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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 create organizational problems that managers solve 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.
"Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality is vital and timely reading for professional and non-professional readers with an interest in economics, venture capitalism, income inequality, and corporate evaluations."
"Benjamin Shestakofsky’s new book Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality gives an experiential account . . . providing a first-person glimpse into how the imperatives of venture capital determine the modalities of working life inside a start-up."
“Offers organizational scholars a critical view of the idolized, if ephemeral, organizational form that is the VC-backed startup. Along the way, readers will find new research questions in the aspirations (and desperations) of the small companies that may one day dominate markets.”
“Offers a rare inside look at the labor propelling one startup's explosive growth. Shestakofsky convincingly argues that venture capital funding models have devastating consequences for the workers enabling technological innovation.”
“New or not, Shestakofsky . . . shows that high-tech companies often strive in the beginning to build community among their workers only to have it destroyed as venture capitalists assume ownership.”
“Behind the Startup . . . [does] an excellent job of cutting through the hype to interrogate the evolving textures of today’s digitally imbricated labor on the ground.”
“It is a meticulous, immersive ethnographic study of a San Francisco startup. . . . With tremendous care, Shestakofsky documents how often banal decisions shape people’s lives and livelihoods, driving wedges between a few who rep lavish benefits and those who merely get by.”
"Benjamin Shestakofsky’s Behind the Startup contributes to this body of literature by placing venture capital and shareholder interests at the forefront of his analysis of work in Silicon Valley startups. . . . The book provides a rare insight into the early stages of a tech startup and the ways in which technologies and workplaces are shaped by venture capital."
“Shestakofsky's book is a great illustration of how technology developers respond to narrow financial imperatives in ways that can very easily lead to problematic outcomes (e.g. putting everything in one proverbial basket).”
Preface
Introduction
PART I San Francisco: Launching the Rocket Ship
1. Orchestrating Change
2. Dreaming of the Future
PART II The Philippines: Innovation’s Human Infrastructure
3. Working Algorithms
4. All in the Family?
PART III Las Vegas: The Call De-Center
5. Working the Phones
6. Bearing the Burdens of Change
PART IV When a Startup Grows Up
7. Growing Pains
Conclusion: Reorganizing Innovation
Acknowledgments
Methodological Appendix
Notes
References
Index