The billionaire and former host of The Apprentice is not, in fact, America’s pro-business presidential candidate. That would be Vice President Kamala Harris, according to more than 4,000 venture capitalists and tech founders who turned out for the VCs for Kamala video call on Wednesday.
“Kamala Harris is actually, in fact, the business candidate,” said LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, the billionaire Democratic donor. “Kamala Harris is very good for diversity of innovation, through innovation for all of us.”
Talking points shared by the Harris campaign with call organizers doubled down on her vision of growth through broader inclusion.
“You cannot have economic growth without a stable society,” said Stephen DeBerry of Bronze VC, among the prominent impact investors on the call. Former President Donald Trump, he said, “represents an existential threat to the stability of our democracy.”
Impact VCs, including DeBerry, Tracy Gray of The 22 Fund, Brian Dixon of Kapor Capital, Stefanie Thomas of Zeal Capital Partners, Shayna Harris of Supply Change Capital and Nneka Kibuule of Aligned Climate Capital, are among nearly 1,300 investors and founders that have signed a pledge to vote for Harris in November.
Inclusion alpha
As Trump was peaking in popularity in June, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya and other Silicon Valley VCs lined up behind the former president.
At least part of Andreessen’s and Horowitz’s case for Trump was in defense of small startups, saying that “little tech” is essential to America’s technology future and economy, and thus “a first class political issue on par with any other.” Trump, they have argued, would not stifle startups through regulations and taxes.
Harris’s broader economic message, of an economy that works for all, has energized a more diverse set of investors and founders focused on what DeBerry called “growth lying fallow on the edges.”
“This really isn’t a conversation about big tech versus little tech, because that sounds like it’s about large versus small,” DeBerry said in response to a question from ImpactAlpha’s Lynnley Browning, who moderated a panel on the call. “What this really is, is a conversation about ‘take all tech’ versus ‘tech that serves the entire population’.”
“We’re not opposed to profits,” DeBerry continued. “We’re not opposed to high growth. That’s what drives us.”
“What we are opposed to is building a regulatory regime that guts our government and pulls out safety so that we so the system can’t withstand itself and it collapses, and therefore the wealth in the system is aggregated to only a few.”
Mac Conwell of RareBreed Ventures in Baltimore told Browning that “As a VC, yes, regulations suck, right? They get in the way. They make things harder, but they also make sure that this system doesn’t collapse.”
Economic traction
VCs love… slide decks. Bloomberg Beta’s Roy Bahat’s pitch deck reminded the venture capital crowd of the Biden-Harris team’s economic traction: stock market highs (until recent weeks), low unemployment, new manufacturing jobs and record new-business applications. Harris cast the tie-breaking vote “to build large-scale factories for semiconductors, electric vehicles, batteries, solar cells and more,” Bahat noted.
Other pluses in Bahat’s deck: She’s normal. She will make the country stable. She will help startups thrive.
For VCs, it often comes down to the team, and the VCs applauded their candidate’s choice of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as a running mate. “The team is amazing,” said Bahat, displaying a slide with their combined credentials. “Howard University, Army National Guard, Attorney General of the State, serving in the House of Representatives as senator, Governor, first female vice president. You can’t get logos better than this.”
La Keisha Landrum Pierre of L.A.-based Emmeline Ventures advocated for patient capital, saying that “growth for growth’s sake, without guardrails,” was a recipe for failure. “The job of us as venture capitalists is to see an opportunity, to see an economic unlock that everyone else is not paying attention to.”
“What really resonates for me about the future that Kamala would help us unlock is that we can actually invest in the future that we know is possible.” The alternative, she said, “prevents that.”
The campaign said Harris’s economic agenda “is about generating growth and innovation by giving America’s middle-class more opportunities and more financial security, and by investing in expanding the productive capacity of our economy.”
Billionaire VC Ron Conway, who has known Harris for 20 years said she is “eminently qualified to be president of this country.”
Then added, “We don’t need to do due diligence on this candidate.”
