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Short abstract

How do Silicon Valley VCs make sense of failure? Through the case of recent investment in precision fermentation and bioeconomy startups, we show how “waste” functions as a cultural category that allows venture capitalism to reframe its speculation as innovation and legitimate its expansion.

Long abstract

Decades of STS scholarship on digital waste has highlighted the immense material and environmental costs of computing infrastructure– from resource extractivism and environmental racism to data centers and their immense water costs (Gabrys 2011, Hogan 2022). Less attention has been paid to how the concept of waste functions as a generative cultural category within the political economy of Silicon Valley itself. This paper examines venture capital's conceptualizations of waste through the case of its investment in alternative protein and bioeconomy startups.

Since 2021, various media outlets have declared that the alt-protein bubble– at least, the high-tech, Silicon-Valley-funded version– had burst. In the years since, however, venture capitalists have reinvested, under a paradigm of “deep tech.”

Drawing on interviews with Silicon Valley workers, content analysis of industry literature and media coverage, and archival research, we found that industry actors drew on AI and software analogies to make sense of alt protein’s failed prophecies. They have framed this era as an “alt protein winter,” repositioning failure as an opportunity to refocus on “hard tech” and basic research. This reframing has contemporaneous analogs across the tech industry and has shaped a new cohort of funded startups whose explicit mission is to transform waste into productive inputs. Some are developing technologies to extract nutritional value from industrial byproducts, fungi, or even air; others sell nature-based solutions to cut cattle’s methane while boosting beef yield. Historicizing these cases within imperial histories, we demonstrate that waste figures centrally in how venture capital speculation reproduces itself.