“Readers . . . will find a real-life 'The Office,' Silicon Valley version, alternately comical and poignant.”― New York Times​ 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. “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 "Plenty has been said about what venture capitalists can do for young firms. But we know very little about what venture capital actually does to firms and especially the people who work for them. Based on a year and a half of deep fieldwork, Benjamin Shestakofsky shows us how venture capital’s demands and expectations shaped the concerns, the jobs, and the lives of the founders, engineers, and contractors employed by a startup that developed one of the first online labor platforms. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz , Shestakofsky pulls back the tech economy’s curtain to reveal why only a handful of those who labor in Silicon Valley’s vineyards ever taste the wine they produce. Behind the Startup is bound to become a parable for our economic times. It deserves a wide audience."—Stephen R. Barley, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, UC Santa Barbara, and Professor Emeritus, Stanford University "This captivating, fast-paced study of AllDone—a pseudonym for a Silicon Valley unicorn—offers something no other profile of the platform economy or gig work has to date: a clear view of the elitist practices that pump venture capital into young startups’ work routines to produce that elusive ingredient known as disruption. While we have studies that trace the histories of Big Tech incumbents and narratives of scrappy inventors-in-garages, sociologist Benjamin Shestakofsky brings skillful attention to an overlooked piece of the organizational puzzle of the dot.com world: how investments in the very idea of tech upstarts deploy capital to upend consumer and labor norms more than anything of tangible value. The outcome is not so much the making of individual millionaires as the structural maintenance of logics of wealth accumulation through old-fashioned valuing of some human labor at the cost of others’ daily routines. Shestakofsky’s approach turns venture capital itself into a character that ensnares Silicon Valley, Las Vegas, and the Philippines, constantly upending and remaking what AllDone’s global workforce sees as their role in filling the valuation lag that ultimately looks like an animal frantically chasing its tail. This book is both a valuable time capsule and a harbinger of what awaits us all if thinking like a venture capitalist invades every nook and cranny of our global economy."—Mary L. Gray, MacArthur Fellow and coauthor of Ghost Work: