AngelList: Mass-Producing the Habitus to Assetize

• In Event: Turning (More) Things into Assets: Techno-economic TRANSformations

Abstract

This paper examines the mass-production of a particularly high-risk asset which is the early-stage technology startup. For decades, elite financial networks in prosperous cities controlled investors’ access to these startup “deals.” However, new online marketplaces such as AngelList and WeFunder are opening up such opportunities to broader participation. These equity crowdfunding platforms claim to be “democratizing” access to wealth-generating assets. But in doing so, they are also promoting a particular mode of financialized reasoning as an everyday practice (Chiapello 2015). This incursion goes far beyond valorizing investment as a virtue of individual fiscally responsibility (Davis 2009). Rather, it disseminates a habitus whereby the world appears as brimming with potentialities which are rapidly scalable and then liquidate-able. And while business schools have long cultivated the habitus for valuing corporations (Muniesa 2016), such asset-making labor has typically involved face-to-face relations with entrepreneurs, and calculations based on past revenue. What happens when such sense-making happens on online platforms? And likewise, what sociotechnical futures will take shape when these platforms circulate and authenticate a startup team, rather than a crowdfunding video? I begin to answer these questions through an analysis of (1) the self-presentations of investors and entrepreneurs on AngelList, (2) the “term sheets” and contracts by which AngelList turns an entrepreneur’s idea into an investment, and (3) recent loosening of American SEC regulations on these high-risk capitalizations of private corporations.

bibliography

Chiapello, E. 2015 “Financialisation of Valuation.” Human Studies 38:13–35

Davis, Gerald (2009). Managed by the Markets. Oxford University Press.

Muniesa, Fabian (2016). “Setting the Habit of Capitalization.” Historical Social Research 41:196-217

Author

• Jacob Hellman