Zombie Startups: Time, Labour and Value in Singapore’s Innovative Entrepreneurship ‘Ecosystem’

ABSTRACT

Zombie startups – which neither grow nor die, but persistently breakeven and inexplicably refuse to fold – are a staple presence in startup sectors globally. While dominant business discourses dismiss them as aberrantly misguided ventures, I draw on anthropological understandings of the labour of time to show how zombies are integral to the startup sector’s temporal logics. Startup sectors run on the interplay between what scholars have termed ‘the time of investment’ and ‘the time of speculation.’ Following a startup in Singapore through five years of unprofitable operation, my ethnography shows how zombies are produced by and, in turn, contribute to maintaining these temporalities. By connecting the value that successful startups create to the unpaid labour that un-succeeding startups do to maintain the sector’s timescape, the article demonstrates how anthropology’s attentiveness to time can surface new forms of relationality that are emerging with this globally expanding form of entrepreneurship.

KEYWORDS:

• Startupentrepreneurship
• time
• investment
• speculation
• labour

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Marcus Teo and TaskMe are pseudonyms. IRB Reference Codes: LA-16-228E and NUS-IRB-2021-818.

2 Vivian Balakrishnan, Minister-in-charge of Smart Nation, speech at LaunchPad Unveiled, 4 August 2015.

3 Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, quoted in (Chng, 2015).

4 Alvin Tan, Minister of State for Trade and Industry, speech at Slingshot 2020, 8 December 2020.

5 For a complementary application of Berlant’s concept to entrepreneurial endeavors, see (Ashman et al., 2018).

6 In Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono and the Gates Foundation rock the world with OKRs (London: Portfolio Penguin, 2018).

7 One such founder was developing an artificial intelligence-powered newsfeed service, another was building a fleet of last-mile delivery robots, while a third was working on an online-only wedding planner.

8 Customer Acquisition Costs.