As pandemic restrictions began to ease in late 2021, the annual Finnish startup conference Slush made its return as an in-person event. Held for the first time in 2008, Slush grew through the 2010s to become a major international startup event with tens of thousands of attendees—a symbol of the “success story” of Finnish startup culture and a focus of national pride and economic hope.
The theme for the 2021 conference was “Entrepreneurial Renaissance.” Though startups had done well during the pandemic, buoyed by low interest rates and demand for remote working solutions, the conference theme entailed critical self-reflection and a call for something of a progressive rebirth. An announcement of the new theme read: “For the past two decades, our ability to create meaningful change through technology has been on the decline. We invest more and receive less. Our continued progress as a species depends on us reversing this trend.”
View of the 2021 Slush “Opening show.” Photo by Petri Anttila. Non-commercial use granted by Slush Media.
At the conference itself, an “opening show” provided a dramatic rendition of this vision. On its main stage, alongside a DJ playing techno music, large screens showed a video montage representing humanity’s technological progress. After images of the moon landing, microchips and an early iPod came a polar bear floating on an ice sheet, floods and wildfires, an orange globe covered with small icons reading ‘CO2’, densely packed apartment buildings in an orange haze cutting to a shot of yachts resting in a harbour. The montage closed with a more hopeful vision: wind turbines in a green landscape, a robot and human holding hands, high tech indoor farming and drones flying across a futuristic cityscape. Appearing on stage for their opening remarks, Slush’s young leadership team laid out the “Entrepreneurial Renaissance” agenda for a diverse and inclusive startup culture, where founders solve “problems that actually matter” and develop revolutionary technologies like nuclear fusion and quantum computing.
This agenda was a response to now conventional critiques of startup and tech companies: of their homogenous white and male demographics, trivial or downright harmful products, and innovations that in fact sustain the status quo rather than disrupt it. The frame of a “renaissance” allowed these critiques to be integrated into the legitimizing narratives of startup entrepreneurship, suggesting that startup culture had lost its way and proposing a return to its original promises of “making the world a better place.” At the same time, the “Entrepreneurial Renaissance” agenda sought to situate startup culture as a leader within a broader ethical and progressive turn in business discourses—one reaching beyond Finland and startups specifically. A white paper published by Slush in 2020 (Bergström et al. 2020, 59) explained:
the economist Milton Friedman argued that the sole responsibility of a company should be to maximize value for its shareholders. […] Now, a stakeholder approach seems poised for a comeback. Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) are just two of the many groups to recently endorse stakeholder capitalism.
Stakeholder capitalism—a form of capitalism in which companies serve the interests of all stakeholders, not just shareholders—was emblematic of this broader progressive turn. Like the “Entrepreneurial Renaissance,” it acknowledged critiques of capitalism while suggesting these will be addressed by a return to a more ethical approach to business that predated the ascendance of Friedman’s shareholder primacy (Schwab and Vanham 2021). During my time conducting fieldwork within the Helsinki startup community, I sought to explore this seemingly progressive turn, following its broader language of “purpose,” “impact,” “responsibility” and so forth across events, programs, companies, and conferences.
I argue that this purported turn is ultimately not a shift away from Friedman’s shareholder primacy, but a shift in the rhetorics employed in its legitimation. In superficially disavowing shareholder returns as an end in itself, it becomes further naturalized as a means, representing a necessary condition for accomplishing anything at scale—including a more progressive world. New rhetorics allow startups to become a vehicle for progressive aspirations, while recruiting these aspirations in the service of shareholder value.
Businesses as Society’s Progressive Protagonists
Startup culture had sparked my interest as seeming to provide a sense of real progressive possibility when the horizons of formal politics felt more limited than ever. Since the 1990s, Finnish governments have implemented policies of fiscal austerity and cuts to the welfare state, or at most sought to maintain public services at the existing level. This trend has not been accompanied by any broad decline in the popularity of the welfare state. Indeed, austerity policies have been framed as “difficult but necessary” measures for ensuring its survival. Finnish politics has increasingly become characterized by a “post-democratic” and “post-political” turn whereby the key terms of economic policy are set by unelected technocrats at the Ministry of Finance and where fiscal discipline has become established as beyond political contestation. Progressive agendas have been most successful in the form Nancy Fraser (2019) calls “progressive neoliberalism”—equality as sought through politics of representation rather than material distribution.
In this context, the private sector has taken an expanded role as chief protagonist for the advancement of progressive values (Mäkinen and Kourula 2008). On the one hand, businesses including startups have adopted social and environmental agendas through frameworks such as diversity and inclusion or the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In Finland, startup culture discourses often take a positive stance towards the welfare state—surprising, perhaps, in light of the libertarian values typically associated with Silicon Valley. The Finnish industry association for startups describes itself as originating “from gratitude towards the Finnish welfare society.” Its chair writes that “we believe that the American dream is most accessible right here,” referring to the equality of opportunity made possible by social security and public services, and positions the startup sector as “a new pillar for the economy” that will enable the continued existence of the welfare state (2021). Young “digital millionaires” reportedly hold the welfare state in high regard and happily pay taxes to sustain it (Valkama 2024).
