More Than 100 Silicon Valley Investors Pledge to Support Kamala Harris
The group, including Democratic donors such as Reid Hoffman and Vinod Khosla, has been organized under an effort called VCsForKamala.
Theodore SchleiferMike Isaac and Erin Griffith
Theodore Schleifer reported from Washington, and Mike Isaac and Erin Griffith from San Francisco
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More than 100 venture capitalists said on Wednesday that they had pledged to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in November and had solicited donations for her presidential campaign, in a rejoinder to the splintering among tech leaders over whom to support in the election.
The group includes Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn; Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures; Mark Cuban, the former principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks; Ron Conway, a well-known angel investor; and the billionaire Chris Sacca.
“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 Ms. 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 X, and the investors Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and David Sacks have endorsed former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee.
While these conservatives — such as Mr. Musk, who created a new pro-Trump super PAC, and Mr. 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 over a decade.
But since President Biden announced this month that he would not seek re-election and would support Ms. 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 Mr. Musk, Mr. Sacks and others. “They don’t speak for most of us. And they don’t speak for the founders.”
Ms. 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 Ms. Harris’s candidacy rose and that she reached out to Mr. Hoffman.
Ms. Feinzaig circulated a Google sign-up form soliciting venture capitalists to join the pledge, calling it a “grass-roots 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 V.C.s 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 Ms. Harris, who is from the San Francisco Bay Area, is planning a fund-raising trip there as soon as next month.
Julia Collins, the founder of the climate tech start-up 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 Ms. Harris.
“What we’re building is a grass-roots movement that includes all people in tech, not just the luminaries, not just the billionaires,” Ms. Collins said.
Theodore Schleifer writes about campaign finance and the influence of billionaires in American politics. More about Theodore Schleifer
Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent for The Times based in San Francisco. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley. More about Mike Isaac
Erin Griffith covers tech companies, start-ups and the culture of Silicon Valley from San Francisco. More about Erin Griffith
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