I'm here at TechCrunch Disrupt and have been watching the talks and perusing the "Startup Alley" and would like to make the assertion that the "Tech Industry" is actually less about building technology and rather, about building products that use technology.

The "Tech Industry" was born out of solving incredibly difficult problems that would eventually enable other things to be built. Think processors, hard drives, difficult algorithms that solve major search issues.

These days I feel like the industry as a whole focuses far less on building these core technologies but instead focuses on leveraging them to develop products.

For example, I see Uber as a transportation company that intelligently leverages technology.

I'd actually go a lot further than that - the potential products that come from a recombination of of pre-existing technologies is massively larger (by definition) than the number of technologies themselves. And when you add data sources to the mix, then the number of potential products escalates ever more. A good example is something like attention data, which something like last.fm adds to the social graph and to data about music. When you add in the actual data files for the songs themselves, then you get another axis of potential product.

The big error though is to confuse this trend with the roles associated with each of these names. "Product" for me emerges from engineering / design and business equally...

That really resonates with me. It's why a company like Branch can be based in NYC. The "stack" is commoditized and most of the innovation is around user experience (at least in the "tech industry" that I think you are referring to).

From my perspective, it's pretty evident that almost any new company should view themselves as a part of the "Tech Industry," even if they don't want to outwardly portray themselves as that. Our (Warby Parker's) messaging is focused on fashion, quality product, value, customer service, doing good in the world… not necessarily being good at tech. But the core of the company is supported by technology and systems that have already been built, but never properly leveraged. Two years in, I think we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible.

The fact that we're accepted as a tech company by so many seems to reflect Matt's assertion.

I just want to make sure that I'm clear about this though - just because most 'tech' companies are focused on product rather than tech does not mean that product *people* are more important than tech or design people. In my experience you can find good product ideas emerging from business, tech or design, and some of the very best from the interplay between them. And no great product idea that emerges will have the slightest chance of meeting its potential unless engineers and designers and business people can find a way to unite around it and bring it forward.

+1 Tom