| With less than 100 days until the US presidential election, it might be no surprise that partisan fights are increasing in many circles. But, as Sarah McBride writes, it's rare for Silicon Valley to air its ugly differences this publicly. Plus: A social media ransom scheme and why Sonny Angels are everywhere. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. Please note: Our email domain is changing, which means you'll be receiving this newsletter from noreply@news.bloomberg.com. Update your contacts to ensure you continue receiving it—check out the bottom of this email for more details. Silicon Valley venture capitalists are a famously clubby group. In the world of startup investing, relationships are king—and VCs rarely publicly criticize anyone in the industry, let alone each other. At least, that's how it used to be. This week, simmering tensions have boiled over on social media, igniting a flame war between some of tech's biggest names. On X, the Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham posed the question: Is venture capitalist David Sacks "the most evil person in Silicon Valley"? (He later deleted the post.) Sacks responded by calling Graham "a bully and maybe something much worse." The exchange led to a litany of other tech names, including OpenAI's Sam Altman, publicly lining up behind either Sacks or Graham and against the other. (Altman called Graham "one of the best all-around people I've ever met.")  Sacks has endorsed and raised money for Trump. Source: Bloomberg The spat had spun out of a separate conflagration between Sacks and startup founder Parker Conrad, an outgrowth of their failed relationship at Zenefits, a startup Conrad founded. It joins some other surprisingly public beefs in Silicon Valley this month. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has been tangling with Elon Musk and Republicans in tech over their support for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Even Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, has weighed in. At the root of these disputes is Silicon Valley's flamboyant embrace of politics. For years, people in tech disdained the bureaucracy in DC, preferring to focus on building companies in faraway California. But the threat of regulation has made Washington more relevant to them. The rising political mood in the US—which has inflected everything from theme parks to pop music—has finally come for tech, too. Although political opinions have long diverged within technology circles, they tended to be held quietly and discreetly. Investors didn't want to offend potential portfolio-company entrepreneurs, and vice versa. "Silicon Valley, as a state of mind and a physical place, has become more comfortable speaking about politics," says Kate Mitchell, a former chair of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and a founder of Scale Venture Partners. "Now you wear it on your sleeve." The tension even infused the recent retreat for captains of the universe in Sun Valley, Idaho. One session featured an impromptu tussle between two members of the so-called PayPal Mafia: Republican billionaire Peter Thiel and Democratic billionaire Reid Hoffman. Thiel mockingly thanked Hoffman for funding lawsuits against Trump, thus making him a martyr, according to an account of the exchange in news outlet Puck. Hoffman responded that he wished he actually had made Trump a martyr. Hoffman later clarified: "Of course I meant nothing about any sort of physical harm or violence, which I categorically deplore."  Thiel has long supported the Republican VP pick, JD Vance. Source: Getty Images Because political wrangling and communication is a relatively new arena for VCs, "they're incredibly bad at it," says Sarah Cone, a venture capitalist at Social Impact Capital. "Still, no one is better than the tech industry at getting good at things, and I expect in a decade we'll all become sophisticated political actors. We're just in the toddler stage." Perhaps no one better exemplifies tech's turn toward partisan politics than Musk. Back in 2015, Musk said he gets involved with Washington "as little as possible," echoing the industry's widely held ethos at the time. Today, Musk is flirting with becoming a major Republican donor, frequently lampoons Democrats on X and is one of Trump's most prominent supporters. Rooted in the deep-blue San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley is still largely Democratic—but dissenting voices have become louder and more visible, exacerbating divisions. In addition to Sacks and his fellow investor, Chamath Palihapitiya, Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire, Intercom Inc. co-founder Eoghan McCabe and others have donated to the Trump campaign or attended Trump fundraisers and posted about it. And the founders of Andreessen Horowitz posted a 90-minute video discussion elaborating on their decision to back Trump. In a post on LinkedIn, VC Rob Day accused VCs of "political opportunism," writing, "We as longtime investors tend to not criticize each other. Among other reasons, we know we're all just people like any other, so who are we to judge." But he added: "This all changed last week with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz's endorsement of Trump." Scale Venture Partners' Mitchell says there have been times when VCs dabbled in Washington with positive outcomes. For example, the NVCA lobbied heavily for the 2012 legislation known as the Jobs Act, which passed. Compared with a little over a decade ago, now "people understand that policy matters to our ecosystem," she says. Even if the debate turns caustic, it's better than no debate: "The overall awareness plays to our benefit." | 
No comments:
Post a Comment