What Are Venture Investments? Utilitarian Intimacies in New Technologies

• In Event: 40263 - Knowledge Markets, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

Abstract

In the cutthroat world of VC investment, founders compete in a ruthless game of attention-seeking for a VC partner’s time. Yet time is also freely spent on the seemingly frivolous: cocktail receptions, coffee chats, holiday celebrations and even gym sessions, where VC partners and startup founders spend precious time and effort. In a field where half an hour of attention could be worth millions in investment, the question that begs to be asked in the face of this apparent contradiction between temporal scarcity and abundance is, why? Why are social relationships valued to the extent that they are, in the world of venture investing, that its participants deem it a worthwhile venture to commit to?
We investigate ethnographically venture capital’s relationships with AI and blockchain startup founders, based on interviews and field observations in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Singapore, which are major hubs of venture capital. We argue that VC investment relationships occupy a distinct space in the array of economic social relationships. They harbour significant distinctions in context, patterns and expectations when compared with other types of social relationships in the business and personal worlds. They are simultaneously vessels of mutual evaluation and signifiers of social proximity. This double bind of business utility and real-life intimacy—what this paper would dub as “utilitarian intimacy”—sets VC investment relationships apart from other relational norms studied by economic sociology.

Authors

• Alex Preda, Lingnan University

• David Xingyi Chen, Lingnan University