Can software startups that need $$$ avoid venture captial?
Today's episode is a chat with Benjamin Shestakofsky, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania with a focus on the ways in which digital technologies are affecting work and employment, organizations, and economic exchange.We discuss research from his new book which dives into the venture capital business and explores the cooperative model that some software startups are taking instead.
You can find Shestakofsky on his website or check him out on X.
Grab a copy of his new book: Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality.
As he writes on his website, the book:
Draws on 19 months of participant-observation research to examine how investors’ demand for rapid growth created organizational problems that managers solved by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. The book shows how the burdens imposed on startups by venture capital—as well as the benefits and costs of “moving fast and breaking things”—are unevenly distributed across a company’s workforce and customers. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by tech startups 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 argues that we should focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.
A big thanks to our user of the week, Parusnik, who was awarded a Great Question badge for asking: How to run a .NET Core console application on Linux?