Former President Donald Trump on Monday picked Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate as he seeks to reclaim the job he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020.
Vance, best known for his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” worked for many years as a venture capitalist before leaving the industry after being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022.
After graduating from Yale Law School in 2013, Vance moved to San Francisco and served as a principal at Mithril Capital, a fund co-founded by Peter Thiel and Ajay Loyan. Mithril launched two funds, $540 million and $850 million, in 2013 and 2017, respectively. Thiel has been publicly politically active, backing Trump's first presidential campaign in 2016 and helping to fund Vance's Senate campaign, but has said he has no plans to donate to Republicans in the 2024 election.
In 2017, Vance left Mithril to join Steve Case's Washington, D.C.-based Revolution as managing director. His move came after his wife, Usha Chirukuri Vance, took up a position as a Supreme Court clerk.
While at Revolution, Vance helped Case launch Rise of the Rest, a strategy focused on investing in startups outside major U.S. tech hubs. At Revolution, the Republican vice presidential nominee led a deal for Michigan startup Artmun, which develops software and wearable devices for workplace safety for construction workers. He also backed and served on the board of Kentucky-based AppHarvest, an indoor farming startup that went public via a SPAC in 2021 but filed for bankruptcy protection in 2023.
But Vance didn't play an active role in Revolution's second Rise of the Rest seed fund, which closed in 2019 with $150 million in capital commitments. During the same period, he was focused on fundraising for his own firm, Cincinnati-based Naria Capital. By early 2020, the new firm had raised $93 million for a fund targeted at $125 million from limited partners including Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Eric Schmidt. Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who later entered the race as the Republican presidential nominee and was seen as one of the front-runners to be President Trump's vice presidential nominee, was also one of Naria's limited partners, according to Axios.
Narya, like Rise of the Rest, is primarily focused on supporting startups in underserved areas of the U.S. It's unclear whether Steve Case backed Narya's first fund, but the AOL founder has publicly distanced himself from Vance's political views and record.
“I [Vance] “Last year, he announced he was running for Senate, but I am not endorsing that campaign,” Steve Case told TechCrunch in September 2022.
Following his election to the Senate, Vance stepped down from running Naria. The company is now run by Naria co-founder Colin Greenspon, a former partner at Rise of the Rest Seed Fund and former managing director at Mithril. The company is in the process of raising $125 million for its second fund, according to regulatory filings with the SEC in late 2022.