She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book is a scene from a startup “festival” in Bengaluru, intended to teach local people how to become entrepreneurial. As an ethnographer I attended the festival to understand this process and over four intense days of scheduled events and activities, I met entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and technologists from the city’s startup sector. Here’s the page:Learn more about Experimental Times at the University of California Press website.The startup founder leant casually back in his chair and crossed his hands above his head. He began: “We [the two founders] were seated at a bar on New Year’s Eve and got talking about this crazy idea for a travel business. We scribbled our notes on the soggy napkin on which our beer was placed, and that was the start of the company.”Page 99 is a great example of how the book is written: it offers an in-depth look at scenes of entrepreneurial life and introduces you, the reader, to memorable characters and moments. It then builds out to locate these snapshots within larger questions of caste, class and gender to rethink key concepts like risk and innovation. While the content on page 99 might seem to be at once from a nowhere and everywhere of entrepreneurship— a scene that could be Silicon Valley, California or Bangalore, India— I pick up these ethnographic moments from this Startup Festival to locate them in a particular story of the production of the entrepreneur as an upper caste man in India. Tracing the entanglements of caste and commerce historically, I show how upper caste Brahmin men came to access the markers of modernity (such as education and urban living) through specific routes that led to them being advantaged in professions like science and engineering. Thus, what seems like a “universal” moment of pitching to venture capitalists and hearing startup stories turns out to be in fact a historically specific route to this scene that unfolds at a festival in contemporary India.
The audience was still. We listened in silence. The man next to me wore a black T-shirt that read “Superman”—the S was a dollar sign: $uperman. The entrepreneur continued. Those hasty notes made on a damp napkin possessed the two former “techies”—male, middle-class software engineers—laughing over a beer late one night, to spontaneously turn into tech entrepreneurs. My field notes continue with excerpts of the conversation: “interrogate your own assumptions,” “back your gut feeling,” “you have to interest the VC (venture capitalist) in the first 5–10 minutes to impress him,” “you have to diminish the distances between you and him; for Americans you need to be straight. With Brazilians you need to be chatty and friendly,” “you cannot be sentimentally foolish.”
Launch stories I heard in Bangalore resonate with those from elsewhere—the maverick entrepreneur, the inspirational idea hatched through collaboration at an unlikely venue, the risky jump away from a corporate job into the world of entrepreneurial innovation. These stories circulate as evidence of Bangalore’s new belonging in a global eco–system in which eccentric entrepreneurs take great risks from their garage–based startups.
Books and films like the biography of Steve Jobs (Isaacson 2011) or the film about Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg (Fincher 2010) crystallize classic entrepreneurial narratives of risk and create the figure of the startup founder as a maverick man who refuses stability and rejects middling success to pursue a wild and fantastical dream. As Deborah Piscione (2014) writes in a popular book about Silicon Valley and startup entrepreneurship, risk is “the most vital apparatus of our time” (10).
Subsequent chapters adopt the same approach to understanding what I call “startup capitalism” through detailed ethnography and storytelling. Scaling out from the ethnography, the chapters offer a feminist reading of contemporary capitalism that approaches the widely circulating ethos of “Do What You Love” by asking how this adage is gendered and racialized, and how it is maintained in the face of precarity and ongoing technological automation.
--Marshal Zeringue
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