10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5106
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urn:nbn:it:unica-29858
Fabio Mattioli
Anuac
Disruption, interrupted: Startups and social challenges in a government accelerator
Text.Serial.Journal
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Thematic section: Anthropology, financial expansion and its relationalities
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2022-02-07
2023-12-31
2024-02-03
73-92
1
Fabio Mattioli
2023/12/31
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5106
73
University of Melbourne, Australia
2239-625X
2
en
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urn:nbn:it:unica-29858
Disruption, interrupted: Startups and social challenges in a government accelerator
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                                         2023 | anuac. VoL. 12, n° 2, diceMbre 2023: 73-92




Disruption, interrupted
Startups and social challenges in a government accelerator
Harriette Richards
University of Melbourne
Lani Sellers
University of Melbourne
Fabio Mattioli
University of Melbourne




ABsTRAcT: This article investigates how the dual demands of finance and social impact af-
fect the relationships of founders to disruption, as a rhetorical function, material goal and
relational context. Building on recent studies of innovation and entrepreneurship such
as Bardinelli (2019), Irani (2019) and Lindtner (2020), the article offers a nuanced view of
disruption that complicates unidimensional narratives of financialization as a singular
force and accounts for the complexity of reconciling financial and social interests. Based
on data gathered at a startup participating in a government-funded accelerator program
in Melbourne, Australia, we analyse how the logics of finance impact entrepreneurial
experience in an early-stage social enterprise startup. Our data suggests that, in their at-
tempts to attract the attention and funding of financial investors, founders of early-stage
startups focus more on proving the value of their disruption in a rhetorical sense than
on refining the materially disruptive potential of their products to ensure real world so-
cial impact. By analysing disruption through a relational lens, we identify four layers of
disruption (product innovation; social value; financial return; and labour relations) to
which early-stage startups are aligned, and through which their products and personal
lives are transformed.

KeYWORDs: acceLerator proGraMs; entrepreneursHip; Finance; innoVation; startups




2023 | anuac. VoL. 12, n° 2, diceMbre 2023: 73-92
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5106.
74                                       Harriette Richards, Lani Sellers, Fabio Mattioli

Introduction1
   On a wet afternoon in early March 2020, right before the first wave of
Covid-19 in Australia, we sat down to lunch with Jasper, the founder of GoY-
ou! – a startup designed to help young people get active. It had been a hot
and challenging summer. Devastating bushfires raging across the country had
cloaked the cities of Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne in thick clouds of toxic
smoke. Despite this gloomy context, and the worrying news of what will be-
come the Covid19 pandemic filtering from overseas, Jasper was in good spirits.
Like the rain, which welcomed a new season and washed away the ashy residue
on the city streets, he and his co-founder Stephen felt that they were about
to turn a page in their professional life. In late 2019, their startup had been
accepted into the GovTech Labs accelerator program, a social impact startup
incubator funded by the Victorian state government. Responding to a “chal-
lenge” put forward by one of the government departments involved, GoYou!
was finally starting to gain some traction with stakeholders and potential cus-
tomers. Jasper told us:
      In December, I was about to give up. We had been struggling for so long to
      get funding. It was really tough. But then GovTech came along and it was
      great. Now things are happening!

   Reflecting on the four years he had spent pursuing a business idea without
any financial returns, Jasper insisted on the higher purpose of the venture: in-
spiring young people. He spoke passionately about the sense of satisfaction he
felt from following a social objective, rather than working for a big company
where he felt like he was “a cog in a machine”. Jasper, like many other en-
trepreneurs we had worked with in Melbourne, understood the products and
services of his company as having a direct social impact. Introducing a new
technology onto the market, for these founders, meant hitting the jackpot: re-
ceiving the attention of financial investors and using their money to develop
solutions oriented towards positive social outcomes which also ensured solid
economic returns.
   For Jasper, creating a “disruptive” technology (and more, generally, disrup-
tion) meant building a tool able to harness the power of finance and generate
radical, positive social change. This perception resonates with the global dis-
course promoting innovation, where columns in Forbes (Jackson 2019), the


1. We would like to thank Lauren Kate Kelly for her thoughtful contributions to the theoret-
   ical framing of this article in the early stages of writing.


