In this chapter I explore how the concept of “start-up” has transcended its primary meaning as a synonym for early-stage, hi-tech company to become a managerial ethos helping creative workers to grapple with the uncertainty and precarity of creative labor. I advance a definition of start-up based on Michel Foucault’s concept of episteme, understood as a historically-specific register of knowing, being, and sensing. To delineate the cultural hinterland of the start-up episteme, I focus on three areas of knowledge, which were instrumental in legitimizing it: complexity economics, a school of thought in economics championed in the 1990s by the Santa Fe Institute (Cowan, Manhattan Project to the Santa Fe Institute: The memoirs of George A. University of New Mexico Press, 2010); the Agile paradigm in software development (Beck et al., Manifesto for Agile software development. http://agilemanifesto.org/ , 2001); and design thinking (Brown, Change by design: How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. Harper Business, 2009; Cross, Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work. Berg, 2011).