All Companies Are Tech Companies

I picked up an interesting concept from my reading/consuming recently:

I think this is fascinating because it captures the true disruptive power of technology. It shows that it’s not just a tool for your business, but rather the entire infrastructure for it.

Examples are informative.

A package delivery company used to be about cars and trucks and planes. So if you mostly got some of the packages from one place to another, you had a delivery business. This was done on paper first, then in Excel, then there were tracking systems. But now it’s a whole other beast. Now the tracking system is a series of realtime tracking and adjustment algorithms. Now the software is the business.

And it’s the same for flower companies and cake shops and shoemakers. You either learn to scale your sales and delivery or you die.

So instead of technology enabling business, technology becomes the business. And the product doesn’t matter as much. It’s a module to be clicked into place within a sales and delivery infrastructure that optimizes every aspect of the business.

Maybe that’s not revolutionary to people, but to me it’s fascinating.

Notes

1. There are obviously some local businesses that can get by with completely local service, no tracking, no technology, etc. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to survive against competition that uses these tools.

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