Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation and Inequality
13 Mar 2025
14:00 -15:30
Times are shown in local time.
Open to: All
Room W4.05 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Organisational Theory and Information Systems Seminar
Speaker: Dr Benjamin Shestakofsky, University of Pennsylvania
About the seminar topic
In recent years, dreams about our technological future have soured as digital platforms have undermined privacy, eroded labour rights and weakened democratic discourse. Some blame harmful algorithms or greedy CEOs for the downsides of innovation. Behind the Startup focuses instead on the role of capital and the influence of financiers. Drawing on 19 months of participant-observation research inside a successful Silicon Valley startup, this book examines how the company was organised 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. I show how these demands create organisational problems that managers solve by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labour. With its focus on the financialisation of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by these companies are funnelled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. To promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, I argue that we must focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.
Speaker bio
Benjamin Shestakofsky is Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences. His research centres on how digital technologies are affecting work and employment, organisations and economic exchange. His academic articles have been published in journals including Socio-Economic Review, Theory and Society, Big Data & Society, Work and Occupations, Socius, the International Journal of Communication, and Teaching Sociology. His research and commentary have appeared in media outlets including the New York Times, National Public Radio, San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times, Fast Company, Los Angeles Review of Books, Forbes India, Axios, and in a publication of the World Economic Forum.
His new book, Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality was published in March 2024 by the University of California Press.
Articles based on this project have been awarded the 2019 W Richard Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the ASA’s Section on Organisations, Occupations, and Work, and the 2021 Star-Nelkin Paper Award from the ASA’s Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology. Benjamin’s recent and ongoing projects examine the sociology of artificial intelligence, how organisations can improve conditions for the hidden workers who support AI systems. The governance of digital platforms, power and positionality in organisational ethnography and the relationship between venture capital, organisational cultures, and organisational change. Benjamin’s research has been supported by the WE Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, and the UC Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
Register
If you would like to register, or know more about this event, please email Luke Slater.