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Disruption, interrupted                                                           75

Harvard Business Review (Martin, Kemper 2012; Chirstensen 2015), and other
mainstream media publications (Kalifa 2020) routinely cite industry leaders
and tech gurus who, under the rubric of “disruption”, boast of the potential of
innovation to transform the market, and, in the process, the world. Recently, a
growing number of public institutions, including in the EU (Mattioli 2021), In-
dia (Irani 2019), and China (Lindtner 2020), have been targeting the creation
of tech-based innovation ecosystems as a pillar of economic policy to solve
issues of unemployment and deliver sustainable, green technologies – mak-
ing “disruption” not only a tech mantra, but also one increasingly present in
public policies.
   Australia firmly entered the arms race of startup innovation in 2015 when
then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced the National Innovation
and Science Agenda (NISA) with the slogan: “Ideas Boom”. Conjuring a se-
ries of economic policies aimed at stimulating innovation and disruption, the
NISA propelled the development of accelerator programs, incubators, and
innovation districts across the country, capturing the imagination of tech
entrepreneurs and investors and contributing to the rapid growth of the Aus-
tralia startup sector. Just four years after the launch of the NISA, the Techboard
Funding Report for the financial year 2018‑19 recorded almost AU$7 billion in
startup investment, up from AU$3.5 billion in the previous year.
   Policies such as the NISA assume that the positive outcomes of disruption
can be elicited by increasing the capital available to startups. However, the
example of several late-stage startups suggests that these seed funding op-
portunities only act as catalyzers – enabling startups to attract larger venture
capital funds or investors. In doing so, companies can become preoccupied
with financial capital and forget, or even renege on, their original promises
to generate positive social change. In many cases, this results in the simple
commercialisation of a socially ambitious idea. In others, the pressures of fi-
nance can conjure very different social outcomes. For instance, pyramid and
Ponzi schemes create heightened expectations of success that interrupt the
typical social order (Cox 2013). These fast money schemes intersperse the ev-
eryday with hopes for financial returns that vindicate a society’s perceived
flaws, including its postcolonial marginality, through the quasi-mystic action
of political, and sometimes religious, leaders (see also Verdery 1995; Musaraj
2020). The disruptive component of finance is key to the success of fast mon-
ey schemes: the ability to conjure wealth almost out of nothing becomes the
primary tool through which individuals build their social fortunes (Cox 2018).



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76                                     Harriette Richards, Lani Sellers, Fabio Mattioli

    Ponzi schemes, however, are not the only outcome of disruptive innovation.
In this article, we explore the practical life of disruption, as lived by startups
that operate in the context of Melbourne, Australia – a place that is geograph-
ically peripheral, and yet central to many financial processes (Startup Genome
2022). We ask: how do early-stage startup founders navigate the multiple de-
mands of financial investors and social impact in their pursuit of disruptive
innovation? And how do these demands transform and interrupt the profes-
sional goals of startups and the personal lives of founders? The data gathered
from our study suggests that, despite the performed commitment to social
change, the focus of early-stage startups tends to be centred on the expecta-
tions of financial investors. We applied a relational, rather than ideological
lens to our analysis of the data and came to understand disruption as func-
tioning on different planes; layers to be negotiated by founders depending on
the demands of external stakeholders. These layers of disruption took four
key forms: first, as a business goal based on product innovation; second, the
delivery of social benefit and public value; third, fulfilling the expectations
of financial investors; and fourth, the transformation of labour relations be-
yond corporate methodologies. Ultimately, to convince investors to fund their
enterprises, founders find themselves dedicating more energy to proving the
value of their disruption in a rhetorical sense than to refining the materially
disruptive potential of their products to ensure real world social impact.
    The process of negotiating the demands of finance and social impact
produce contradictory reverberations in founders’ own subjectivities. In ap-
pearance, founders seem to embody the quintessential neoliberal subject,
happy to justify the perceived precarity of their entrepreneurial condition as
a liberating process, an opportunity to escape the grind of corporate jobs in
favour of a more creative entrepreneurial enterprise. In practice, however, the
more they pursue the expectations of financial investors, the more they aban-
don innovative working methodologies – replicating instead methodologies
of work found in traditional corporate structures. This suggests that, while
the impact of financial expectations does affect the overall direction of what
founders pursue, it does not necessarily rewrite their subjectivities – instead,
it seems to produce a more kaleidoscopic, fragmented selfhood.

