Meet Tracy: an interior designer who can’t find a good house painter. Meet Bob: a wine store proprietor whose retail staff is unreliable. Meet Seth: a valet driver losing tips in an increasingly cashless culture.

Tracy is a founder of EasyPaint, a startup that matches house painters with individuals and companies seeking their services. Bob sells wine to Bjorn and Marissa Ovick, whose startup Staffly supplies retail workers to independent shops. Seth is a client of Bravo, which lets customers tip electronically.

Last week, each of these companies participated in the Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt San Fransisco, the annual convention hosted by TechCrunch, AOL’s tech journalism site. The September 2015 Disrupt marked the thirteenth iteration of the event, which began in New York in 2012, and which now takes place each year on both coasts as well as in an overseas city. Each event features an exhibition hall, where software and hardware companies display newly launching products, panel discussions and “fireside chats” with executives whose companies lead the technology industry, and a hackathon that asks teams of coders to build something new over the course of twenty-four hours. Yet Disrupt’s main event, the centerpiece of the convention, is the Startup Battlefield. Billed as “the very heart of TechCrunch Disrupt,” the Startup Battlefield is a competition for investment capital and press attention. To win the competition’s $50,000 prize, preselected contestants must deliver a compelling pitch before an assembly hall of industry insiders, including investors and press, followed by a question and answer session with a panel of industry judges.

Disruption, a favorite Silicon Valley buzzword, signals the end of business as usual—yet the modes of engagement employed this week at TechCrunch Disrupt replicate, rather than rupture, industry norms. In their Startup Battlefield presentations, EasyPaint, Staffly, and Bravo took care to emphasize that the protagonists of their product narratives are real-life individuals affiliated with each company. Still other contestants opened their pitches with (presumably) archetypal or composite characters, imagined individuals whose struggles are solvable with the right company’s technology. In other words, each company set up its product’s desirability by introducing a person (“meet so-and-so”) who faces an obstacle (“so-and-so requires X but can’t have it because Y”) which the company’s technologies will remove (“I’m here to tell you about Z.”)

About half of the Startup Battlefield contestants invoked this presentational formula, which fits a range of industrial verticals: Emily wants to get pregnant but doesn’t know her fertility window. Abby needs school lunches but hates bananas. Scott needs medical care but hospital communication confuses him. Sam owns a car dealership but 401ks overwhelm him. Susie wants a divorce but lawyers are expensive. Tom grows peppers but can’t analyze his farming data. Gillian has asthma but can’t keep up with her treatment regimen. Kendall loves art and manicures but can’t customize her fingernails. Alex needs to notarize his will but must bring a full stack of paper to a notary public, and who prints anything anymore?

Having presented these protagonists’ perils on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage, the startup founders quickly came to their rescue. Ava makes a smart bracelet that tracks its wearer’s menstrual cycle. Scrumpt lets parents order their children preselected lunches. Stitch streamlines communication between medical providers. Money Intel automates 401k administration. Separate.us helps divorce petitioners manage their own filing. Agrilyst, winner of the Startup Battlefield, analyzes the agricultural data produced by individual indoor farms. Cohero Health tracks asthma patients’ treatment adherence and lung function through a mobile app that syncs with a smart inhaler and spirometer. Preemadonna prints customized images from a smartphone onto users’ fingernails. Stampery provides digital document certification.

If there is a neoliberal logic undergirding the move to locate a would-be revolutionary technology within the life of a particular person, a narrative logic is also at play in these presentations. An irony of the Startup Battlefield is that the broader the implications of a given technology, the more difficult it is to explain in a matter of minutes. The plight of the pepper farmer highlights the revolutionary potential of Agrilyst for an audience likely unfamiliar with indoor farming on a broad scale.

Still, it’s worth considering what it means when, in the name of disruption, one of the tech industry’s most celebrated events for new, innovative technologies proposes the transformation of industrial sectors as diverse as agriculture, healthcare, and business administration using identical presentational paradigms. Sometimes “breaking shit”–to use another of the tech industry’s favored terms for innovation–means remaking it in Silicon Valley’s image.

Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that shortly before its open call at the world’s largest consumer technology show, ABC aired an episode of Shark Tank (Season 6, “Week 4”) that devolved into a debate over what a technology is. The company that prompted the debate, called Reviver, makes a fabric wipe that masks odors when rubbed on clothing. Company founders, brothers Ben and Eric Kusin, of Dallas, Texas, pitched the show dressed in the Silicon Valley uniform of jeans and candy colored company t-shirts: in their case, light blue tees with their company name screen-printed across the front in lower case, white, sans serif letters. “I think you’ve got a good product,” entertainment mogul and Shark Tank judge Mark Cuban tells the brothers midway through the segment, “but first, you’re not a technology.” The soundtrack’s stock music swells, then turns ominous. The brothers counter that they’ve spent $150,000 on custom machinery; Cuban insists that machinery does not a technology make. “It’s not a technology!” he repeats as the shot closes in on Ben Kusin’s stunned expression. Dramatic twist achieved, ABC cuts to commercial.

Shark Tank plays by the reality TV rulebook: editors cut hour-long sessions into scenes lasting minutes, splice in reaction shots out of sequence, and post-zoom wide shots into close-up for dramatic effect. Ben Kusin’s slack-jawed stare, broadcast as his response to Cuban’s pronouncement, may well have come from a different moment in the shoot. Yet the tension cultivated by the TV show comes as much from the producers’ editing suite as from the judges’ ability to fast-track products and fund fledgling companies. In tech industry parlance, Shark Tank’s objective is monetization, not innovation; the argument between Cuban and the Kusins stems less from disagreement over the nature of a technology than over its association with market value. After the commercial break, Eric Kusin defends Reviver’s technological status based on its multiple applications. “We just started thinking of ourselves as a technology because the manufacturers are telling us what this can do,” he explains, and begins ticking potential features off on his fingers—but Cuban cuts him off immediately, at “mosquito repellent,” noting that talcum powder also has a lot of uses. To Cuban, it seems, technology means digital, or at least electronic, whereas to the Kusins, technology means machinic and scalable.

Despite their quarrel over the ontological status of odor masking wipes, however, Cuban and the Kusins alike define technology as a means of accruing venture capital. For the Kusins, both the uniqueness of their formula and its potential for further applications, which they see as technological properties, indicate the desirability of their product to prospective investors. Although Cuban rejects the Kusins’ assertion that the wipes are technological, he perceives the brothers’ insistence on calling themselves a tech company as a reuse for acquiring funding—from their father, founder of the video game corporation GameStop, from whom they received a two million dollar investment to start their venture. (“You only call it a technology because that allows you to go to dad and say, dear dad, we have a technology!”) Cuban may or may not be correct that the elder Mr. Kusin restricts his interest in his children to their interest in the tech sector, but entrepreneurial calculation undoubtedly led the brothers to adopt the language and aesthetics of Silicon Valley. Describing their “freshness revolution” while dressed in t-shirts that Reviver (which, like Twitter, Tumblr, and Uber follows a tech industry naming trend), the brothers emulate celebrated CEOs of the digital economy: usually, like the Kusins, young white men in jeans and t-shirts (Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick are exemplars), whose products promise to revolutionize something. Contra Cuban, it seems to me that the Kusins frame their product as a technology in the hopes that doing so will attract investors other than their father; they look like hundreds of aspiring tech entrepreneurs roaming the exhibition halls at CES.

Self-presentation is always part of pitching prospective funders. When the pitch is broadcast on national TV, performance plays an even larger role. Shark Tank contestants frequently dress according to a theme, and it’s easy to imagine introducing a similar product with entirely different stylistics. Another set of contestants, pitching a product that freshens clothing, might put on, say, aprons or athletic wear—especially if those contestants are women. Interestingly, the Kusin brothers avoid feminine associations with cleaning or clothing, distance bolstered by coding their product as a tool of technology rather than domesticity.

Partnership offers the Kusins receive from Shark Tank judges at the end of the segment underscore the domestic and technological duality of their product: one from Robert Herjavec, who made his fortune in the IT industry, and another from Lori Greiner, of the QVC home shopping network. That the brothers opt to partner with QVC, drawn in part to the exposure afforded by the TV network, suggests how the entrepreneurial aesthetics of digital technology transcend industrial sectors.

The Kusins’ dispute with Cuban gets no further attention. Their post-pitch interview, a confessional clip that Shark Tank usually devotes to rehashing contestants’ perceived slights at the hands of judges, focuses on Barbara Corcoran, founder of Corcoran real estate. Upon learning that their father has already given them two million dollars, Corcoran declines Reviver on the grounds that she doesn’t invest in rich kids. “We’re not rich!” Ben Kusin tells the camera after the segment, “That’s an unfair characterization of how they made it out to be, because of our father’s success.” Blindness to privilege isn’t restricted to Silicon Valley either.