While the progressive cause in formal politics is no longer one of building something new but defending what remains of past accomplishments, where neoliberal orthodoxy entails “realism” and pragmatic necessity—the world of startup entrepreneurialism appears to promise the opposite. It offers excitement, optimism, and forms of worldmaking agency through which anything and everything seems possible. In his 2021 Slush opening remarks, Slush’s president Mikko Mäntylä ended his critical reflections on humanity’s progress by saying that “The past two decades have also proven that entrepreneurship is the most effective way to build the future we want to see.” For progressive professionals, startups can provide solutions to our social and environmental crises, while sustaining the welfare state by creating economic growth.
Slush president Mikko Mäntylä. Photo by Esa-Pekka Mattila. Non-commercial use granted by Slush Media.
My research interlocutors included many who saw startup entrepreneurship as a uniquely powerful way to have a positive impact on the world. Jaana, founder of a startup converting harmful algae into fossil-free ingredients for the chemicals industry, saw that entrepreneurship could be a form of activism. Her startup was a continuation of environmental activism she had pursued since her youth, and she considered it a smart way to ensure the sustainable resourcing of an essentially activist project. “I have absolutely no interest in making money,” she told me. Kata was co-founder of a digital platform connecting corporations with “impact startups” addressing environmental or social problems. Though coming from a background in performing arts, music, and film, she told me that the tangible impact achievable through business now felt more significant to her, and she considered it naïve to associate non-profits with virtue and profit with exploitation. Meanwhile Sami, the founder of a startup seeking to improve health and wellbeing through better indoor air quality, explained:
In my opinion, the only sustainable way to make a change in the world is through business, because it scales. Charity and other things are great, but they aren’t really sustainable. They don’t feed themselves, so to speak. In one way or another, the movement of money is a crucial aspect of doing good.
For my entrepreneur interlocutors seeking to do good, business was simply an effective, pragmatic way of getting things done. Venture capital powered startups in particular hold the promise of doing things at vast scale and at great speed—a seemingly powerful form of agency understandably exciting and attractive whether the goal is making money or solving global environmental problems.
Rehabilitating Shareholder Value
At conferences, on my LinkedIn feed, and the pages of business media, I observed a range of widely repeated tropes insisting on the harmony of “profit and purpose” and how profitability in fact benefits from the pursuit of an ethical mission. Talented employees will prefer companies with a meaningful purpose, unethical businesses will be disadvantaged by regulatory and brand risks, while advances in the quantification of social and environmental impacts will lead markets to increasingly align positive impacts with making money.
If the self-narratives and reflections of my entrepreneur interlocutors rehabilitated the moral value of profit and growth as simply an effective way to accomplish things at scale, these “profit and purpose” discourses rehabilitated the shareholder value of ethics and responsibility as in fact effective ways to improve profits. Though often positioned in opposition to Friedman’s rejection of social responsibility, they are not in fact a repudiation of his views. Friedman’s (1970) critique of social responsibility specifically excluded activities framed as responsibility but pursued to increase profits. He found such posturing distasteful (as “approaching fraud”), but not contradictory with the sole responsibility of a business to increase profits.
Contemporary ethical business discourses have sought to transcend the tension between social responsibility and profits through conceiving of it instead as a harmoniously co-constituting means-ends relation where profits enable ethical impact and vice versa. Of course, as Galit Ailon (2022) observes, market ideology has always framed the value of free markets precisely in their ability to transform the self-interested pursuit of profit into activities that produce social value. Ethicising discourses provide the inverse logic: that the selfless pursuit of social value can create great profits (for self-interested shareholders).
In either case, social value is only realised when aligned with profit. Ethicising business discourses—whether of stakeholder capitalism or “Entrepreneurial Renaissance”—ultimately offer no meaningful structural challenge to shareholder primacy. They provide alternative stories about the meaning and purpose of business, capitalism, and entrepreneurship. Such stories may not be entirely insignificant in terms of the kinds of businesses built and how profit is sought. But they also enable a deeper entrenchment of shareholder primacy—rejected as ideology but naturalised in practice as the necessary condition of any enterprise. They create a path even for those critical of shareholder power and profit above all else, for those who wish to enact progressive values, to nonetheless seek entrepreneurial agency premised on the enrichment of shareholders.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Michelle Venetucci.
References
Ailon, Galit. 2022. “Profit, Self, and Agency: A Reevaluation.” Critical Sociology 48 (2): 251–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205211002250.
Bergström, Tommi, Mikko Mäntylä, Eerika Savolainen, Elmo Pakkanen, and Natasha Salmi. 2020. Entrepreneurship Redefined. Slush.
Fraser, Nancy, and Bhaskar Sunkara. 2019. The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond. Verso Books.
Friedman, Milton. 1970. “A Friedman Doctrine‐- The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” The New York Times, September 13. https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html.
Mäkinen, Jukka, and Arno Kourula. 2008. “Yritysvastuun politiikkaa.” Niin & Näin 4: 93–101.
Pakarinen, Riikka. 2021. “Building Blocks for the next Era of the Welfare State.” Finnish Startup Community, November 30. https://startupyhteiso.com/en/blog/future-of-welfare/.
Schwab, Klaus, and Peter Vanham. 2021. Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet. John Wiley & Sons.
Valkama, Heikki. 2024. “Nuoret digimiljonäärit ajattelevat lähes kaikesta toisin kuin vanha patruunasukupolvi – professori kertoo miksi.” Yle Uutiset, November 7. https://yle.fi/a/74-20121001.
