“We are pro-business, pro-American dream, pro-entrepreneurship and pro-technological progress,” the group said in a statement posted to their website, VCsForKamala.org. “We also believe in democracy as the backbone of our nation.” The website asks people to sign a pledge to support Harris and another to donate to her campaign.
The effort was buttressed by another group of tech entrepreneurs and workers called Tech For Kamala, which also wrote a letter this week expressing “enthusiastic and unwavering support for Vice President Harris.” The letter gathered more than 550 signatures in two days.
The moves are perhaps the most public pushback to right-wing venture capitalists and executives whom some tech leaders see as dominating political conversation in the tech community. For years, Silicon Valley was largely considered a liberal bastion. But over the past few weeks, Elon Musk, who leads Tesla, SpaceX and the social platform X, and investors Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and David Sacks have endorsed former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee.
While these conservatives — such as Musk, who created a new pro-Trump super political action committee, and Sacks, who spoke at the Republican National Convention — never represented a majority of the rank-and-file employees in the tech industry, the right is ascendant in Silicon Valley in a way that it had not been in more than a decade.But since President Joe Biden announced July 21 that he would not seek reelection and would support Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee, dozens of venture capitalists have started speaking out against that narrative.”They don’t speak for me,” said Leslie Feinzaig, a managing director of the venture firm Graham & Walker and a primary organizer of VCsForKamala, referring to Musk, Sacks and others. “They don’t speak for most of us. And they don’t speak for the founders.”
Feinzaig said the “tweet after tweet after tweet of these guys coming out and supporting Trump” was in part what had spurred the group to snap into action. She added that the effort had come together quickly over the past week as excitement over Harris’ candidacy rose and that she reached out to Hoffman.
Feinzaig circulated a Google sign-up form soliciting venture capitalists to join the pledge, calling it a “grassroots effort” and saying it was not meant to signify an alignment with any one political party, according to a copy of the page viewed by The New York Times. Signing the pledge is a vote for “strong, trustworthy institutions,” according to the group’s website statement.
“Let’s show founders that not all VCs have turned MAGA,” the sign-up form read.
The investors have also launched a landing page to track donations made to the Harris campaign, although organizers said they were not actively bundling contributions.
Some Democratic donors and operatives tied to Silicon Valley privately worried that the Biden campaign had not paid close enough attention to the shifting politics in the tech industry. The Harris campaign has sought to organize Silicon Valley leaders more, and Harris, who is from the San Francisco Bay Area, is planning a fundraising trip there as soon as August.
Julia Collins, the founder of the climate tech startup Planet FWD, who organized the Tech For Kamala letter, said the group is working with other tech groups and hopes to do “one of those iconic Zoom calls” to get people involved. She was referencing the series of organizing calls that supporters have held for Harris.
“What we’re building is a grassroots movement that includes all people in tech, not just the luminaries, not just the billionaires,” Collins said.
