“I love David’s house,” Donald Trump said on a podcast last month. “What a house! That made the biggest impression.”
Trump was complimenting David Sacks, the venture capital investor who cohosts the All-In podcast. Two weeks earlier, Sacks had opened the doors of his San Francisco home to host a fundraiser for the Republican presidential candidate.
The event, which reportedly raked in $12 million, was a vivid demonstration of Republican financial might in the famously liberal city. More important though, it revealed a fracture in America’s tech capital that—while it may always have existed below the surface to some degree—has suddenly burst into the open, creating acrimony and recriminations among startup founders, investors, and the rest of the tech workforce.
Read more:Why I started ‘VCs for Kamala’
“I lost lots of friends and disappointed family as well,” Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire notes in an email to Fortune about the aftermath of his X announcement that he was donating $300,000 to the Trump campaign. “But that’s okay, I was expecting it. It’s sad we live in a time of such extreme polarization.”
Since Sacks’ fundraiser, a string of high-profile techies have declared their allegiance to team Trump, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and venture capital partners Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. On the other side of the aisle, Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings told The Information he was giving $7 million to a PAC supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee. Former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg and SV Angel’s Ron Conway are among the other big-name techies who have publicly endorsed Harris.
Adding fuel to the fire: Harris is a Bay Area native, while Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, is a former venture capital investor—albeit for a short period of time—nurtured by Peter Thiel.
Read:Presidential endorsements of Silicon Valley’s tech titans
With only a few months left until the general election, the candidates and their campaigns feel closer to home in Silicon Valley than perhaps during any previous election. And if Silicon Valley once preferred to concern itself with the business of term sheets and technology rather than dirty itself in the muck of political partisanship, it now looks like just one more arena in the country’s overheated political spectacle.
‘A lot more mixed’
The change in Silicon Valley, particularly the vocal embrace of the right, is striking compared with the last two times Trump ran for the nation’s top office.
“There might have been people who quietly supported [Trump], but nonetheless at least what you saw publicly was pro-[Democrat],” notes Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist who had managed Michael Bloomberg’s 2009 mayoral reelection campaign and advised Andrew Yang’s 2021 mayoral campaign. This time around, Tusk says, “it’s a lot more mixed.”
Eight years ago, Peter Thiel caused a stir within the tech community by speaking at the Republican convention and throwing his support behind Trump. Back then, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and Shaun Maguire all supported presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Of course, it’s a different environment than even four years ago. And Silicon Valley’s ecosystem of startups, venture firms, and public tech companies have felt the impact.
During the Biden presidency, the private markets have been pinched as interest rates began to climb in 2022, putting the IPO market at a near standstill. Acquisitions of startups by larger tech companies—an important source of liquidity for investors and tech workers—have also slowed considerably. The head of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, has challenged a series of high-priced deals, including Adobe’s abandoned $20 billion deal for the design startup Figma. (Microsoft managed to complete its $69 billion acquisition of game maker Activision Blizzard, but only after fighting the government’s effort to block it.)
“Under Trump, there was a ton of liquidity,” Tusk says. “Under Biden, there was not.” While that’s not necessarily to the credit of Trump or discredit to Biden, human beings are going to look at their own lived experience and vote accordingly, he adds. (Tusk says he plans to contribute some amount in the “low six figures” to the Kamala Harris campaign.)
The crypto factor
The rise of crypto within the tech industry, and the sector’s rocky performance, may be further turning up the political temperature. Many in the crypto industry blame Biden’s nomination of Gary Gensler as SEC chair for wreaking havoc on their world.
One of Gensler’s most impassioned critics has been Ryan Selkis, founder of crypto analytics firm Messari. A onetime Biden supporter, according to a recent profile, Selkis has lambasted the SEC’s Gensler with unique fervor, calling him a “rat,” a “snake,” and a “fraud.” In May, Selkis spoke at a Trump event promoting NFTs at Mar-a-Lago and has since gone full MAGA.
But this political transformation took a dark turn after the Trump assassination attempt, when Selkis posted a barrage of incendiary tweets declaring the start of a “civil war” and that anyone who votes against Trump can “die in a f–king fire.” Selkis later posted an apology and has since stepped down from the CEO role.
Political rhetoric has caused problems on the left as well. Earlier this month, Greylock partner and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman had to explain a recent comment at a conference expressing his wish for Trump to become an “actual martyr.” The comment was made days before the assassination attempt on Trump, but Hoffman posted a long note on X to clarify the comments, which he said had been taken out of context. “Of course I meant nothing about any sort of physical harm or violence, which I categorically deplore,” Hoffman wrote.
One early-stage investor told Fortune they were afraid to speak publicly about their support for Vice President Kamala Harris, as they were afraid women who worked at their fund would become subject to online attacks or even cyber-threats.
Blowback risk
With Silicon Valley’s concentration of ego, money, and power, it’s perhaps not surprising to see its notables rush headlong into the political scrum. Entrepreneurs of various political stripes who made their fortunes in tech like Keith Rabois, Palmer Luckey, Vinod Khosla, Joe Lonsdale, and Mark Cuban have long been outspoken personalities on social media.
But when Andreessen Horowitz, the preeminent VC firm known as a16z, published a video this month endorsing Trump, the move reverberated far more intensely than the typical online banter. Several startup founders and tech industry insiders felt a16z’s institutional endorsement crossed a line, given the VC firm’s central role within the startup industry and Trump’s degrading statements regarding women and immigrants.
Merci Grace, the former head of growth at Slack and a former VC at Lightspeed, said on X that she “was utterly crushed” that Andreessen and Horowitz had gone “all in” for Trump. “I felt betrayed that they’d trade us away for more money,” she wrote. In a comment to her post, another founder said he had “lost an enormous amount of respect for a16z and others in the Valley.”
It remains to be seen whether Andreessen Horowitz’s Trump endorsement makes the firm a pariah among certain founders and causes it to lose out on deals.
Anu Duggal, founding partner of Female Founders Fund, who hosted a two-day summit event for more than 100 female founders that began the day after Andreessen Horowitz had posted the video, said the topic of venture capitalists endorsing Trump hardly came up at all.
“I haven’t seen a strong reaction,” Duggal says. “I think some people are almost not surprised.”
For her part, Duggal says she feels a lot of energy around this election cycle—and that, with a female presidential candidate, there’s a stronger opportunity to put women’s health issues on the federal agenda.
Still, as if to highlight the perceived risk in plunging too deep into politics, Sequoia Capital, one of a16z’s main rivals, has publicly stated that the institution will not take sides in the election (though Sequoia partners, such as Maguire, Trump supporter Doug Leone, and longtime Democratic donor Michael Moritz, are free to do as they please).
The partisan divide in the U.S. is unhealthy, Sequoia boss Roelof Botha said onstage at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference this month. “At Sequoia as a partnership, we don’t take a political point of view.”
