We’re a Team, Not a Family

Michael Eby reviews “Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality” by Benjamin Shestakofsky.

By Michael EbyAugust 5, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Economics and Finance

THE NETFLIX CULTURE DECK contains all the genre conventions of the corporate PowerPoint presentation. The slideshow’s visual and narrative elements—the minimalistic layout and sans serif font; the bold headers and bulleted lists; the passive-voice mantras and active-voice directives; the stock images and visual aids; the industry-specific abbreviations, acronyms, and jargon—are formally indistinguishable from those of the rest of its ilk. While outwardly conforming to the governing norms of its medium, the culture deck stands out for its outsize influence on Silicon Valley workplace culture: just five years after its publication, the company’s chief talent officer (and the deck’s co-author) Patty McCord claimed that the publicly hosted set of 127 slides had been viewed online over five million times, and former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg stated that it “may well be the most important document ever to come out of the Valley.” The only corporate culture guide to achieve the status of a viral hit, it continues to serve as a manifesto—a defining text of the 21st-century management canon, boldly declaring the organizational principles and values to which employees of the new start-up era must adhere.

The deck’s content—which stems from the underlying philosophy of the company’s outspoken former CEO, Reed Hastings—has contributed to a distinct corporate-cultural outlook cultivated by the tech industry’s HR departments, executive training programs, and leadership seminars. One of the deck’s most discussed discursive formulations is the “pro sports team” metaphor used to describe professional relationships at Netflix; in several slides, Hastings explicitly couches workplace dynamics in the language of athletic competition: “We’re a team, not a family.” The insistence upon the superiority of “team” over “family” in characterizing Netflix employment relations gives the lie to a decades-old management platitude, which Hastings derisively calls the “classic metaphor.” Employers have long regurgitated the cliché that, by joining their firm, new hires are adopted into a large and extended corporate family. This implies the existence of a value system to which an employment contract is necessarily anathema: while two family members might hesitate to sever ties over a persistent disagreement, a boss would have no quarrel with firing a worker over insubordination. Given the fundamentally transactional nature of employer-employee intercourse, Hastings’s slideshow licenses a transvaluation of values that had already taken place in corporate America.

Once companies disavow loyalty to their labor force in this way, the premium for employee success must be sufficiently generous to incentivize their commitment and engagement to work. So the pro sports team metaphor performs two complementary functions: it requires underperforming team members to be penalized and adequately performing team members to be greatly recompensed. To fulfill this latter criterion, the deck insists on the bestowal of material and symbolic rewards upon workers—large compensation packages, stock-option grants, “unlimited” time off, flexible working hours, informal dress codes, financial transparency, and nominal self-management and self-direction. These freedoms also displace the traditional methods for ensuring employee accountability; management reintroduces accountability by defining and closely monitoring a series of performance metrics—for Netflix, these might include monthly active users, subscriber growth rate, customer acquisition costs, and the like. By reorienting activity towards the fulfillment of quantified goals, the firm gamifies work—success becomes unambiguously measurable—and it implores employees to use whatever means necessary, beyond the confines of rigid working hours and job descriptions, to achieve the company’s desired outcomes. It also motivates workers to internalize the company’s success, since they gauge their own personal success using the same benchmarks that are used to gauge the company’s success. Employees begin to think, and behave, like their employers.

Benjamin Shestakofsky’s new book Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality gives an experiential account of this process, providing a first-person glimpse into how the imperatives of venture capital determine the modalities of working life inside a start-up. While Shestakofsky was in graduate school studying the issue of overwork, he was offered an internship at AllDone—a pseudonym he uses to name a TaskRabbit-like digital platform that connects buyers and sellers of local services—during which he simultaneously performed fieldwork for his thesis at the start-up’s Bay Area office. Over a period of 18 months, the author eventually slotted himself into a full-time middle management role, overseeing AllDone’s remote, contracted customer service agents and clerical workers stationed remotely in Las Vegas and the Philippines. Via careful local analyses of the labor processes of each of the three teams, Shestakofsky articulates how, at distinct stages of the start-up’s life, concrete investor decisions created the affordances and constraints that employees in different sociocultural circumstances had to navigate.

