There's a lot of talk about about Tesla being a startup or a tech company. In reality, they're a car company (albeit one that's doing a few things better/differ

There's a lot of talk about about Tesla being a startup or a tech company. In reality, they're a car company (albeit one that's doing a few things better/differently), and need to be looked at in that context. I've been thinking about this a bit lately, more generally. My impression is that what counts as a "tech startup" in the past few years is more of a cultural question than a business, technological, or economic question. Now whether that's a good or bad thing is another question. There is something to the cultural resemblance, though I worry that it's papering over pretty significant differences, which might in some cases be more important than the cultural similarities. Tech startups are, to some extent, just those new companies that culturally use the language of, and interact with, the social milieu of the startup scene. One has to have a general interest in technology, but it can range from deep to very superficial. Tech startups can be wholly based on developing novel technology; or their level of technology might not extend much further than "has an Android app". They could be bootstrapped capital-light companies, or capital-intensive companies in traditional industries. What seems to matter to the classification is more of a style or culture or attitude. They aren't really distinguished by using technology, because everyone does that now. They aren't even distinguished by technology being their "thing", because many companies seen as tech startups culturally are actually pretty light on the technology— e.g. AirBnB doesn't really use technology more than any other travel-industry player does... they're mostly a new-business-model play, which happens to deploy the business model through a website, because nearly everything in travel has gone through a website for 10+ years now. My guess is that we'll start to differentiate again a bit more in the coming years, based on more structural and less cultural factors.