In the last two years, Portugal has been increasingly presented as an emergent “start-up nation”. During this period, public grant programs have been stimulating startup “hubs” across the country, positioning the so-called Portuguese innovation ecosystem as a “success story”, as one of the “best-performing startup communities in Europe”. Critical, dissonant perspectives of this phenomenon are rather scarce. In this paper, we consider that it`s necessary to go beyond dominant discourses of (public) glorification, in order to study how business is concretely managed in a start-up context, or if organizational practices, work cultures and individual, immediate, work experiences are somehow specific in start-up organizations. Conceiving a start-up primarily as a temporary organization is suggested to represent an analytical lens that can help uncover some of its less “visible” dimensions. Analytical work is anchored in qualitative interview and direct observation data, gathered during a 12 months longitudinal research, held in one the most successful start-ups created in Portugal, in the last four years. One narrative – “Like there`s no tomorrow” – is presented and discussed. Organizational and management practices are described to be primarily based on relentless experimentation, a focus on action (on “getting things done”), an alluring need to be always “on the move”. The continuous need to promote organizational differentiation and singularity is highlighted, as it constitutes, in a start-up context, a relevant proof of (institutional) existence. Due to this need, managerial visions tend to emphasize, in a neo-schumpeterian vein, the virtues of disruption and discontinuity. An overall sense of uncertainty, volatility and normative impermanence, and the defuturization of individual work experience(s), are suggested to be two concrete implications of these organizational and managerial orientations.

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Start-up,Innovation,Temporary Organizations