This gets complicated though. Is AirBnB a tech company? A simple analogy to the article would suggest no, AirBnB is a hotel company. However, the actual "hot

This gets complicated though. Is AirBnB a tech company? A simple analogy to the article would suggest no, AirBnB is a hotel company. However, the actual "hotels" are owned and operated by AirBnB hosts, and AirBnB does not derive significant competitive advantage from the quality of their administration, beyond the value of having a large number of hosts on the platform. AirBnB is fundamentally an information company. Its real competitive advantage is that it owns the channel to the customer, it has a really good search function, and it also owns all the data that makes up reputation-management system that's critical to good hotel reservations. These are all tech areas; AirBnB can afford to lose a bunch of venues, even really good venues, but if it loses the review database a good portion of its competitive advantage goes away. There was a time when lots of people believed Netflix's key competitive advantage was the recommendation algorithm and viewing history. I'm not certain we're in that world anymore - Netflix seems to care a lot more about content than recommendations these days - but I can see why Netflix would've been considered a tech company back then.