President Joe Biden has lost the confidence of some of Silicon Valley’s loudest voices, who argue that Donald Trump should be the clear choice for the tech industry.
But with Biden’s withdrawal from the race, there’s a chance for Kamala Harris to regain the industry’s support by offering an olive branch and distancing herself from some of Biden’s policies.
Harris, deeply rooted in the Bay Area, has a roster of influential tech donors, including Ron Conway, John Doerr, Jony Ive, Marc Benioff and Sheryl Sandberg. Many heavyweights have already pledged support, and there is potential to sway the undecided.
“It would be very impactful for her to say she thinks the innovation economy is really important,” said Adam Kovacevich, founder of Chamber of Progress, a tech lobbying firm. “Just to acknowledge that fact would go a long way. That doesn’t mean she has to side with tech on everything.”
The Biden administration sought to rein in the potential monopoly power of tech giants through the Federal Trade Commission and impose tighter controls on cryptocurrencies through the Securities and Exchange Commission — leading some to perceive the White House as hostile to technological progress. The president’s distance from Silicon Valley, both personally and professionally, doesn’t help.
“Biden had no real roots in the Valley and very few relationships,” Kovacevich said.
Harris’ boosters see her candidacy as an opportunity for a pivot. “Bring this back to the White House,” Eniac Ventures investor Nihal Mehta texted, with a photo of former President Barack Obama and Elon Musk during a visit to SpaceX.
Mehta plans to host several fundraisers for Harris this fall with his wife, Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code. Harris should “reconnect to all the innovators in the tech industry,” Mehta added, including Musk, whom Biden criticized in a recent tweet.
Mehta hopes Harris will hold roundtables with prominent executives in artificial intelligence, including those at Nvidia, Anthropic and Hugging Face. As vice president, Harris took on the role of AI czar and spearheaded the Biden administration’s sweeping executive order calling for voluntary standards around safe development of the technology.
It has been mere days since Biden dropped out and Harris stepped into the limelight, so the fundraising wars are just starting to heat up. Billions of dollars of tech wealth are in play.
Trump’s vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, is headlining a fundraiser Monday in Palo Alto, according to an invitation tweeted by a New York Times reporter. Vance, a former venture capitalist, once worked for Peter Thiel and has been claimed by the members of the influential “All-In” podcast as a member of their clique, a group of tech investors that has skewed to the right in recent years.
A fresh start?
Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, general partners at Andreessen Horowitz, said on their podcast last week that they thought Trump would be more helpful than Biden when it comes to regulation of crypto and AI. “The future of our business, the future of technology, new technology and the future of America is literally at stake, so here we are. And for little tech, we think Donald Trump is actually the right choice,” Horowitz said.
The Harris campaign may be getting the message. Billionaire Mark Cuban told Decrypt he had received questions from her campaign about crypto, the publication reported Tuesday. However, it’s still unclear whether the regulatory scrutiny the industry has bristled at under SEC chair Gary Gensler would relax on her watch.
Harris’ relationship with the tech industry has evolved since her time as San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general. In those roles, she made combating cyberbullying and ensuring online privacy key initiatives and worked to stem the use of tech platforms to share sexually explicit images or videos of individuals without their consent. Notably, she did not support calls for breaking up Big Tech companies, instead advocating for regulation that ensures consumers’ privacy is not compromised.
Harris has similarly maintained a middle ground in the Biden administration, saying in a November speech about AI that she and the president “reject the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or advance innovation. We can and we must do both.”
But there’s policy, and then there are hurt feelings. At least part of the discontent toward the Biden administration comes from a feeling that while the tech industry has been a huge driver for the economy, its executives and the wealth they helped create have been vilified by the left.
Indeed, Horowitz lamented on the podcast that he and Andreessen had tried and failed to meet with Biden. Andreessen added that he previously endorsed Obama and Hillary Clinton and had met with a number of presidents.
Musk, who endorsed Trump after the former president’s assassination attempt, has made clear he felt personally alienated by the Biden administration. His key example was when the White House held up General Motors, rather than Tesla, as a leader in the electric vehicle industry.
Musk tweeted that Tesla hadn’t been invited to White House events about the EV industry and once wrote that the Biden administration had “done everything it can to sideline & ignore Tesla, even though we have made twice as many EVs as the rest of the US industry combined.”
The tech veepstakes
One factor that could color how Silicon Valley perceives Harris is her choice of running mate. Just as Trump chose a former venture capitalist with close ties to tech, Harris has the chance to use her VP pick to bolster her bona fides in the industry.
Among the potential picks is Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who recently vetoed a bill allowing self-driving cars on state roads while signing into law tax breaks for crypto miners.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who has received donations from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Ripple Labs founder Chris Larsen, has signed an executive order on generative AI use by government employees.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who raised funds from prominent Silicon Valley executives during his 2020 presidential run, is another possibility. He has connections with figures like Hoffman and investors that include Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and Sarah Tavel of Benchmark.
Buttigieg was the 2020 candidate of choice for Palantir Technologies adviser Jacob Helberg, who is married to prominent venture capitalist Keith Rabois and reportedly donated $1 million this year to efforts to reelect Trump.
Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, one of the architects of the CHIPS Act, which provided billions of dollars for U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, is also seen as a strong contender.