141–150 of 153 posts
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Define a "tech IPO" for me. I'll wait.
I think for the purposes of this question, "IPO whose S-1 gets posted to HN" is a good definition. No need to overthink it.
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> Do you know of any publicly traded companies that split out IT in their financials? No, you'd have to be familiar with their internal practices. But let's be honest, you're just being pedantic now. It's fairly obvious from the outside which companies are "tech" companies. > Do you consider Apple, which builds consumer electronics (e.g. hardware engineering) a tech company? First of all, about 25% of their revenue c…
> It's fairly obvious from the outside which companies are "tech" companies. It it though? You'll find a bunch of replies here with disagreements about what "tech" companies actually are, so how is that obvious? > But let's be honest, you're just being pedantic now. And I think you're being too obtuse. It's one thing to refer to "tech companies" as a general colloquialism (I do), but if you're going to try to start c…
I see a bunch of posts with definitions that are not well thought out and counterexamples. I haven't seen any counterexamples from my definition. Tesla, Uber, and Amazon all fall under tech in my definition. Starbucks does not, because their dev team is part of IT. They still do great tech work, but they aren't a tech company.
> It's a bad example, but it's still a tech company? I think you just proved my point :)
It was only a bad example because you were misinformed on their revenue model. I was saying it was a bad choice for you to use as an example because it is so obviously a tech company.
> but then when someone says "how do we count how many tech companies do X" then we start to get into a whole bunch of grey areas about how to measure something
There are many unmeasurable things, but we still measure them and look for trends. If I dump a pile of sand on your desk, and then another pile of sand that takes more space, the number of grains of sand is effectively immeasurable but it doesn't matter, we can still see the trend of bigger piles of sand.
You don't need a precise definition to look for trends, and we are talking about trends here. More tech IPOs than last year. We don't need a precise definition of what a tech IPO is to see a trend.
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> just a fancy wrapper on top of AliExpress and dropbox is just a fancy wrapper on top of ... and airbnb is just a fancy wrapper on top of ...
Dropbox and AirBnB had the added value of being simpler use than whatever they replaced. Wish does not have that. The shopping experience on Aliexpress is similar if not better and it is backed by Alibaba so it will only grow. Wish capitalizes on low customer expectations and dirt cheap prices. There is nothing in that business model that can't be easily copied by another Chinese company.
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The power of a brand name though. Wish is memorable.
Wish is number 6 on Shopping App Chart and Aliexpress is at 30 or so. It’s more popular but Aliexpress barely does any marketing in the US AFAIK
Wish also has a huge ad spend on Facebook and Instagram driving app downloads. I see at least 10x more ads for Wish than AliExpress.
I totally get the Wish hate but I don’t think most here realize why it’s so popular. My family in the Midwest loves wish because they purchase from there knowing the quality isn’t going to be superb. My mom buys random things from them like clothes, jewelry, and random appliances for literally $5. She’s willing to wait three weeks to get her stuff because it’s such a good deal. My dad was able to get a quality DSLR f…
I always thought of Wish as an AliExpres front, doing drop-shipping at higher prices. Therefore, I've never used it myself. I might be wrong. Are there good reasons for why someone would recommend their loved ones to use Wish over AliExpress?
Huh, I've never heard of this but went to the home page and it sells .. junk? Some of the products remind me of those "THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK" ads
It's an online dollar store, meant to give the experience of consumerism to poor people, who otherwise wouldn't have enough money to participate.
There are a billion product categories where an unbranded direct-from-manufacturer product is entirely adequate. I don't need to pay for a premium name brand on a basic phone case, Arduino clone, USB 2.0 cable, or a replacement part for a toy.
You can lean into that. With sites like Aliexpress and Banggood, I know more or less what I'm going to get, and generally the products meet expectations, so I'm a happy return customer.
Wish starts out in much worse territory. They overpromised and underdelivered for long enough that they've become a meme, an anti-brand. I suspect they've been able to show appealing numbers just by burning through the suckers who will try any too-good-to-be-true offer once, but eventually you run out of those customers and have to pivot towards building a repeat customer base. How do you do that? Maybe aggressively culling products with poor customer feedback, strong guarantees, and reined in advertising designed to prevnent disappointment.
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Know this mostly isn't looking for an answer, but I think HN typically means something along the lines of: "one with a significant development arm of their employees/business that is crucial to the company's success" So any company run off an app or website that's complex and well made is probably a "tech company" even if it's in the business of cars, e-commerce, or widgets. There's no hard and fast rule here of cour…
> even if "tech company" is a misnomer in many ways. Well it is a misnomer and that's precisely the point.
If there's one IPO that I'm not excited about, is this one. This is a shit model. And I want to apologize in advance to any Wish employees that may be here and that are surely doing hard work to build the logistics and consumer layers of this business. This is a business built on top of cheap Chinese goods, subsidized shipping and low customer expectations. High transaction volume with very low margins, and totally e…
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If every human stopped working at the company for a day the product would still work (not a meatspace product). The company will typically have a high GAAP gross margin.
> If every human stopped working at the company for a day the product would still work (not a meatspace product). So an automobile company?