Research context and methodology
  This research is grounded in the context of the GovTech Labs, in Melbourne,
Australia, where we worked closely with GoYou! (as well as other startups) over



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Disruption, interrupted                                                         77

a period of eight months in 2019‑2020. Unlike other accelerators, which may
receive some public funding yet rely on venture capital or angel investment,
the GovTech program explicitly mobilises public funds from the Victorian
state government to inspire private innovation. However, while this state
funding certainly inspires innovation, it is not enough to support founders to
fully develop their products. As such, while GovTech Labs sees its goal as that
of enabling government and startups to work together to solve challenges that
affect the public good, entrepreneurs remain preoccupied by the demands of
finance, courting other investors to ensure that they can meet the challenges
set by the government. In theory, the entrepreneurs and government bodies
work together to co-design and fund solutions to a set of social impact priori-
ty areas identified by the government, for example: supporting gig workers in
safe working practices; helping businesses reduce food waste; or improving
disease prevention. The structure of the accelerator thus reflects the goals of
social entrepreneurship, which look for ethical solutions, rather than simply
wealth creation (Cohen, Katz 2016). In practice, however, the desire to simul-
taneously accumulate personal wealth, build a sustainable company for a
broader market, and enact social good creates significant tensions and con-
tradictions (Bandinelli 2019). While creating “social value” may be seen as the
primary goal of publicly supported entrepreneurship, the reality of securing
funding, meeting investors’ expectations and achieving certain metrics can
bring a number of divergent and even oppositional goals into focus.
   GovTech Labs operates as a three-month-long accelerator program
which provides entrepreneurs an initial AU$30,000 funding, mentorship,
and a co-working space in exchange for their commitment to help solve
pre-approved societal “challenges”. The final step of the process allows en-
trepreneurs the chance to secure a further AU$150,000 – a generous amount
of money which, nevertheless, is insufficient to build a fully functioning com-
pany. The monetary aspect is undoubtedly a driving factor for entrepreneurs’
desires to work with GovTech and it was clear that some founders within
the program, including the founders of GoYou!, effectively “moulded” their
ventures to fit within the scope of the challenges set by the government. In
the case of GoYou!, Jasper and his co-founder Stephen initially envisioned
creating an app that would enable women in their late 20s and early 30s to
“live their best lives” through ongoing moral support. However, there was no
challenge at GovTech Labs geared towards this demographic or particular so-
cial issue. Instead, there was one aimed at increasing physical activity among



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78                                     Harriette Richards, Lani Sellers, Fabio Mattioli

teenagers. Jasper and Stephen thus pivoted their idea and pitched an app that
would allow a wide range of individuals to create challenges and complete
them with virtual moral support. Our work with GoYou! commenced when
they were accepted into the GovTech Labs program and was part of a larger
collaborative research project (established by Richards and Mattioli) begin-
ning in 2018 and comprising an ethnographic investigation into the lives of
startups in Melbourne, Australia. We were interested in exploring the experi-
ences of early-stage founders in what is colloquially known as the “Valley of
Death” – the period between first rounds of funding and economic viability.
Over time, the study and the team expanded to include economists, manage-
ment scholars, and other anthropologists. In 2019, we began to examine the
overall trajectory of startups in the Melbourne entrepreneurial ecosystem,
focusing on how founders move into and out of support networks, including
accelerator and incubator programs. In late 2019, Sellers joined the research
team and conducted a four-month internship with GoYou! following their
acceptance into the GovTech accelerator program.
   Our research across the larger project took a diluted and longitudinal ap-
proach. Compared with other recent ethnographic studies of innovation
companies (see Irani 2019; Johnson 2019; Kelman 2018; Lindtner 2020), our
research was not situated within the everyday activities of a specific startup.
Rather, our fieldwork followed the trajectory of startups at regular intervals
over 6‑12 months and was conducted in parallel with other professional ac-
tivities, including teaching, administrative work, and personal commitments.
In this part of the study, our usual methods were supplemented by the inten-
sive internship undertaken by Sellers (made digital because of the “working
from home” requirements imposed by Covid-19). As a recent graduate, Sellers
took on a part-time, two days a week position at GoYou! where she worked
alongside four other interns supporting the growth of the nascent company.
Activities performed by Sellers included surveying potential customers for user
research, compiling data and desk research findings, and producing pitch deck
materials. Throughout the internship, Richards and Mattioli met with Sellers
once a fortnight to discuss findings, provide mentoring and offer support in
engagement with GoYou! founders. The collaborative rapport fostered during
the internship experience provided deep ethnographic insights into the hu-
man-centered aspects of this startup, the relationship of the founders to the
accelerator program and their negotiations with the competing demands of
financial investors and social impact advisors.



