The Work Futures Research Group and the Bristol Digital Futures Institutes invites you to a Research Symposium on Finance and Digital Futures.

The digital economy is profoundly shaped by speculative finance. However, financial logics and practices are notoriously difficult to study. This Symposium features three speakers who will share their work in this area and help us better understand the nature and impact of speculation.

2-3pm: Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality 

Benjamin Shestakofsky, Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Investors push startups to scale as quickly as possible to inflate the value of their asset. In Behind the Startup, Benjamin draw's on nineteen months of participant-observation research inside a successful Silicon Valley startup to show how investors’ demands create organizational problems that managers solve by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by these companies are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. To promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, Benjamin argues that we must focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.

3-4pm FinTech Capitalization

Professor Paul Langley, Department of Geography, Durham University, UK.

Drawing from a forthcoming book co-authored with Andrew Leyshon (University of Nottingham, UK), this presentation will explore the huge volumes of venture capital investment which backed startup and early-career FinTech firms in the 2010s. During a decade long expansion of venture capital investment across the globe, FinTech firms became perhaps the leading asset class. Valuations climbed and many unicorns were born. The presentation will foreground the diversity of the institutions that made venture investments in FinTech economies over this period. It will thereby raise wider questions about how venture capitalization processes might be understood when they extend well beyond the specialist venture capital firms which are typically the focus for critical attention.

Reserve your place for this event on Ticket Tailor. 

This is a hybrid event. If you're joining online a zoom link will be sent to you after registration.