Every company now is a tech company.

But there is a key and useful distinction. What are they actually selling?

Only a few companies have technology as their core product.

Anthropic's LLM API.
Nvidia's graphics cards.
Amazon's AWS cloud services.

Those are tech companies. Yours probably isn't.

Why is this important?

Because in every other business, technology is not the product. It's an enabler.

It allows you to build a better service, bring the costs down, and enable some functionality that was previously impossible or unscalable.

And that has implications for your tech strategy and how you prioritize work.

Do you know how much random access memory your iPhone has? You don't care as long as it works fast enough that you can take pictures of your cat.

The point is, in a tech-first business:

You put R&D into technology because that unlocks profit. Like a node-shrink in a chip fab.

In a tech-supported business:

You invest in improving the customer experience and find what technology you need to apply.

The innovation is likely not going to be something new and unique. It will be established technologies assembled in a new way that unlocks the new user experience.

Yours,

Taj