Rarely do ethnographies capture the extent of an ethnographer’s own seduction by the culture he set out to study. Shestakofsky began his tenure at AllDone balancing his internship with his studies; eventually, he took a yearlong sabbatical from his graduate program in order to devote himself fully to start-up life. Assuming the title of AllDone’s director of customer support and operations manager, Shestakofsky succumbed to the temptations of corporate existence over the course of that year. He compares the AllDone work regimen favorably to that of graduate school, where solitary hours at the library were the mainstay; by contrast, the meetings, conferences, and meals at AllDone’s office resembled “attending a social gathering,” and he found it “gratifying to begin and complete an endless series of small projects with definite endpoints.” At the end of his sabbatical, Shestakofsky faced a genuine dilemma: whether to return to academia or remain with the start-up indefinitely. Though he eventually departed from AllDone in order to finish his degree, he describes this decision as an “existential crisis.”

Shestakofsky was initially hired by the start-up because he apparently possessed the elusive quality, cherished by managers, of a “culture fit.” While the concrete specificities of this quality may vary from firm to firm, an employee that embodies it has internalized what Gideon Kunda, in his classic study of the corporate culture of the Digital Equipment Corporation, calls a “member role”—a managerially sanctioned self-image, comprised of a discrete set of beliefs, values, and attitudes, with which all individuals of an organization must identify. The member role constructed by management at AllDone’s headquarters, a repurposed industrial loft in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, seized upon many of the tenets of the post-Netflix management orthodoxy; in an introductory email sent to all new hires, the company even appropriated its first “guiding principle” from the Culture Deck: “We’re a professional sports team, not a family.” Like Netflix, the members of this 20-person team continuously fought to maintain their positions and status; under the constant threat of termination, a competitive ethic framed their interactions with one another, with management, and with the market. Such employment insecurity incentivized overwork, fomenting stress and burnout, but the intense pressure to perform just as often fueled excitement and pride in their outputs.

The casual and unbureaucratic nature of workplace dynamics at AllDone often created the illusion that employees were motivated by passion rather than by a paycheck. Team members were granted formal autonomy in their labor processes, encouraged to self-regulate towards the achievement of goals. This generated a sense of creativity in problem solving, and it fostered a feeling of ownership in and responsibility for the success of the company. Explicit status distinctions between employees were minimized; the performative informality of their interpersonal relationships extended to their common dress code (T-shirts and hoodies), which doubled as a symbolic emulation of much revered start-up “unicorns” from the past. The “social recruiting” activities encouraged by the founders entailed that all workers had to participate in courting potential recruits by hosting promising talent at the office, boasting of the company’s perks, and demonstrating that AllDone was a “cool” place to work. Employees’ pride in affiliation—their experience of belonging, harmony, and combined purpose—appeared to be its own reward.

The author depicts an organizational culture of “speculative optimism.” Employees were fixated on measurements of the company’s performance, captivated by the collective opportunities that its potential success promised them. At lunch, they engaged in spirited ideational discussions regarding the possible future monetary value of their stock options. Industry gossip about the latest start-up acquisitions and IPOs echoed the founders’ fantasies of a remunerative “exit.” Employees’ daily actions were guided by their desire to move key performance indicators “up and to the right,” and the progress they made on these scientifically objective goals was tracked and displayed conspicuously on administrative “dashboards.” In addition to performance metrics, the preoccupations of employees and employers were aligned through management’s cultivation of a shared vocabulary, an obtuse corporate-speak filled with neologisms, acronyms, and exaggerated metaphors (the firm was frequently likened to a “rocket ship” on a “journey”). The ritualistic performances—feature demos, quarterly reviews, all-staff meetings, recruiting events, happy hours, milestone celebrations—worked to collectively orient the office towards something that even the author, a critical sociologist, perceived as an ardent mission.

The working conditions of the Bay Area office contrasted sharply with those observed by the author in the company’s locations in Las Vegas and the Philippines. At AllDone’s Silicon Valley headquarters, a significant portion of the engineering work centered on, or was subject to, the practice of “A/B testing.” In digital platforms, A/B testing is an experimental method used to compare two variants of an application—designated as variant A and variant B—in order to determine which option yields superior performance as measured by user engagement, conversion rates, customer retention, and so on. Variants are randomly served to users in fixed proportions until a decision is made and one variant is adopted as a new version of the app. For instance, an A variant might feature a blue call-to-action button positioned on the left side of a webpage, while a B variant might feature a red button positioned on the right side of the page. But the discrepancies between variants can be substantial—say, a complete redesign of a page layout, navigation menu, or pricing structure—potentially leading to user confusion and frustration. On top of this, tests can include more than two variants, and Shestakofsky notes that AllDone frequently conducted more than two dozen of these experiments consecutively.

