Medium Tech? ⭐
In the 1980s, Sam Adams was a local phenomenon in the Boston area where I lived, and it was, at first, a novel outlier, a craft brewery in a world dominated by Big Beer. As a regular patron at Doyle’s Cafe in the Boston suburbs, I was familiar with Sam Adams early on, and there were fanciful rumors that the beer was delivered to the restaurant and bar from the local brewery underground in pipes.
Sam Adams didn’t stay local. It exploded in popularity in the 1990s as the country and then the world embraced so-called craft beers and the craft breweries that made them. This required its parent company, the Boston Beer Company, to acquire and build breweries around the country so that it could meet the demand more easily.
At some point, the Boston Beer Company crossed an all-defined line between being a craft brewery and just being an enormous company that made beer and other alcoholic drinks. Because of the explosive growth of Sam Adams and other bigger craft beers, the Brewers Association that oversees this market proposed changing its definition of what constitutes an American craft brewer. And that change meant that the company behind Sam Adams was no longer a craft beer maker.
The Boston Beer Company fought this change because being a craft beer maker was so central to its image. But it wasn’t just bigger than other craft brewers, it was getting as big as some Big Beer makers too, with national and international distribution and annual unit sales in the millions of barrels. This is no mom and pop operation anymore.
I don’t know a lot about the beer industry, nor do I care all that much. But I do know that it has endured a lot of consolidation in the last couple of decades, with obvious parallels to our industry. Big Beer today consists of just major companies—AB InBev, SABMiller, Heineken, and Carlsberg—that by some measures collectively control about 90 percent of the market. Meanwhile, 8 of the biggest companies in the world by market capitalization—Nvidia, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, TSMC, Broadcom, and Meta—are Big Tech companies and each is dominant in its own way.
More to the point, we also have personal technology companies that straddle the line, or exist in a gray space, between Big Tech and Little Tech. These companies earn billions of dollars in revenue each year, so they are objectively “big” even though they’re not big enough, by any measure, to qualify as Big Tech. Likewise, some of them are even market leaders, and though none I can think of are outright dominating any important or big market, that confuses matters further.
What companies am I referring to? There are probably dozens or even hundreds of them, but the most obvious that come to mind are Spotify and Epic Games. None of these companies are on a list of the top 100 companies by market cap, where the smallest include Intuit, Qualcomm, and Intel. But they’re not Little Tech, right?
I don’t know. If you want to arg...
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