are criticising these days. It took Google less than 6 years to reach mega-profits. There are now firms that are doing Series G (!) raises, which aren't profitable after 15 years.
• tjs8rj 5y ago
  About half the companies you mentioned are cash-flow positive, so their economics work, they just have accounting for depreciation and other lines on their balance sheet. They are default alive companies using accounting practices to avoid taxes, but they have more money coming in than going out