Outlining startup culture as a global form

Abstract

Startup entrepreneurship, understood as innovative venture creation and development, has gained a strong momentum under current capitalism, and startup cultures are being developed all over the globe. In this article, I examine startup culture as a global form and investigate the relationship between Silicon Valley - often seen as the cradle of current technology and startup entrepreneurship - and local manifestations of startup culture. I argue that Silicon Valley is an ambivalent, emblematic schema for the global construction of startup cultures. Therefore, I draw attention to the shared features of startup cultures by conceptualizing the notion in a threefold manner. Firstly, I conceive startup culture as a form of governance, which I dub startup entrepreneurialism. Secondly, I discuss startup culture as the cultural circuit of digital capitalism. Thirdly, I explore startup culture as a distinct form of economic activity that is characterized by a symbiosis between venture capital and growth companies. Drawing together, I find that startup cultures are best understood as an instantiation of a privileged form of contemporary capitalist production.