More than 100 venture capitalists, including Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla and Mark Cuban, have pledged to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in the upcoming US presidential election.
Mobilized under the group VCsForKamala, the VCs are also raising money for Harris' campaign, though organizers say the effort is not intended to align with any particular political party.
According to the group's website, signing the petition represents a commitment to “strong and trusted institutions.”
“We believe that strong, credible institutions are a feature, not a flaw, and without them our industry – and every other industry – will collapse,” reads a statement on the VCsForKamala site. “That's what's at stake in this election. Everything else can be resolved through constructive dialogue with political leaders and institutions that are willing to talk to us.”
VCsForKamala, along with recent tech worker open letter campaigns like Tech for Kamala, aim to counter the perception that Silicon Valley was heavily supportive 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 Sachs have endorsed Republican presidential candidate Trump. Musk launched a new pro-Trump super PAC and Sachs spoke at the Republican National Convention. The billionaire Winklevoss twins, founders of cryptocurrency firm Gemini, also donated (in Bitcoin) to Trump's campaign.
Trump's Silicon Valley base has argued that the Republican Party, and Trump himself, are generally favorable to the startup ecosystem. Andreessen and Horowitz, for example, said they believe President Joe Biden and his administration are stifling tech companies with excessive regulation and perhaps unnecessary taxation, policies that could slow the growth of the AI and cryptocurrency sectors.
Harris has held various positions on tech regulation as California's attorney general, U.S. senator and vice president. As a California senator in 2019, she advocated for the breakup of Meta (then Facebook). Last year, she also hosted four tech CEOs — Sam Altman, Dalio Amodei, Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai — at the White House to “share their concerns about the risks associated with AI.”
Over her career, Harris has received praise and financial backing from tech industry leaders such as Box CEO Aaron Levie, Marc Benioff, Sheryl Sandberg and Jony Ive. Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs and venture capitalist John Doerr were among those who supported Harris in the last presidential election, which ended in December 2019 when she dropped out and endorsed Biden.
Harris and her allies have been waging an intense behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign to drum up support from Silicon Valley's elite who have yet to decide whether to run, and she is planning a fundraising trip to the San Francisco Bay area as early as next month, according to The New York Times.
It's proven to be a winning strategy so far: Harris is on track to raise more than $100 million from tech donors, including Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, through her campaign, political action committee and so-called “dark money” groups, according to NBC.