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Disruption, interrupted                                                          79

   It is important to note that, while the broader research project engaged
with founders of varying social and economic backgrounds, and of differ-
ent genders, the two founders at the centre of this article are middle-class,
cis-gendered, white men. This demographic does not represent the larger
scope of our research. However, it is representative of the startup world more
generally and of the Melbourne innovation ecosystem in particular, where, in
2020, approximately 80% of all startup founders were men (LaunchVic 2020).
Further, the experiences of these founders, whilst certainly individual, are nev-
ertheless representative of much of what other founders we spoke with in the
Melbourne ecosystem observe and experience. The social arrangements of in-
dividual founders differ; yet the fundamental dynamics regarding the impact
of financial pressures are very similar – allowing many of the entrepreneurs
we worked with to embrace disruption as a both an ideological and strategical
framework to navigate the contradictions they experience.
   In the sections that follow, we first frame the relevance of disruption with-
in theories of entrepreneurship and financialization. Second, we describe the
multiple forms or layers of disruption that we saw entrepreneurs pursuing in
their work. Third, we highlight how the demands involved in proving their
worth to financial investors shifted the focus of the founders away from re-
fining their product or delivering social value and, ultimately, pushed them
to abandon innovative ways of working – finding refuge in more consolidated
“corporate” working processes.

Framing disruption
   “Disruption”, especially when understood in relation to financial flows and
entrepreneurship, constitutes a conceptual frontline between three intellec-
tual traditions. Amongst scholars of entrepreneurship, for instance, disruption
and its broader conceptual field are generally understood as a force that ush-
ers in (positive) change. Since Schumpeter’s Theory of Economic Development
(1911), disruption has been seen as a fundamental characteristic of inno-
vation, framing the kind of “creative destruction” that savvy entrepreneurs
can turn into productive opportunities (1942). Other influential theorists of
entrepreneurship, such as Knight (1921) and Drucker (1985), have extended
this work, highlighting the inherent risk and uncertainty that accompany the
opportunities of disruption, while others (see Christensen 1997) have drawn
attention to the strategic reasons why new “entrants” can take over market
segments forgotten by established leaders.



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   Over time, scholars of entrepreneurship began to question the idea that
disruption is, necessarily and naturally, an opportunity. Starting from a con-
structivist framework, this second line of inquiry became more concerned with
explaining the social, cultural, and economic assumptions that made “disrup-
tion” desirable. Marwick (2013), for instance, sees “disruption” in the startup
world not as a generic force, but as a by-product of a specific “California Ide-
ology”, built on a foundation of “technological determinism and libertarian
individualism” (see also Barbrook, Cameron 1996). This characterization am-
plifies arguments within the anthropology of finance (Ho 2009; Zaloom 2006),
which demonstrate that a key component in the socialization of white-collar
investors, brokers, and bankers, is precisely the normalization of disruption
– one of the factors that, in the Global North, contributed to the build-up of
increasingly risky, unsecured, financial products (see Souleles 2019).
   But what happens to one’s existential space once (financial) disruption is no
longer confined to the elite and is normalized as a key social habitus through-
out society? For ethnographers influenced by Polanyi, the answer is social
devastation (see Polanyi 1944; Ho 2009; Graeber 2011). From this perspective,
disruption is neither an opportunity, nor a cultural fact. Instead, it constitutes
a broader state of crisis, where gaming the disruption of financial markets
generates widespread and violent forms of dispossession across local com-
munities. To adapt to this new landscape of risk and financialized capitalism,
individuals are forced to become entrepreneurial. Rather than opportunities,
here disruption ushers in new forms of domination, which leave little choice
but to embrace new forms of individuality – where one’s own identity is re-
fashioned and conceived as a “brand” (Gershon 2016).
   As an opportunity, a cultural leitmotif, or a force that remoulds subjectivity,
disruption defines the relational space that entrepreneurs build (or break),
as they try to navigate the speculative diktats of financial capital. For those
who experience it as filled with potentiality, as founders and startups often
do, disruption articulates the relationships they try to build with investors –
by indulging in speculative future outcomes or by materializing their future
revenues, successes, and wealth (Roitman 2023; Hayden, Muir 2022; Mattioli,
2023). But it also identifies other relationships (to their selves, their co-work-
ers, their mentors) that emerge, evolve, and often disappear quickly during the
pursuit of ephemeral financial gains. As Lindtner (2020: 14), citing Benjamin
(2019), remarks, “when tech companies propagate the mantra of disruption,
acceleration, and breakage, the ‘people and places broken in the process’ are



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Disruption, interrupted                                                          81

enrolled in an enticing story of market development and progress”. Disrup-
tion, in other words, forces us to focus on the relationships that constitute the
“narrating” as well as the “breaking” – and enable startups to transform those
broken pieces.
   When analysed through relational lenses instead of ideological definitions,
disruption can be understood as a bundle of different practices. In the case
of startups within social impact programs such as those enrolled in GovTech
Labs, the imperative to shift market dynamics is accompanied with the si-
multaneous demand to bring about positive social change. For companies like
GoYou!, disruption means aligning at least four different layers of aspirational
transformation. First, building an innovative product that can attract users
and/or customers. Second, delivering specific kinds of social value as defined
by the program. Third, fulfilling the expectations of a variety of financial in-
vestors. And, finally, building a company where working can be fulfilling and
pleasurable thanks to its innovative (i.e. non-corporate) labour methodolo-
gies. It is the tension between these layers of transformation that we’ll explore
in the following pages.

