In the opening chapter, I situate the emergence of the start-up episteme in the historical period that goes from 1993, the year of the launch of Mosaic, the first ever user-friendly web browser, to 2011, the year Eric Ries published The Lean Startup. I discuss how, during the New Economy era (1994–2000), dot-com companies experimented with innovative, networked, and flat corporate structures in an effort to tap into the largely unexplored economic potential of technical knowledge and digital creativity. Despite the eventual failure of many dot-com companies during the stock market downturn of March 2000, the managerial principles developed during this time persisted and evolved in the post-dot-com era. The result was a pervasive, yet not necessarily coherent, start-up-inspired managerial ethos that, leveraging values such as empowerment, freedom, and autonomy, thrust the 1990s techno-utopianism into the twenty-first century.