What is (Big) Tech? A Taxonomy.

Why the Definition matters

The last year showed that “Tech” as an industry is under attack. There’s quite some back and forth between the Media and Tech: Both accuse the other side that they don’t understand the other.

We have a relatively new sector which got into power really fast and doesn’t quite fit into the established image of big multinational corporations. Here are some mind-boggling stats from Eric Feng:

• The combined value of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet is worth more than the entire London Stock Exchange (all 3,000 companies)

Average IRRs over a 10 year period

• Simply buying and holding their stock would have outperformed even the top VC firms around
• Microsoft is so big that to grow just 1%, it has to add the entire market cap of Pinterest.
• How do we have 4 trillion dollar companies growing at startup rates?

Indeed, a very good question I tried to answer before. No wonder journalists try to label these juggernauts.

Of course, attempts of clustering add to the confusion — there are various acronyms floating around. The most commonly used is…