What Makes A Tech Company?

Technology is having an impact on every industry, but being digitally savvy doesn’t change a business into a tech company.

What makes a business a tech company? Domino’s seems to have been asking itself this question recently after the purveyor of pizza introduced the Anyware ordering system. Hungry customers have now got the option of ordering through Dom, the voice-controlled ordering app; via a Samsung Smart TV; a Ford car with a Sync AppLink; through a smartwatch, or of course the regular app or website. And let’s not forget they could always phone.

“The platform story is part of our broader tech story,” Dennis Maloney, VP multimedia marketing manager at Domino’s, told ‘DigiDay’. “We’re starting to think of ourselves as an e-commerce company that sells pizza. So we can take a few more risks and lean forward a little more. E-commerce companies move fast and launch stuff and learn along the way.”.

This is great for Domino’s – the company’s forward-looking attitude to digitalisation hits the mark, making the company a potential winner in the age of Digital Darwinism. Domino’s is recognising the changing face of customer service by embracing new technologies to reach out to customers and engage with them. It is even taking it one step further by going outside the food industry to form wide-reaching partnerships.

But as much as we love pizza, we’re struggling to get on board with this idea of Domino’s as a tech company. Yes, the method for selling goods has changed, but having an app doesn’t make you a tech company, just as having a telephone system doesn’t make you a phone company.

So what makes a business a tech company then?

This question isn’t all that clear-cut, apparently. A similar debate arose around BuzzFeed last year after it raised $50m from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz: “We think of BuzzFeed as more of a technology company. They embrace internet culture. Everything is first optimised for mobile and social channels,” Chris Dixon, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and BuzzFeed board member, told ‘The New York Times‘ at the time of the fundraising.

BuzzFeed’s prowess at using digital tools doesn’t detract from what they’re actually selling, which is still media content and advertising services. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said the internet is vanishing because it is gradually becoming an integral part of everything we do, and that means we should see more and more innovative digital solutions from companies whose core business has seemingly nothing to do with tech. In that spirit, what BuzzFeed and Domino’s is doing is just evolving within their respective industries – they’re not moving over to the tech industry.

This small but important distinction is something Andreessen Horowitz’s Dixon seems to get, regardless of his  official comments to the press. Writing on his personal blog, Dixon described how technology is now spreading through every industry: “The most interesting tech companies aren’t trying to sell software to other companies. They are trying to reshape industries from top to bottom.”. Dixon describes how companies like BuzzFeed [he could have added Domino’s] are taking the internet seriously, growing with technology at its core: “BuzzFeed is a media company in the same sense that Tesla is a car company, Uber is a taxi company, or Netflix is a streaming movie company.”.

In the early days of the internet, a company could see its share price spike just by launching a website so it’s no wonder companies want to associate themselves with the “hot” tech sector. One reason why Domino’s has been pushing the tech angle is because it’s easier to attract talented engineers that way. “With the strength of our brand and our focus on technology innovation, we are now attracting the right people and in the right numbers,” Kevin Vasconi, Domino’s chief information officer, told ‘DigiDay‘.

But while companies continue to develop their digital offerings, it may be worth keeping an eye on their brand DNA: What are we providing? What do customers want? Providing great technological solutions will almost certainly be an important part of these answers. But the app won’t be worth much if the pizza isn’t great.