Last month, J.D. Vance flew to San Francisco to host a fundraiser for Donald Trump and then a private dinner for two dozen tech and cryptocurrency executives and investors.
The location was the palatial Pacific Heights mansion of David Sachs, an entrepreneur and podcaster whom Vance met through tech investor Peter Thiel. Vance, now 39, worked for one of Thiel’s investment firms in San Francisco in 2016.
That night, at a $300,000-per-person dinner, sitting between Sachs and another tech investor, Chamath Palihapitiya, Trump privately asked for a vote on who he would choose as his running mate. The other running mate, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, was also there, but the answer from Sachs, Palihapitiya and others was unanimous: They told Trump to pick Vance, according to two people familiar with the conversation.
Vance, the Ohio senator whom Trump picked this week as his running mate, spent less than five years in the Silicon Valley tech industry, working as a junior venture capitalist and biotech executive. But while his footprint in tech is modest, it was the formative years that underpinned Vance’s extraordinary rise within the Republican Party and will likely shape his political future.
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Vance’s work in the tech industry was crucial in cultivating connections to billionaire executives and investors, including Thiel, Sachs and Elon Musk, the owner of the social platform X. These figures repeatedly funded Vance’s political ambitions, boosting his profile with other wealthy donors and on social media and lobbying Trump to select him as his running mate.
Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, Thiel donated $15 million to support Vance’s campaign for Senate. Sachs donated $1 million to a political action committee supporting Vance’s candidacy. In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump cited Vance’s “highly successful business career in technology and finance” as one of the reasons he chose him as his running mate.
“His experience in technology has certainly influenced his thinking,” Nathan Reimer, CEO of technology policy consulting firm Fixed Gear Strategies, said of Vance. “He’s built rapport with some of the key influencers who are now aligned with Trump.”
But it’s unclear whether Trump and Vance would align their interests with Silicon Valley if elected to the White House in November. Vance has praised the Federal Trade Commission for bringing antitrust cases against some of the tech industry’s biggest companies and called for breaking up Google, calling it a “distinctly progressive technology company.”
Representatives for Vance, the Trump campaign and Sachs did not respond to requests for comment.
“JD is a great choice,” Palihapitiya said in a text message. “We will all be happier knowing he will work for all of us.”
Vance got his start in tech as a student at Yale Law School, where he met investor Thiel in 2011, after he gave a speech at Yale in which Thiel mocked the prospects of law students and suggested they would be better off spending their time in Silicon Valley.
“Peter’s lecture remains the most important moment of my time at Yale Law School,” Vance wrote in a 2020 essay for the Catholic Literary Journal.
After graduating from Yale Law School in 2013, Vance moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and worked as an executive at biotechnology company Circuit Therapeutics.
Frederick Mohr, then CEO of Circuit, said he hired Vance “because he’s a very bright guy with a great legal background, but also because we owed him a debt of gratitude to Peter,” referring to Thiel, whose venture capital firm had previously invested in one of Mohr’s companies.
Mr. Vance stayed in contact with Mr. Thiel, who wrote the blurb for Mr. Vance’s 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” Mr. Thiel also encouraged him to hire him for a role at Mithril Capital, a venture firm he co-founded, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Mr. Vance joined the firm as a principal in 2016, and one fellow investor said his colleagues remember him primarily as the person who introduced the super-sweet Big Red soda, a stark contrast to the LaCroix soda that has become an emblem of Silicon Valley culture.
Around that time, “Hillbilly Elegy” became a bestseller and Vance’s profile began to rise. While Thiel was gaining attention for his support of Trump, Vance went in a different direction, calling himself an “anti-Trump” in an interview with Charlie Rose that fall.
A few months later, Mr. Vance left the firm after clashing with Ajay Loyan, Mithril Capital’s managing partner, according to three people familiar with the matter.
“JD was a friend and a talented and valued member of the Mithril team,” Loyan said in a statement.
In 2017, Mr. Vance became a partner at Revolution, a venture firm founded by America Online co-founder Steve Case, and began working there for about 18 months, splitting his time between Ohio, where the company was based, and Washington state.
In an interview, Case said Vance “didn’t really work that much” at Revolution. Case, through a spokesman, declined to comment.
In 2020, Mr. Vance launched his own venture firm, Naria Capital, in Cincinnati. He leaned on his tech network, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, billionaire investor Marc Andreessen and Mr. Thiel, to raise $120 million. Mr. Thiel has agreed to join Naria’s leadership advisory board, according to a person familiar with the matter.
During that time, Mr. Vance became interested in backing tech platforms favored by conservatives, such as the social network Parler Inc. He advised Parler’s controlling shareholder, Rebecca Mercer, a major Republican donor, to consider investing in the company, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
Nariya ultimately did not invest in Parler, but he did invest with Thiel in Rumble, a YouTube competitor favored by conservatives, in 2021. Nariya also invested in AppHarvest, a Kentucky-based indoor farming company that went public in late 2020. AppHarvest filed for bankruptcy last year.
Around that time, Vance co-founded a network of major conservative donors with technology industry leaders called the Rockbridge Network. In July 2021, he announced he would run for Ohio’s soon-to-be vacant Senate seat. Thiel agreed to endorse him and brokered a meeting between Vance and Trump, who had asked the former president for his help.
“Like others, J.D. Vance may have said some not-so-nice things about me in the past, but I understand now, I see it clearly,” Trump said when he eventually endorsed Vance for Senate.
Since then, Thiel’s relationship with Trump has deteriorated, while Vance’s ties to the former president have strengthened. At a conference in Aspen, Colorado, last month, Thiel said he would only vote for Trump “if they put a gun to my head.”
Thiel called Trump urging him to choose Vance, two people briefed on the call said. Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate significantly increases the likelihood of Thiel backing him, two other people close to him said. After Trump named Vance as his pick on Monday, Thiel sent messages to aides expressing his excitement, the people said.
“Vance had been a friend of Thiel’s network for years,” said Crystal McKellar, a venture capitalist who worked with Vance at Mithril Capital. “Peter seemed to see something really special in Thiel and wanted to encourage it.”
Musk had recently encouraged Trump in private conversations to select Vance, and on Monday called Vance’s selection “a great decision.”
Vance has relied on Sachs, calling him “one of my closest friends” in politics at a gala this spring, after which he introduced Sachs to President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
A person familiar with Trump’s thinking said the former president was impressed by Sachs’ wealth and media profile, and that Sachs spoke at the Republican National Convention on Monday.
At a Trump fundraiser in San Francisco last month, Mr. Sachs returned the favor to Mr. Vance, who said the high-profile event, which raised $12 million for the Trump campaign, wouldn’t have happened without Mr. Vance, according to a person familiar with the matter.
“This is the man I want on Trump’s side,” Sachs wrote on X on Monday, adding, “God bless JD, God bless Trump and God bless the USA.”
This article originally appeared on nytimes.com. Read it here.
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