On May 22, Dmitrii Zhikharevich presented a paper in progress, “Patricians and Careerists: A Prosopography of Early U.S. Venture Capitalists,1945-1970,” stemming from his Ph.D. thesis, at the History and Theory of Capitalism Workshop, University of Chicago. Based on a collection of oral history and archival sources, this paper reconstructs the “collective biography” of the first generation of post-war venture capitalists in the U.S., highlighting their middle-class social origins and hierarchical career mobility. The paper shows how their employment in formal financial institutions and participation in the intra-organizational divisions of labor and knowledge influenced their entry to the emergent VC industry.

On 2 June, Dmitrii attended the 7th Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop and presented a paper “How to make sense of algorithms when they make no sense: the role of interpretative labor,” co-authored with Vassily Pigounides (CNAM). Based on ethnographic fieldwork and multiple correspondence analysis, this paper analyzes the division of labor in an AI startup using David Graeber’s notion of interpretative labor.

On June 13, Dmitrii participated in the symposium “Technology and Democracy” at the Centre for the Study of the United States, Tel Aviv University, and presented another paper stemming from his Ph.D. thesis, “Towards a Genealogy of Technical Entrepreneurship, 1958-1970.” Drawing on Ian Hacking’s concept of “human kinds,” it shows how the category of “technical” or “technological” entrepreneur, understood as a specific kind of person, emerged in the postwar debates on how to best manage scientists and engineers working in industrial research labs.

Finally, we also just received ethics approval from the University of Vienna research ethics commission and are now beginning to adjust our sampling strategy and preparing for recruitment of interview partners. So VALUE-VACC seems to be in full swing indeed and we are all very excited about this next phase!