Beyond the hype: layers of disruption
   To stand out in the crowd, startups must find dramatic ways to convey their
“economic performance…[and] draw an audience of potential investors. The
more spectacular the conjuring, the more possible an investment frenzy”
(Tsing 2000: 118). The vocabulary of disruption is, often, a key part of this
spectacular financial alchemy. For example, the famously charismatic founder
of co-working and “consciousness raising” company WeWork, Adam Neumann
projected a captivating portrait of future success, wealth creation and positive
social outcomes by proclaiming: “We’re definitely not a real-estate company…
We are a community of creators [who] leverage technology to connect peo-
ple… And it’s a new way of working. Just like Uber is the sharing economy for
cars, and Citibike for bicycles, we’re the sharing economy for space” (Rothstein
2021). This ambitious evocation of disruptive triumph allowed Neumann to
secure both financial and cultural capital. Included in TIME magazine’s list of
100 most influential people in 2018 and anointed “the planet’s next great tech
CEO” by SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son, at the height of its meteoric
rise, Neumann’s WeWork reached a valuation of close to fifty billion dollars
(Brown, Farrell 2021). And yet, when the lack of substance behind his bluster




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82                                        Harriette Richards, Lani Sellers, Fabio Mattioli

was exposed, the “value” of the company quickly evaporated. As critics re-
marked, “the only thing WeWork disrupted was itself” (Kepes 2021).
   The dream of becoming a “unicorn” preoccupied the imaginary of disrup-
tion deployed by many of the Melburnian startups we worked with. However,
founders also embedded this horizon with other, more pragmatic, meanings.
First, founders framed disruption as a business goal, which would enable them
to develop new, innovative products that would deliver “value” to their users
and (paying) customers. For GoYou! co-founder Stephen, this meant produc-
ing an app that would encourage “users to be their best selves”. By offering
challenges and social tasks that encouraged users to become more physically
active, GoYou! aimed to disrupt users’ views of their daily activities, pushing
them “to step outside their comfort zone [to generate] personal self-develop-
ment”. Jasper and Stephen saw the self-actualization offered by GoYou! as a
solution to a social problem, able to combine financial profit with public good.
For Jasper, this second dimension of disruption was about social value. The
goal was not to amass great quantities of capital; rather, he aimed to “have
enough” to be financially stable and be able to build “something of value” not
only to him, but to society at large. As he put it:
      It’s about having people use this in a very positive way in their life. The
      material side of that is that I build something of value, it pays me, I sell it or
      whatever, financial stability, especially with a family mortgage. Personally,
      I hate money. I’ve always seen money as something that makes people
      miserable, but I do see it also as an enabler. On the material side I just want
      to have enough so that I don’t have to worry. I think worrying about money
      is one of the life stresses I can do without.

   However, what counted as social benefit or as financially viable depended
on a wide variety of investors and supporters. In this third sense, disruption
was about financial returns: striking a balance between social benefit and
financial viability that would satisfy the different stakeholders GoYou! was en-
gaged with as a member of GovTech Labs. Unlike other accelerator programs,
where investments were immediately provided by the program or through its
business networks, GovTech sourced and coached startups to address specif-
ic needs identified by government departments. In the first instance, then,
GoYou! was required to address a specific “challenge” put forward by a depart-
ment, working with public officials who, in dialogue with GovTech, evaluated
their progress.
   For startups, this was both a boon and a curse. Unlike other investors, gov-
ernment departments were directly engaged in helping startups achieve their


