Behind the Startup

“Readers … will find a real-life ‘The Office,’ Silicon Valley version, alternately comical and poignant.” * New York Times *
“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.” * Midwest Book Review *
“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.” * Los Angeles Review of Books *
“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.” * Administrative Science Quarterly *

“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).”

“Behind the Startup is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding financialization of innovation, work and technology, and organizational inequalities. Rich in ethnographic detail and theoretical insights, this book unveils how venture capital produces fictional promises and pressures that guide organizational practices in tech startups.”

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.

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