Which candidate is better for tech innovation? Venture capitalists divided on Harris or Trump
LOS ANGELES — Being a venture capitalist carries a lot of prestige in Silicon Valley. Those who choose which startups to fund see themselves as driving the next big waves of technology.
When some of the biggest names in industry threw their support behind former President Donald Trump and the former VC he picked as his running mate, JD Vance, people took notice.
Then, hundreds of other VCs—some well-known, some not so well-known—slid into the spotlight behind Vice President Kamala Harris, battling it out over which presidential candidate would be best for tech innovation and the conditions startups need to thrive. For years, much of Silicon Valley’s political debates took place behind closed doors. Now, those informal debates have gone public—via podcasts, social media, and online manifestos.
Venture capitalist and Harris backer Stephen DeBerry says some of his closest friends support Trump. Though they live in a part of Northern California known for its liberal politics, the investors who help bankroll the tech industry have long been a politically divided group.
“We ski together. Our families are together. We’re super close,” said DeBerry, who runs the Bronze Venture Fund. “This isn’t about not being able to talk to each other. I love these guys — they’re almost all boys. They’re good friends. We just have a different perspective on policy issues.”
It remains to be seen whether the more than 700 venture capitalists who have thrown their support behind a movement called “VCs for Kamala” will match the promises of Trump’s moneyed backers like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. But the effort marks “the first time I’ve seen a galvanized group of people from our industry come together and unite around our shared values,” DeBerry said.
“There are many practical reasons for VCs to back Trump,” including policies that could boost corporate profits and stock market values and benefit wealthy benefactors, said David Cowan, an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners. But Cowan said he backs Harris as a VC with a “long-term investment horizon” because “a Trump world reeling from rampant income inequality, raging wars and global warming is not an attractive environment” for financing healthy companies.
Several prominent venture capitalists have voiced their support for Trump on Musk’s social platform X. Public data show that some of them have donated to a new, pro-Trump super PAC called America PAC, whose donors include powerful tech industry conservatives with ties to SpaceX and Paypal who are in Musk’s social circle. Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrencies and pledge to end enforcement of the industry are also fueling support.
While some of Biden’s policies have alienated parts of the investment industry concerned about tax policy, antitrust scrutiny or overregulation, Harris’ presidential bid has rekindled interest among VCs that had until recently been on the sidelines. Part of that excitement owes to existing relationships with Silicon Valley that stem from Harris’ career in the San Francisco area and her time as California’s attorney general.
“We’re buying risk, right? And we’re trying to buy the right type of risk,” Leslie Feinzaig, founder of VCs for Kamala, said in an interview. “It’s really hard for these companies that are trying to build and scale products to do that in an unpredictable institutional environment.”
The schism in the tech world has left some companies divided in their loyalties. While venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, founders of the company that bears their names, backed Trump, one of their firm’s general partners, John O’Farrell, pledged his support to Harris. O’Farrell declined to comment further.
Doug Leone, the former managing partner of Sequoia Capital, endorsed Trump in June, expressing concerns on X “about the overall direction of our country, the state of our broken immigration system, the ballooning deficit and foreign policy missteps, among other issues.” But Leone’s longtime business partner at Sequoia, Michael Moritz, wrote in the Financial Times that tech leaders backing Trump “are making a huge mistake.”
Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire posted on X that he donated $300,000 to Trump’s campaign after endorsing Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Federal Election Commission records show that Maguire donated $500,000 to America PAC in June; Leone donated $1 million.
“The area where I disagree most with Republicans is women’s rights. And I’m sure I’ll disagree with some of Trump’s policies in the future,” Maguire wrote. “But overall, I think he was surprisingly prophetic.”
Feinzaig, managing director at venture capital firm Graham & Walker said she founded “VCs for Kamala” because she felt frustrated that “the loudest voices” were starting to “sound like they were speaking for the entire industry.”
Much of the VC discourse on elections has been a response to a July podcast and manifesto in which Andreessen and Horowitz endorsed Trump and laid out their vision for a “Little Tech Agenda” that they said contrasted with the policies Big Tech is pursuing.
They accused the US government of becoming increasingly hostile to startups and the venture capitalists that fund them, citing Biden’s views. proposed higher taxes about the wealthy and corporations and about regulations they say could hinder emerging industries in blockchain and artificial intelligence.
Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio who worked for a time in San Francisco at Thiel’s investment firm, expressed a similar perspective about “little tech” more than a month before he was chosen as Trump’s running mate.
“The donors who have really engaged with Silicon Valley in a pro-Trump way are not big tech, right? They are little tech. They are starting innovative companies. They don’t want the government to destroy their ability to innovate,” Vance said in an interview on Fox News in June.
Days earlier, Vance had joined Trump at a San Francisco fundraiser at the home of venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks, a longtime conservative. Vance said Trump spoke to about 100 attendees, including “some of the leading innovators in AI.”
DeBerry said he doesn’t disagree with everything the Andreesen Horowitz founders advocate, particularly their reluctance to let powerful corporations control the agencies that regulate them. But he pushes back against their “small tech” framing, especially when it comes from a multibillion-dollar company that he sees as hardly the voice of the little guy. For DeBerry, whose company focuses on social impact, the choice isn’t between big tech and small tech, but “chaos and stability,” with Harris representing stability.
Complicating the loyalties is that a hard-line approach to breaking up the monopoly power of big business no longer cuts along party lines. Vance has spoken positively of Lina Khan, Biden’s pick to lead the Federal Trade Commission and who has taken on several tech giants. Meanwhile, some of the most influential VCs backing Harris—such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, an early investor in ChatGPT maker OpenAI—have sharply criticized Khan’s approach.
U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat whose California district includes part of Silicon Valley, said Trump supporters are a vocal minority representing a “third or less” of the region’s tech community. But while the White House has appealed to tech entrepreneurs with its investments in clean energy, electric vehicles and semiconductors, Khanna said Democrats need to do a better job of showing they understand the appeal of digital assets.
“I think the lack of adoption of Bitcoin and blockchain has hurt the Democratic Party among the younger generation and among young entrepreneurs,” Khanna said.
Naseem Sayani, a general partner at Emmeline Ventures, said Andreessen and Horowitz’s support for Trump became a lightning rod for those in tech who don’t support the Republican nominee. Sayani signed up for “VCs for Kamala,” she said, because she wanted the types of companies she helps fund to know that the investment community isn’t monolithic.
“We’re not one-profile founders anymore,” she said. “There are women, there are people of color, there are all the intersections. How can they feel comfortable building companies if the environment they’re in doesn’t support their existence in certain ways?”
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