It started with an “angry tweet.”
“To launch ‘democracy venture capital,'” Graham & Walker founder and general partner Leslie Feinzaig wrote on X in late July. “Who’s in there?”
It turns out More than 1,300 “techies,” including 750 accredited investors, joined a group that came to be known as “Kamara Ventures.” On Wednesday, the group raised $150,000 during an hour-long Zoom call with as many as 600 people in support of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential bid.
About $100,000 of that came from 97 donors and another $50,000 from a match by SV Angel founder and managing partner Ron Conway, who helped launch the call. The group, which initially worked to get venture capital investors to sign a pledge to support Harris, has raised about $25,000, bringing its total raised to date to about $176,000.
Donations surged during the call, which also included prominent Democratic donor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. About half an hour later, enough donations poured in to unlock the $50,000 threshold for Conway’s contest.
Here’s the latest trend in political organizing on Zoom
It’s the latest in a trend of political organizing on Zoom, including a massive call from Harris shortly after entering a race that included tens of thousands of black women. Later, there was the tongue-in-cheek “Harris’ white guy.” Feinzaig noted that the VC call was “smaller than that call, even though there is a high degree of overlap between the two groups.”
The tone of the call was both positive and somewhat defiant. Several venture capitalists have made side comments about Andreessen Horowitz — whether by name or not — after its founder recently announced his support for former President Donald Trump. The group seemed irritated during Wednesday’s call that the views of some prominent members of the industry have come to be seen as representative of the political leanings of the venture capital community.
When Feinzaig sent the “angry tweet,” she said she was “like many of you, frustrated with the growing sentiment that VC and all my colleagues are going MAGA, and I just feel like they’re not speaking to me. For me, I feel like I want my voice to be heard, and more importantly, I feel like the loudest voices are not speaking to the hundreds of founders I speak to every month.
In July, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz published a blog called “The Little Tech Agenda,” in which they argued that “bad government policy is now targeting Little Tech No. 1 threat,” they basically think Little Tech is a startup. “We support or oppose politicians regardless of party affiliation or their positions on other issues,” they wrote. Just weeks later, it became clear they would support Trump in the election.
“Companies pushing this framework would lead us to believe that people who support Kamala Harris are anti-capitalist,” Stephen DeBerry, founder and managing partner of Bronze Investments, said on a conference call. “It doesn’t make any sense. We’re not against profits. We’re not against high growth. That’s what drives us, that’s why we’re here. We’re not against billionaires — there are several billionaires on this call. Millionaires. What we are against is a regulatory system that bogs down our government and loses its security, causing the system to overwhelm and collapse, so that the wealth in the system only gets concentrated into the hands of a few and we become like Russia. The same oligopoly society.
Mac Conwell, managing partner of RareBreed Ventures, questioned the meaning of “differentiated technology.”
“We’re all supposed to work together, but what they’re really saying is, we don’t want to work with you, we want to work here,” Cornwell said. “We don’t need any rules. We want to grow for the sake of growing, without any guardrails and regulation. As a venture capitalist, yes, regulations suck. Right? They hinder things and make things more difficult. But They also ensure that the system does not collapse.
Venture capitalist Roy Bahat, who leads Bloomberg Beta, shared a startup-style pitch deck with the group to support Harris’ campaign. A slide showing the competition matrix. On the Y-axis are “stable” and “unstable”. On the X-axis are “past” and “future”. In the “Unstable” and “Past” quadrants, Bhagat puts the image of former President Donald Trump in the “Make America Great Again” hat. In the “stable” and “future” quadrants? Coconut emoji.
“The competition is funded by Andreessen Horowitz and a few other funds, but we all know that more capital doesn’t necessarily make a difference,” Bahat said. “It’s this plus an execution plan.”
Vanzag said she is not a registered Democrat or Republican, and as a naturalized citizen, her “personal politics actually don’t fully align with American politics.” But when she looks at an investment, she asks, “What would the world look like if this company was wildly successful?”
“No matter where you are on the political spectrum, ask yourself, what would the world look like if these candidates were wildly successful?” Feinzag said. “I think there’s a vision that’s exciting. And then there’s a vision about this that’s actually pretty scary.