However, this discussion truly begins in the months ahead of the Emmys. The numerous roundtable interviews and photo shoots organized by trade publications and wrestled over by publicists are where the politics of representation of awards season begin to form, while the Emmy submissions themselves offer a subsequent space in which such politics are negotiated.

This is particularly clear this year, given that Washington was notably absent from early Emmy campaigning, despite having been part of roundtables for both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety the previous year. This led to a Hollywood Reporter cover featuring the year’s top actresses, all of whom were white, and a Variety roundtable featuring six different lead actress contenders, all of whom were also white. Washington’s absence—likely tied to the fact she gave birth to her first child earlier this spring—offers a stark reminder that if not for Washington, there would be no women of color competitive in her category.

This is not to say that there are no other women of color submitted in the category: the official Emmy ballots revealed six, including Being Mary Jane’s Gabrielle Union, Sleepy Hollow’s Nicole Beharie, Elementary’s Lucy Liu, Nikita’s Maggie Q, and The Fosters’ Sherri Saum and Cierra Ramirez. Eliding for a moment the depressing statistic that only seven of the fifty-six women in the category are women of color, there are other reasons these women have been less visible than their counterparts. Issues of genre, network/channel branding, and cultural hierarchies of taste all make series like these less likely to draw Emmys in a dramatic field dominated by prestige cable dramas or network dramas with prestige cable auspices.

However, this does not necessarily exclude these women from participating in roundtables with major trade publications, provided their publicists—either associated with the network, studio, or the actress herself—work hard to get them there. Features like the Hollywood Reporter cover are competitive by nature, a coup for a publicist working hard to prove their worth to their client. But if you don’t have a publicist or agent who has played the Emmy game, or if you’re part of a show on a cable channel like BET with limited experience Emmy campaigning, there’s a good chance you will not be represented. And even if Gabrielle Union’s publicist had pushed for her to be included in one of these roundtables, would anyone have taken Union as a serious contender, given the low cultural standing of BET compared to the networks and channels dominant in the roundtables?

As Dear Black Woman reminds us, these realities do not render these situations ideologically neutral, because the optics they create are real, and offer a stark reminder of the state of diversity in not only the Emmys but in television more broadly. Rather, such considerations highlight how the Emmy nominating process functions as the intersection of multiple spaces of industry practice, each equally disinterested in confronting issues of diversity in a meaningful way unless someone like Washington emerges who fits the other requirements—a successful series, a reputable network, a strong publicity team—dominant in those spaces.

We can extend this into the submissions process itself. Transitioning to issues of gender, three examples stand out among the series and performers submitted for consideration. In the case of Amy Schumer, star and executive producer of Comedy Central’s sketch comedy series Inside Amy Schumer, she’s forced to compete in the Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series category due to rules surrounding variety series. Although she is unlikely to garner a nomination in either category, the optics of the ballot push her into a supporting role on a show based around her comedy, and which in its appeal to female viewers signifies a meaningful shift in Comedy Central’s brand identity.

In other cases, Emmy campaigns reinforce broader readings of a series’ gender politics. HBO’s Silicon Valley focuses its satire on the male-dominated technology field, and in its short first season featured only one supporting female character in Monica, played by Amanda Crew. And although the show drew significant criticism for its engagement with gender, HBO nonetheless chose to submit every other credited actor in the series for Emmy consideration without submitting Crew, making it their only series without an acting submission from each gender. The chances of Crew being nominated are slim to none, but the optics of not even submitting her don’t seem worth the money saved with one less submission among their extensive slate.

In the case of FX’s Fargo, broader channel strategy intersects with gender in problematic ways. Although Allison Tolman has been cited as the series’ lead actress in interviews with its creator, she is submitted as a supporting actress, a category she won at the recent Critics’ Choice Television Awards. There is an awards logic to this decision: Tolman is a newcomer without the name recognition of those likely to compete in Lead Actress, plus FX has a better shot in that category with American Horror Story’s Jessica Lange. And yet this strategy marginalizes Tolman to a lesser category (which was nearly eliminated last year), and pitches Fargo as a show with two male leads (Billy Bob Thornton and Martin Freeman), which is notable given how some critics felt the finale worked to marginalize her character.

While the ideological dimensions of Emmy campaigning are made visible in trade publications, the same dimensions in Emmy submissions need to be excavated, and depending on the nominations may never make it past the ballots. However, exploring these questions reinforces that our understanding of the politics of the Emmys is not only driven by who is nominated or wins, but by how issues of race and gender are negotiated in the processes that lead to those results.