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Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality
This systematic analysis of everyday life inside a tech startup dissects the logic of venture capital and its consequences for entrepreneurs, workers, and societies.
In recent years, dreams about our technological future have soured as digital platforms have undermined privacy, eroded labor rights, and weakened democratic discourse. In light of the negative consequences of innovation, some blame harmful algorithms or greedy CEOs. Behind the Startup focuses instead on the role of capital and the influence of financiers. Drawing on nineteen months of participant-observation research inside a successful Silicon Valley startup, this book examines how the company was organized to meet the needs of the venture capital investors who funded it.
Investors push startups to scale as quickly as possible to inflate the value of their asset. Benjamin Shestakofsky shows how these demands created organizational problems that managers solved by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by these companies are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. To promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, Shestakofsky compellingly argues that we must focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.
In recent years, dreams about our technological future have soured as digital platforms have undermined privacy, eroded labor rights, and weakened democratic discourse. In light of the negative consequences of innovation, some blame harmful algorithms or greedy CEOs. Behind the Startup focuses instead on the role of capital and the influence of financiers. Drawing on nineteen months of participant-observation research inside a successful Silicon Valley startup, this book examines how the company was organized to meet the needs of the venture capital investors who funded it.
Investors push startups to scale as quickly as possible to inflate the value of their asset. Benjamin Shestakofsky shows how these demands created organizational problems that managers solved by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by these companies are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. To promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, Shestakofsky compellingly argues that we must focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.
326 pages, Paperback
Published March 19, 2024
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April 18, 2024
Through captivating ethnographic insights, "Behind the Startup" by Ben Shestakofsky reveals the financial incentives that structure startup life and the organizational logics that animate the tech industry. This is a deeply insightful and important exploration of the high-stakes world where innovation, money, and labor collide in complex ways.
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December 5, 2024soc495
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