Benjamin Shestakofsky joins us to discuss his new book, Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality, which provides a systematic analysis of everyday life inside a tech startup and 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 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. Benjamin Shestakofsky shows 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 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.

Meet our speakers and chair

Benjamin Shestakofsky is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is affiliated with AI at Wharton and the Center on Digital Culture and Society.

Rebecca Elliott is Associate Professor of Sociology at LSE. Her research focuses on how climate change, as a material and symbolic phenomenon, is reshaping social and environmental landscapes.