It started with an “anger tweet”.
“I'm going to start 'VC for Democracy,'” wrote Leslie Feinzaig, founder and general partner at Graham & Walker, on X in late July. “Who's in?”
It seems more than 1,300 “techies,” including 750 accredited investors, were part of a group that became known as Kamala's VC. On Wednesday, that group raised $150,000 to support Vice President Kamala Harris' run for the presidency during an hour-long Zoom call that reached as many as 600 participants.
Of that, about $100,000 came from 97 donors, and another $50,000 came in the form of a match from SV Angel founder and managing partner Ron Conway, who helped launch the appeal. The group has already raised about $25,000 from its initial efforts to get VCs to sign on to back Harris, bringing its total fundraising so far to about $176,000.
Donations rose quickly during the call, which also featured prominent Democratic donor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. In about half an hour, enough donations came in to unlock the $50,000 threshold for Conway's match.
It's the latest trend in political organizing on Zoom
It's the latest trend of political organizing on Zoom, including a massive call shortly after Harris joined the race that drew tens of thousands of black women. And later, there was the tongue-in-cheek “White Dudes for Harris.” Feinzaig noted that the VC call will be a “smaller call than that, even though there is a large overlap between the two groups.”
The call took on both a positive and somewhat defiant tone. Several VCs have made comments about Andreessen Horowitz — whether by name or not — whose founders recently announced their support for former President Donald Trump. The panel on Wednesday's call seemed upset that the views of a few prominent members of their industry have come to be perceived as representative of the venture capital community's political leanings.
When Feinzaig sent her “anger tweet,” she said she “felt frustrated, like many of you, with the growing sense that VC and all my peers were going to MAGA, and I felt that i don't speak for me and I felt that I wanted my voice to be heard. Even more critically, I felt that those strongest voices weren't speaking to the hundreds of founders I speak with on a monthly basis.”
In July, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz posted a blog called “The Little Tech Agenda,” where they identified “bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech,” which they consider basically startups. “We support or oppose politicians, regardless of party and regardless of their positions on other issues,” they wrote. Only a few weeks later, it became clear that they would support Trump in the election.
“The firm that launched this framework would have us believe that the people who support Kamala Harris are anti-capitalist,” Stephen DeBerry, founder and managing partner of Bronze Investments, said on the call. “It makes no sense. We are not opposed to profits. We are not opposed to high growth. That's what motivates us, that's why we're here. We're not against billionaires – there are quite a few of them on this call. What we oppose is building a regulatory regime that destroys our government and removes safeguards so that the system cannot stand on its own and collapses. And therefore the wealth in the system is aggregated to only a few and we become an oligopoly society like Russia.”
Mac Conwell, managing partner of RareBreed Ventures, questioned the idea of ”technology differentiation”.
“We should all be working together and they're trying to literally say, we don't want to work with you, we want to work here,” Conwell said. “And we don't want any rules. We want growth for growth's sake without railings, regulations be damned. And as a VC, yes, the regulations are hell. Right? They get in the way, they make things difficult. But it also makes sure that this system doesn't collapse.”
Roy Bahat, a venture capitalist who runs Bloomberg Beta, shared a startup-style pitch deck with the group in support of Harris' campaign. One slide showed a competition matrix. On the Y axis was “Stable” and “Unstable”. On the X axis, “Past” and “Future”. In the “Unstable” and “Past” quadrant, Bahat posted a picture of former President Donald Trump in a Make America Great Again hat. In the “Stable” and “Future” quadrant? A coconut emoji.
“The competition is funded by Andreessen Horowitz and other funds, but we all know that more capital is not necessarily what makes the difference,” Bahat said. “It's that plus an execution plan.”
Feinzaig said she is not a registered Democrat or Republican and, as a naturalized citizen, “her personal politics do not align with American politics in any way.” But when looking at an investment, she asks, “What will the world look like if this company is massively successful?”
“No matter where you are on the political spectrum, ask yourself, what does the world look like if these candidates are massively successful?” Feinzaig said. “And I think there's a view of that that's interesting. And then there's a view of it is that it's actually quite terrifying.”