Book Title: Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality
Author: Benjamin Shestakofsky
Publisher: Westland Business
Number of Pages: 326
ISBN: 978-9360454654
Date Published: Jun. 24, 2024
Price: INR 405
Book Excerpt
6
Bearing the Burdens of Change
In a popular how-to book for tech entrepreneurs, LinkedIn cofounder and prominent venture capitalist Reid Hoffman argues that startups should adopt practices that “violate many of the [traditional] management ‘rules that are designed for efficiency and risk minimization.” He proposes “a new set of rules” designed to help businesses scale at a breakneck pace, including“embrace chaos,” “tolerate ‘bad’ management,” “launch a product that em-barrasses you,” “let fires burn,” and “ignore your customers.”These tactics, which in other settings would likely be viewed as wasteful and reckless, are directed at helping startups swiftly achieve market dominance at all costs.
If Hoffman had visited AllDone’s San Francisco office during my fieldwork—or if he were to read chapter 1 of this book—it’s likely that he would have approved of what he saw. Employees operated without long-term plans beyond managing emergent crises and hitting their next strategic benchmarks. Software developers were continually experimenting with new product features and design elements, many of which customers con-fronted before they had been fully fleshed out. Instead of dwelling on users’ complaints or focusing on addressing bugs in the software, employees remained fixated on finding new ways to increase the user metrics that mattered most to investors.
AllDone San Francisco’s software developers experienced disruption as exhilarating. Comfortably ensconced in a well-appointed office, they were immersed in the challenging and absorbing work of building a new product and finding creative solutions to organizational problems. They reveled in watching the numbers climb higher, their every success seeming to bring them one step closer to hitting the startup jackpot.
But what do Hoffman’s “new rules” for rapidly scaling a business mean for frontline workers? In this chapter, we answer this question by examining how AllDone’s Las Vegas-based contractors’ experiences of work were reshaped by the organizational and structural conditions of venture capitalism. Among AllDone’s three work teams, its phone agents bore the burdens of organizational dynamism, or the firm’s ever-changing strategies and product features, most directly. While the (almost exclusively) men of AllDone San Francisco enjoyed moving fast and breaking things, the women of AllDone Las Vegas were often left to clean up the messes they left behind.
Check out our Latest Book Reviews
Phone agents in Las Vegas struggled to keep up with and understand the innovations originating in the San Francisco office. At the same time, they were responsible for advising users who were having the exact same problems they were having in making sense of an ever-evolving product.ADLV contractors struggled to keep up with shifting job tasks, and new managerial directives emphasizing adaptability bred stress and anxiety among workers. These conditions created special difficulties for older and more technologically challenged workers, who were already sensitive to the precarious nature of their positions, both within the firm and in the labor market more generally.
AllDone’s leaders attempted to import AllDone Philippines’ culture of familial love to Las Vegas, but team members did not consistently reproduce ADP’s frontstage display of a happy, uncomplaining workforce. Facing relatively low wages, difficult work, and uncertainty about their long-term attachment to the firm, ADLV contractors at times failed to meet performance objectives, violated managerial directives, squabbled with each other, and openly expressed dissatisfaction with managers in San Francisco. Collectively, these conditions and responses contributed to an organizational culture of frustration. Because they operated on the front lines of a fast-moving, venture-backed startup, members of AllDoneLas Vegas were asked to absorb the social costs of the continual change orchestrated in the San Francisco office. Yet, because their efforts were neither “scalable” nor easily measurable, managers tended to devalue their work and blame workers themselves for problems that were structural in nature.
Excerpted with permission from Behind The Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality by Benjamin Shestakofsky, written by Westland Books.
Get a copy now!
