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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

What counts as tech?

Is AirBnB tech, or hospitality? Is Uber tech, or transportation? Is the Apple Watch tech, or a watch? Is SpaceX tech, or aerospace? Is Tesla tech or automotive? Is Instacart tech or groceries? Are Twitter/Medium/Wordpress tech or media?

Not a rhetorical question, I'd actually like to know what's included in the 3% growth figure. I could believe it if tech is defined as "companies that sell computer hardware or softare", but it seems very low if tech is defined as "companies that provide a service using software or hardware that wasn't possible a decade ago."

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That's a GREAT question. Information Technology is $5.6T market, and telecommunications services is another $1.8T [1]. Uber and AirBnB, which I believe ARE tech companies, are under $90B combined, so ~2% of IT sector.

SpaceX is aerospace: ~$12B valuation vs ~$600B Aerospace & Defense industry size, and Tesla is automotive, $28B vs ~$750B Auto + components market.

Note that Uber, AirBnB, SpaceX and Tesla are probably the biggest unicorns out there.

But you are raising an important point - many industries will be redefined when new competitors are using IT much more heavily. Still, that growth mostly comes from existing players, and I believe the growth of the IT sector itself is limited now.

[1] https://eresearch.fidelity.com/eresearch/markets_sectors/sec...

edit: typos, minor clarifications.

Uber, Airbnb, SpaceX, Tesla are not unicorns any more than Google, Facebook, Netflix, Priceline and Amazon are.

Uber is seven years old, Airbnb is coming up on eight years old, SpaceX is 14 years old, Tesla is 13 years old. And they're all very substantial enterprises at this point.

I'd suggest that companies of that size and operational maturity should be considered to be well beyond the semi-early stage billion dollar valuation companies that have tended to get the unicorn tag. They were unicorns, now they're just like Netflix or any other established company.

Unicorns generally refer to pre-IPO billion+ dollar companies. Tesla is not a unicorn, since it's IPOed; Uber and Airbnb are.

Here is a fairly comprehensive list (it's surprisingly long). https://www.cbinsights.com/research-unicorn-companies

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