**This event is open to those of the Stanford community ONLY**
The entrepreneur figures centrally in understandings of contemporary societies. Often left unexamined is its necessary corollary, the angel investor: an amateur financier who invests not just money, but self. In this talk, I show how specific devices and practices work to turn the uncertainty of early-stage business into an ethical pursuit where people develop expertise and make friends. I first analyze financial valuation as a social process of making numbers, through discursive community. Second, I discuss the way investors frame their work “giving back,” and ask how capital itself can be subsumed into gift logic. My analysis makes visible a powerful way that capitalism accommodates critiques of alienation, transforming what capitalism itself is. This presentation draws from an in-process manuscript, and I look forward to critical engagement.