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Disruption, interrupted                                                            83

goals and had already set aside AU$150,000 to invest in the startups. At the
same time, public servants tended to evaluate the startups’ ability to deliver
social value in “the same way they approached a procurement contract”, as
the Manager of GovTech told us. If department officials and the startup had
agreed on, say, having 500 users by the end of the program, this criterium
could become set in stone. But, for most startups at GovTech Labs, includ-
ing GoYou!, early indicators and measurements could not be meaningful once
they iterated their ideas. GoYou!, for instance, found it hard to access teen-
agers – they struggled to receive permission by official institutions to talk to
teenagers, despite government official’s offers of support.
   Moreover, as the Manager of GovTech manager told us, following those
targets, or building custom-made solutions that delivered “public good” as
understood by government officials might not have been in the best inter-
est of the company’s future. While AU$150,000 was a good seed fund, it was,
generally, not enough money to enable the founders to quit their jobs or ful-
ly develop the product. Even at GovTech Labs, founders had to court other
investors, and leverage the early momentum from government funding to at-
tract market investors. These, in turn, might not be interested in the specific
market segment or solutions that government officials wanted. In the case of
GoYou! this meant considering a different layer of disruption – one that had
to do with collecting data about what truly motivated users and packaging it
for marketing purposes.
   In this process, founders hoped to achieve a fourth dimension of disruption
– namely, to transform the labour relations of their own working conditions.
Startups we worked with attempted to disrupt corporate employment struc-
tures and deliver their solutions through agile methods that embodied their
progressive values and aims for social transformation – while also signalling
their ability to be nimble to external audiences. At GoYou!, this meant creat-
ing a working environment that matched the core values of the company: fun
loving, open to trying new things and living loudly. The idea was that, if the
office environment was progressive and innovative, then the company’s abili-
ty to reach its substantial target would follow suit. In practice, this meant, first
and foremost, getting rid of meetings. Instead, every Tuesday, Wednesday and
Friday, the team had a 15‑30-minute “stand-up” check-in sessions which, as
Stephen and Jasper repeatedly told us, were not regular meetings. As Stephen
put it, meetings are “time-wasting, whereas stand-ups are direct. It’s a sign of
how we do things differently”.



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84                                      Harriette Richards, Lani Sellers, Fabio Mattioli

   The (oversized) significance that Jasper and Stephen assigned to using
stand-ups, instead of meetings, had its roots in their own professional back-
ground and aspirations. Prior to establishing GoYou!, both founders had been
working full-time jobs with significant benefits and some degree of financial
stability. And yet, they were dissatisfied. They felt that their corporate roles
fostered a lack of control and creativity in their daily lives. Jasper told us, with
only a hint of humour in his voice, that his corporate job made him want to
“slit [his] wrists”. He described his days as mind-numbing and depressing. If,
in the corporate world, he was a “mindless worker”, then entrepreneurship
offered him an opportunity to embrace a kind of “lone-wolf spirit” (Engstrom
2012: 50) and invest in his dreams of innovative solutions to complex social
dilemmas (Croitoru et al. 2017). For Jasper, building a disruptive company of-
fered independence and self-determination, imbuing his life with dignity and
purposefulness. He told us:
      I don’t want to sit in an office for 20 years to guarantee that I can pay for
      my house and my meals, there’s more to life than that. I want to be able to
      experience that. A lot of people love structure, love security. I’m a different
      type of beast to a lot of people.

   At GovTech Labs, many agreed: trading the security of corporate careers for
the risk brought by pursuing disruption made sense, as it bestowed a sense of
freedom, autonomy and “purpose” by allowing them to create something new
and of value.

The contradictions of disruption
    Delivering value to users, building a company that “does good” and pays
the bills, satisfying investors, and building an innovative and meaningful work
environment: for the founders we worked with, the true meaning of disruption
consisted in combining these different layers of action. In practice, however,
startups often found themselves unable to juggle these contradictory goals
and forced to abandon some of these objectives. GoYou!, for instance, quickly
began to prioritize the company’s material gains over its social goals. As much
as Jasper claimed to despise money, much of his time was spent thinking about
it: securing funding, calculating users’ retention and interviews, measuring
potential profits and losses. The concern with money was so pervasive that it
constituted a key horizon for many of his jokes.
    This was a familiar narrative within Melbourne’s entrepreneurial ecosys-
tem. Companies with longstanding commitments to products and founders



