INTRODUCTION

This book builds on the argument that the urban field provides today's techno-monopoly capitalism, as it has been defined here, with key sites for economic value generation: namely, labour, human capital, startups and forms of life. The third of these sites is, therefore, technology startup companies, a particular form of early-stage entrepreneurship that has come to dominate the business ecosystems of a growing number of cities and urban areas across the world after the advent of the information technology era.

This chapter shows how the urban startup economy should be primarily understood as an utterly speculative process aimed at creating and manipulating the market value of startup companies. Indeed, in our register, the startup economy is one of the key constituents of the urban field in the age of techno-monopoly capitalism. The basic idea is to demonstrate that the actual appearance of the startup economy as a capitalist formation effectively conceals its essence. In such a view, the startup economy appears as an ecosystem comprising high-skill labour and firms, digital technologies and dense urban environments expected to function as innovation machines. This appearance has been consolidated also by mainstream scholarship on startup economies and startup urban ecosystems. We, in turn, go on to argue that to understand the essence of this economy one needs to examine the ways in which the speculative process of valuation, the contributions by the state, and social polarization, actually constitute the startup economy.

In a mainstream scholarly view, the techno-capitalist economy signals the increasing significance of knowledge and innovation in the generation of profits. In such a view, the techno-capitalist economy is characterized by a strong legacy of what one may call a novelty tradition. This is a perspective that draws either explicitly or implicitly from Marshallian economics and underlines the role of agglomeration economies in creating economic value through a combination of knowledge spillovers resulting from spatial proximity, scale economies allowing input sharing among firms, and dynamics of labour pooling associated with urbanization or more generally with industrial concentrations (Rosenthal & Strange 2004).