the end of the startup

What does it mean to be a tech company today? Put another way: what’s a difference between Amazon’s e-commerce business and Walmart, that is also a difference between Apple and Shake Shack, that is also a difference between Uber and the New York Times?

It’s a tough question that I certainly can’t answer. It used to be that being a “tech company” meant that you relied primarily on creating software (or maybe hardware, too). But in a software-is-eating-the-world era, every organization, from banks and airlines to political campaigns, relies primarily on creating software, too. Is the New York Times, which increasingly relies on digital revenue, a tech company? Is every company is a tech company?

Here’s another tough question: What does it mean to be a startup today?

These are the world’s 5 highest-valued private startups:

• Uber ($62B valuation), a ride-sharing app creating a more efficient market for taxis via tech
• Xiaomi ($46B), an Apple-inspired Chinese consumer hardware company
• Airbnb ($25B), a home and apartment sharing app creating a more efficient market for travel housing via tech
• Palantir ($20B), a data analytics firm primarily providing services for government agencies and enterprise
• Snapchat ($16B), an advertising supported consumer messaging app
• Didi Kuaidi ($16B), a Chinese Uber competitor

It’s a funny list because of how incredibly disparate these business models, markets, companies really are. There’s about as much in shared business fundamentals between Uber and Snapchat as there are between Walmart and General Motors.

Maybe a startup is a company that’s trying to grow fast. But even then, who isn’t trying to grow fast? And analyses of the fastest growing companies include grocery stores and energy multinationals before any startup on the list above.

The one thing these startups all have in common, somewhat tautologically, is their funding model: they’re all backed by venture capital. Even more to the point, the same venture capital firms often have invested in a few otherwise completely disparate startups. Uber and Snapchat, for example, are both financed by the venture capital firm Benchmark. But even this common thread, at least among these late-stage startups, is starting to change. Fidelity, the world’s second largest financial services group, also backs Uber and Snapchat…but only as a small part of a typical, Wall Street-style diversified investment portfolio.

The whole world is tech, the whole world is growth. Everything’s a startup.

So let’s stop talking about startups and non-startups; tech and non-tech; growth and non-growth—and let’s start talking about the modern company.