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Disruption, interrupted                                                           85

dedicated to developing socially impactful companies found it very hard to
maintain focus. On their own, they often got lost in the challenges of everyday
life. When supported by an accelerator program, however, they came under in-
creasing pressure to rapidly raise capital, get to market, and scale as quickly as
possible (Richards, Mattioli forthcoming). Within a very short period, where
they often worked multiple jobs, founders had to convince potential investors
that their idea worked – enough to not only solve a challenge, but also be prof-
itable, and, most importantly, scalable. Many accelerators, including GovTech,
encouraged companies such as GoYou! to approach this conundrum by con-
ducting user research. Accelerator managers reasoned that startups needed to
test whether their products were going to be useful for their intended users
– and that they could leverage those insights to change their products before
they became too expensive (or difficult) to modify, and to showcase market
potential to investors. Founders, on the other hand, had very little time or
energy to conduct interviews and found it very challenging to switch off from
their usual “pitching mode”. Anxious to prove their idea, and pressed to show-
case phantasmagorical financial returns, founders like Jasper and Stephen
struggled to listen to potential users without attempting to convince them of
their solution. Often, this resulted in postponing, or delegating user research,
which was read as an inconvenience, rather than a key factor for the improve-
ment of the product – at least, until they realized that they needed sources of
data for the consumption of investors.
    As an intern, Sellers conducted user interviews on behalf of GoYou!. She
prioritised quality insights from potential users, assuming that their feedback
would play an important role in the evolution of the business. However, for the
founders, the number of interviews seemed more important than their content.
While the interns, including Sellers, spent many hours organizing, facilitating,
transcribing, and analysing these user interviews, and the interviews uncov-
ered important insights about the value of the app, Jasper and Stephen did not
use the data to refine their product. This was not a problem of closed-minded-
ness. Indeed, Stephen and Jasper were open to hearing the critical findings of
the user research. However, they were more invested in using the data to make
an impressive case to GovTech Labs stakeholders and potential investors than
in applying the findings to the development of the app itself.
    In the final weeks of the program, Sellers was asked if she could help Jas-
per find some poignant “quotes” and “anecdotes” that would validate the
business’s “value proposition” and look good on a PowerPoint presentation.



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86                                     Harriette Richards, Lani Sellers, Fabio Mattioli

He told her: “Now, we don’t want you to massage the data, but can you find
some quotes which will match the points we’re trying to make?” By turning
the interview data into quantitative indicators, rather than focusing on its
qualitative dimensions, ambitions of scalability took precedence over other
considerations. As Jasper put it, in a moment of honesty and resignation, the
whole interview process was not really about rethinking the app – or even
discussing whether an app was what was really necessary, as some of the in-
terviews had suggested. Instead, it was merely “a numbers game”, necessary to
justify their progress to the government officials, appease coaches and men-
tors, and attract the next batch of investors.
   GoYou! also faced a second level of contradictions. As the insistence on
“stand-ups” and an “agile” working environment suggested, Jasper and Ste-
phen considered their startup adventure as an alternative to traditional
corporate working conditions, where they could reclaim a sense of indepen-
dence and self-determination. In practice, however, the ideal entrepreneurial
subject becomes a “self-exploited worker” (Rolnik 2011), working longer hours
than ever. As Jasper told us at one stage: “I’m really struggling at the moment
because I’ve been doing 12 hours a day most days and you need a spatula to get
me out of bed in the morning”. Sellers also found that the stand-ups at GoY-
ou! involved agendas, hierarchies and power dynamics familiar to corporate
office environments. For instance, stand-ups presented Jasper and Stephen as
always busy, and gave credence to their claim that they were unable to find the
time to discuss the substance of the research. Yet, during these meetings, they
spent extended periods of time digressing, joking, complaining about their
challenges, rehearsing discussions about a single issue, or offering updates.
Other staff, meanwhile, listened silently on the Zoom call, in the best tradition
of corporate meetings.
   Women who worked at GoYou! felt particularly limited in their ability to
participate. While Stephen liked to stress the progressive values of the com-
pany, Sellers realized that young, female interns were routinely interrupted
by their male colleagues or the founders themselves. Often, their ideas were
dismissed, while remarks by male interns were acknowledged and taken se-
riously. Sarah, who had worked as an intern at the company, told Sellers that
research she had conducted had ended up on the GoYou! website, but her work
had never been acknowledged by the founders, either in public, or in stand-ups
or more formal meetings. Overall, Sellers felt that GoYou! embodied a sort of
“tech-bro” working culture. Here, disruption coexisted and at times replicated



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Disruption, interrupted                                                          87

corporate hierarchies and emphasized male-dominated social codes (see also
Richards, Mattioli 2020). This, in turn, had paradoxical effects on the “inno-
vative” product itself. Sarah recalled that, in their first iteration of the app,
the landing screen welcomed young women with the phrase “Hey Gorgeous”.
Sarah highlighted how, when people used that expression to greet her, it had
always made her feel uncomfortable. Yet, when she raised this with Jasper and
Stephen, they seemed oblivious to, even uninterested in, these gendered im-
plications. Similarly, young adults who spoke with Sellers, suggested that they
might feel uncomfortable with GoYou!’s core idea of creating challenges. Sev-
eral young males feared it would replicate a form of competitive masculinity
that they were uncomfortable with and were trying to avoid. When Sellers
explained this to Jasper and Stephen, however, the conversation became sur-
real. First, she struggled to get their attention. Then, the founders seemed
to completely miss the point, suggesting that they wanted the app to have a
“Jamie Oliver” feel, before beginning to brainstorm how to use the user data to
further their cause with public officials – only to be mortified when realizing
the implications at a later date.

