Blake Masters, J.D. Vance campaigns benefit from VC ties

‘Friends and family rounds’ come for politics

In a few weeks, two former venture capitalists, Blake Masters and J.D. Vance, will be on the ballot to run for the Senate. This isn’t necessarily the win you’d think for the venture industry, since neither have really made venture-friendly policies a main part of their platform or their political identities . But that hasn’t stopped the money flowing from Silicon Valley in support of their candidacies.

Both Vance and Masters are receiving donations from their old co-workers in venture capital. Call it a “friends and family round” but for politics.

• Masters is the former president of the Thiel Foundation, COO of Thiel Capital, and co-author with Peter Thiel of “Zero to One,” so it’s not too surprising to see that he gets a lot of individual support from those in Thiel’s orbit. Masters has received donations from many Founders Fund and Thiel Capital employees, along with well-known Thiel friends Keith Rabois, Joe Lonsdale, and David Sacks. He’s also attracted donations from other techies like Figma’s Dylan Field (a Thiel Fellow), Kraken’s Jesse Powell, Intercom co-founder Eoghan McCabe, Tribe Capital’s Arjun Sethi, and Atomic’s Jack Abraham.
• Vance is another Thiel acolyte who worked for Thiel Capital and then Steve Case’s Rise of The Rest fund before starting Narya Capital . He hasn’t drawn the same depth of support as Masters has from his former employers, but donors do include Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz, former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and former Facebook GC Ted Ullyot. A few folks like Thiel, Sacks, and Kraken’s founder Powell donated to both.

But to actually advance their VC interests, investors are putting their money elsewhere. My colleagues Ben Brody and AJ Caughey worked with the Center for Responsive Politics (the keepers of OpenSecrets.org, which is where I got the above data) to track some favorite money spots for Silicon Valley power brokers.

• “In general, the DNC is still pulling in the biggest totals from Silicon Valley, followed mostly (but not exclusively!) by Democratic candidates and groups,” Ben told me. “There seems to be interest, though, in these specialized groups that are either promoting politically adjacent causes (like abortion rights) or that want to get a particular type of candidate into office, like DigiDems, which raises money to pay the salaries of tech staffers for Dem campaigns.”

• Reid Hoffman and his wife Michelle Yee donated repeatedly to the DigiDems group, but it also attracted money from investors like Ron Conway and Chris Saccheri, LinkedIn’s original web developer. “Tech talent’s expensive,” said Kane Miller, the executive director of DigiDems. “These are folks with skills who command higher salaries in the private sector than what we are accustomed to paying in political campaigns.”
• Not to be left out, the National Venture Capital Association’s PAC is smaller in comparison to others, but it attracted more than $350,000 with 83 donations from a who’s-who list of VCs in the Bay Area. Sequoia’s Roelof Botha, Doug Leone, and Bill Coughran all donated, along with KPCB founder Brook Byers and Kirsten Green of Forerunner.
• Bigger checks went to more of the tech industry’s passion causes. A favorite was bipartisan crypto PAC GMI, which saw million-dollar checks from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried.

VCs might not take a “spray and pray” approach to investing, but it’s clear that they’re more willing to distribute their money across many causes and candidates when it comes to electioneering.

For more on how tech’s political giving is trying to bring us more tech, check out Ben and AJ’s story here .

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