At AllDone’s Las Vegas location, a significant portion of the customer support team’s work dealt with handling the fallout from these tests. Amid San Francisco engineers’ constant tinkering with features, AllDone’s buyers and sellers—many of whom were elderly, technically unsophisticated, or had simply grown accustomed to a particular iteration of the app—would log in to their accounts, fail to locate a familiar feature, and call to complain. The phone support agents in Vegas—whom Shestakofsky was tasked with supervising—were on the receiving end of these calls, and they were often subject to considerable anger and aggression from aggravated users. In this way, the work that was experienced by engineers in Silicon Valley as exhilarating was simultaneously experienced by customer service agents as harrowing; the negative effects of the former were displaced onto the latter. In Vegas, the team engaged in affective labor with distressed customers by absorbing their irritation, managing their expectations, and restoring their faith in the product; many agents even developed ongoing personal relationships with frequent callers. As contractors, the Las Vegas team was given none of the monetary or cultural benefits of full-time employees in San Francisco. They received a $10 hourly rate, no stock options, no healthcare, and no paid leave; many maintained “side hustles” in their off-hours or supplemented their income with food stamps.

Like their counterparts in Las Vegas, the AllDone team members in the Philippines were contracted via oDesk—the freelance hiring platform now known as Upwork—and thus were denied the benefits of full employment. The Philippines team was significantly larger than the Vegas team, however, numbering nearly 200 by the end of the author’s fieldwork, or over 80 percent of AllDone’s total head count. Paid as little as two dollars per hour, these workers engaged in repetitive maintenance tasks that computers were “technically capable” of performing but that were “too costly or time-consuming to code,” such as matching buyers with sellers, classifying services, generating blurbs, and running background checks. In sharp contrast to the self-governing, creatively self-expressing work methodology embraced in Silicon Valley, such tedious but necessary functions resembled those of a digital shop floor. Culturally, the Filipino employees routinely made self-conscious displays of submission to American staff. Eschewing the pro sports team metaphor and all it entails, the Filipino workers reintroduced the language of the corporate family into their working environment, effusively professing their gratitude to managers for the opportunity to execute the underpaid, demoralizing labor upon which the AllDone app relied. The author connects these deferential gestures to the long political history of colonialism and clientelism in the Philippines, in which expressions of subservience and dependence were means of securing favor and protection from those in power.

Shestakofsky argues that the distribution of privileges and burdens experienced by AllDone employees maps directly onto disparities in geography, socioeconomic status, and gender (the engineers in San Francisco were mostly young men, the contractors in Las Vegas and the Philippines mostly middle-aged women). Further, he asserts that the directives of venture capital investors permeated every aspect of each location’s operations. In San Francisco, the engineering team attempted to optimize the AllDone app for boosting metrics such as user growth, engagement, and revenue that founders could then leverage to persuade venture capitalists to invest in additional rounds of funding at higher valuations. This entailed relentless, brute-force product experimentation, whose side effects included “trust drags” that customer support agents in Vegas then managed. Meanwhile, the data processing duties of the undervalued and overburdened Filipino contractors sustained the frenetic pace of innovation behind the scenes.

That the daily realities of start-up employees are intrinsically shaped by demands from investors is perhaps a relatively uncontroversial assessment. It is not just venture-backed companies that must respond to the exigencies of capital markets; publicly traded companies must do this as well. Yet Shestakofsky illustrates this phenomenon with remarkable clarity and ethnographic richness, vividly demonstrating how rapidly the shifting priorities of venture capitalists reverberate across a company. At times, however, the author seems to romanticize the perceived organizational flatness of AllDone’s early stages, lamenting the rigidity of the work performed in the Philippines as well as the stifling effects that bureaucratization and professionalization had on the Bay Area team after the company’s Series B investment round. This seems to contradict his own evidence of the normative control underlying the “post-bureaucratic” member role—such as the necessity of conforming to implicit “feeling rules” and policing one’s reputation—which enforces compulsion through nonhierarchical means. Had he pursued his own insights to their conclusions, he might have characterized the workplace as a site of broader ideological construction, where innovations in corporate process serve to mold ideal subjects.