Conclusion
   Beyond its rhetoric and shiny façade, the vocabulary of disruption encapsu-
lates a variety of different, and sometimes contradictory, goals and outcomes.
Social impact companies like GoYou! derive part of their allure precisely from
their purposed ability to combine useful products with financial returns and
meaningful, non-traditional working conditions. Yet, these objectives are
framed by the need to receive investments and meeting the expectations of
investors – in this case, public officials as well as private fund managers. To
capture financial interest, in other words, startups need to straddle contra-
dictory goals and objectives. On the one hand, the impetus to build a good
product; on the other, the need to prove their solutions at all costs. Here, the
wish to develop a more empowering, inclusive workplace; there, a replica of
vertical, corporate hierarchy, with a clear gendered component.
   These contradictions, and their outcomes, highlight the dynamic relation-
ality that emerges to accommodate, but also challenge, the needs of financial
investors – indeed, the paradoxical outcomes of the movements and coun-
termovement of finance. At GoYou!, founders frequently found not only their
professional goals and personal lives but also their very pursuit of disruptive
innovation interrupted by the demands of finance. Throughout our study, it



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88                                     Harriette Richards, Lani Sellers, Fabio Mattioli

was clear that the focus of early-stage startups is less committed to the ambi-
tions of social change, and more to the expectations of (potential) investors.
The contradictory experiences these founders encountered – trying to embody
the financialized self; ready to brand themselves on the demand of investors;
and replicating the stale, corporate relationalities they so vociferously detest-
ed – highlighted the need to understand entrepreneurship and, more broadly,
financialization as inherently relational.
   Within the entrepreneurial ecosystem, disruption does not play a merely
rhetorical function. Rather, it constitutes a material goal and relational con-
text. Attending to the contradictory demands and outcomes of disruption in
all its forms – as well the impacts on founders and startups involved in its pur-
suit – is necessary to better understand how startups navigate simultaneous
financial and social interests, especially in their early-stages. Furthermore, if
entrepreneurship is to remain committed to the ideological concept of dis-
ruption, it must also confront the exclusion such commitment engenders,
especially when it comes to the labour relations and working conditions with-
in startup spaces. Only by interrupting the impulse to disrupt for disruptions
sake might the entrepreneurial ecosystem edge towards a more genuinely
transformative approach to business, work and life.




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Disruption, interrupted                                                               89

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92

  Harriette ricHards is a Lecturer in the School of Fashion and Textiles at RMIT Uni-
  versity, Melbourne. She is co-founder of the Critical Fashion Studies research group
  and co-host of the Critical Fashion Studies podcast. Her work has been published
  in a range of journals including, most recently, Australian Feminist Studies, Cultural
  Studies and Gender, Work & Organization and in the edited collections Rethinking
  Fashion Globalization (Bloomsbury 2021) and Fashion and Feeling (Palgrave Macmil-
  lan 2023). In 2021, she co-edited, with Natalya Lusty and Rimi Khan, a special issue
  on “Fashion Futures” for Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.
  harriette.richards@unimelb.edu.au

  Lani seLLers is a graduate from the School of Social and Political Sciences at the
  University of Melbourne. She completed her honours in Cultural Anthropology with
  a thesis exploring how “authenticity” is constructed in the Australian yoga com-
  munity. During 2020 Lani worked as an intern in the startup space allowing her to
  bring an emic (insider) perspective to the analysis of innovation ecosystems.
  b.sellers.3@hotmail.com

  Fabio MattioLi is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Social
  and Political Sciences of the University of Melbourne. Dr Mattioli has received sev-
  eral fellowships and honours, including the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fellowship
  and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at NYU Center for Mediterranean and European
  Studies. Dr Mattioli’s research focuses on the social impact of economic change. He
  has spent a decade studying ethnographically the impact of financial speculation
  on European candidate countries – culminating in his book Dark Finance: Illiquidity
  and Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe (2020).
  fabio.mattioli@unimelb.edu.au




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons ©
Disruption, interrupted. Startups and social challenges in a government accelerator
2023 | anuac. VoL. 12, n° 2, diceMbre 2023: 73-92.
