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

Abstract

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.