Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality by Benjamin Shestakovsky

I have been waiting for a book like Benjamin Shestakovsky’s Behind the Startup for many years. It is a meticulous, immersive ethnographic study of a San Francisco startup pseudonymized as “AllDone,” a platform for matching buyers and sellers of local services such as home repair and dog-walking. Shestakovsky took an internship at AllDone, which soon led to holding a full-time managerial job. There he discovered that his workplace and his role in it were under continual influence from the venture-capital investment system that has fueled the growth of nearly all major online platforms. Behind the Startup demonstrates, more fully than any work before it, the specific structural forces that so consistently ensure that platform startups betray their stated ideals.

With tremendous humanity and care, Shestakovsky documents how often banal decisions shape people’s lives and livelihoods, driving wedges between a few who reap lavish benefits and those who merely get by. For scholars of the platform economy, he makes a clarion call: To understand industry behavior and its social externalities—especially widening wealth inequality—we must understand how industries are financed. Shestakovsky’s agenda, however, is not merely a matter of scholarly curiosity. “If we want our future to look different than our current trajectory,” he writes, “we must first change how new technologies are funded” (26).

Much of the book proceeds by introducing each of AllDone’s several worksites based on interviews and the author’s direct experience with each site. Less than 10 percent of the overall workforce was in the San Francisco office, where employees received generous pay, benefits, and stock options. They were predominantly white and male. They were trained to monitor and optimize their activities around metrics that would be of interest to potential future investors. They enjoyed the perks of the pre-COVID tech startup office, with excellent food and significant autonomy about how to conduct their generally satisfying tasks. They applauded each other for making a positive impact on the world.

The vast majority of the AllDone workforce, however, had a different experience. Customer support teams in the Philippines and Las Vegas used their own equipment from home, where they were hired on a contract basis through an intermediary platform. They received no benefits or stock. They were overwhelmingly female. The remit of these workers was to fill in the gaps of what the platform’s technology could not do by itself, and those gaps proved considerable. With every “pivot” the company made, adjusting its business model and offerings to better suit investor demands, the support teams had to manage users’ experience and, often, absorb the resulting vitriol. When investors joined the platform to test it, these workers secretly provided them with a higher level of personalized service while disguising it as the normal functioning of the technology. As AllDone expanded the San Francisco engineering team, technical improvements did not actually reduce the need for this kind of human involvement.

Shestakovsky understands these workforces through lenses such as colonization—the Philippines is a former colony of the United States—and feminist labor analysis. The Filipino workers adopted a culture of “familial love” and a spirit of gratitude for wages that would have been illegally low in the United States but were considered decent locally. AllDone’s management promoted this culture, in turn, among the Las Vegas workers, who were paid well below a living wage. As the company grew and matured, it closed the Las Vegas operation and transferred the activity to a more professionalized call center in Utah. Meanwhile, many Filipino workers came to believe that, as the company’s success did not accrue to them, AllDone had betrayed its familial obligations.

Shestakovsky introduces an analytic vocabulary for the logic of “venture capitalism” that he observes in AllDone’s story. “Speculative optimism” is the shared belief in the company’s potential for massive growth, promulgated among workers whether or not they could access the equity ownership through which the resulting wealth would accrue. “Valuation lag,” “technical drag,” and “trust drag” describe the disparities between the company’s actual achievements and its promises to stakeholders. Closing those gaps produced a series of contradictions: A world-changing mission collapses into investor-friendly growth metrics, a familial spirit whose success breeds its own replacement by a “culture of rationalization.”

There is an extensive airport-bookstore literature on how to produce venture-style startups and pursue growth at all costs. These imperatives are well known. But Behind the Startup connects them with specific human and economic externalities in ways that the how-to guides and much recent scholarship alike do not. This critical analysis is essential for scholars who want to understand not just that capitalism seems to continually poison innovation but how, in practice, that poisoning occurs. The book considerably deepens Cory Doctorow’s polemical observation that platform startups repeatedly fall into a pattern of “enshittification.”¹ Here, rather than just an expletive, we have an explanatory framework and a compassionate account of how even well-intentioned people contribute to harmful dynamics.

After the book’s conclusion, Shestakovsky provides an appendix that narrates his remarkable access and entanglement—including through an equity stake—in the site of his fieldwork. This account only underscores that his achievement is a tremendous stroke of luck for all of us concerned with the platform economy. Yet the rigor and depth of the analysis he produced demonstrate that luck was only part the story. If this book does not achieve its purpose in reorienting future research, the field and not the book is to blame.

Future work on venture capitalism could turn attention to where Shestakovsky didn’t. For instance, the workers who used AllDone’s platform to obtain short-term jobs are comparatively absent; ethnographies of gig work such as Callum Cant’s Riding for Deliveroo and Juliet Schor’s After the Gig are essential complements.² While Shestakovsky’s conclusion points out possible alternatives to venture capitalism, further research should explore the structural conditions necessary for them to succeed. As he notes, venture capital itself was not an inevitability but a consequence of specific public policies. Alternatives to it will likely require policy support as well.

Other questions remain: How widespread, exactly, are the pressures that venture capital seems to impose on innovation? How do those pressures vary across contexts? Questions like these can now be far more clearly defined and more confidently asked, thanks to Behind the Startup.