More than 100 Silicon Valley VCs including Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla and Mark Cuban have pledged to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Mobilizing under the group VCsForKamala, the VCs are also soliciting donations for Harris’ campaign. But the organizers say the effort isn’t meant to align with any one political party.
According to the group’s website, signing on is a commitment to “strong, trustworthy institutions.”
“We believe that strong, trustworthy institutions are a feature, not a bug, and that our industry — and every other industry — would collapse without them,” a statement on the VCsForKamala site reads. “That is what’s at stake in this election. Everything else, we can solve through constructive dialogue with political leaders and institutions willing to talk to us.”
VCsForKamala, along with recent open-letter tech worker campaigns like Tech for Kamala, aim to push back against the notion that Silicon Valley has largely embraced the party of former President Donald J. Trump.
Over the past few weeks, Tesla and X head Elon Musk and investors Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and David Sacks have endorsed Trump, the Republican presidential nominee. Musk created a new pro-Trump super PAC, and Sacks spoke at the Republican National Convention. The billionaire Winklevoss twins, founders of cryptocurrency company Gemini, also donated to Trump’s campaign (in bitcoin).
Trump’s Silicon Valley base argues that the Republic party — and Trump himself — are generally more pro-tech, and highly favorable to the startup ecosystem. Andreessen and Horowitz have said that they believe, for example, that President Joe Biden and his administration have stifled tech businesses through overregulation and potentially needless taxation, and moreover threaten to slow gains in the AI and crypto spaces.
Harris has held varying positions on tech regulation as California’s attorney general, in the California Senate and as VP. In 2019, as a state senator, she advocated for a breakup of Meta (then Facebook). And last year, she hosted four tech CEOs — Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai — at the White House “to share concerns about the risks associated with AI.”
Despite her criticisms of the tech industry, Harris has at different times in her career drawn praise and financial support from tech leaders such as Box CEO Aaron Levi, Marc Benioff, Sheryl Sandberg and Jony Ive. Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs and venture capitalist John Doerr are among those who backed Harris’ last presidential bid that ended in December 2019, when she dropped out of the race to endorse Biden.
Harris and her allies, looking to muster support among Silicon Valley elite who haven’t cast their lot, have launched a blitz of behind-the-scene lobbying campaigns. According to The New York Times, Harris is planning a fundraising trip in the San Francisco Bay Area as soon as next month.
This has proven to be a winning strategy so far. Per NBC, Harris is on track to raise over $100 million from tech donors including Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings across her campaign, PACs and so-called “dark money” groups.