The Tech Industry and VC Case for Kamala Harris for President

I’m writing to share why I think a Kamala Harris presidency would be far better for the long-term success of the American technology industry and the startup world than the alternative—but before I make this political omelet, I need to break a few eggshells.

Marc Andreessen and his partner at A16Z, Ben Horowitz, recently went “all in” on their firm’s podcast to discuss their financial and political support for Donald Trump, which wasn’t all that surprising.

After all, they’re just a couple of rich white guys looking to get richer.

No. What I was stunned by was the weakness of their arguments. I mean, these are supposed to be the smartest guys in the room, right?

Is it possible that when Silicon Valley wades into politics to support Trump, they're not sending their best ?

They should know better than to conflate well-founded critiques of American capitalism from younger generations that will not have the educational or housing opportunities that the ones before them did with a desire to live under a Soviet or Venezuelen Communist dictatorship.

Yet—that’s what they did.

Ben notes, “It's funny because there is this kind of like communist movement that's always kind of president in America particularly among young people and the answer to it is always just meet anybody who lived in a communist country and that'll cure you of that.

Marc adds, “Yeah…any criticism that can be leveled against a capitalist society or economy you can just 10x it and you know whatever it is whether it's environmental damage or quality of life or whatever it's just worse under communism.”

You know what’s not funny, guys? We live in a country where the top 1% of Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. We spend more on healthcare than any other high-income country, yet we have the lowest life expectancy and highest suicide rates among the 11 wealthiest nations. A full-time worker earning the minimum wage cannot afford a two-bedroom rental in any state, county, or city in the country, and they can afford a one-bedroom rental in a mere 7 percent of all U.S. counties.

Given this, any criticism of unbridled American capitalism may just, you know, have a point. You don’t have to want to tear down the whole system to think that it can be improved and made to work better for more people.

They know that—and they just don’t care. They just want their tax break.

Watching them read Trump’s rewrite of the RNC platform like fanboys, I really struggled to figure out whether they were being insanely naive or completely unscrupulous.

“He's he rewrote the the Republican National Committee platform for for this convention and he he rewrote it he rewrote it himself and so it's it's a very clear much more simplified version.”

So close. So so close. Guys, it’s simple because he doesn’t have the intellectual horsepower or attention span for complex national policy.

"I'm just going to read straight from it so this is chapter 3, ‘Build the greatest economy in history!’”

Marc’s response:

Jeez… Why didn’t the Democrats think of that? Oh wait… they did. Unemployment hit an all-time low and the stock market hit an all-time high all while Joe Biden was President.

What’s next? End homelessness by “Making sure there’s no one without homes?” Create peace by, “Stopping war?”

“Bullet five …Champion Innovation… which are words only coming out of his side right now.”

Sorry, but that’s just not true. The current administration is spending billions on STEMM education support, and earmarking 10 U.S. regions emerging as innovation ecosystems for up to $2 billion in innovation funding.

“Pave the way for future economic Greatness by Leading the world in emerging Industries—industry number one crypto… We will ensure every American has a right to self custody of the digital assets and transact free from government surveillance and control…”

[Women’s bodies have entered the chat.]

Sorry, but you don’t get to be a Johnny Come Lately on crypto because you think that rich venture capitalists are going to support you when you don’t stand for any of the principles of crypto. How long before decentralization becomes a serious threat to financial institutions that start lining Trump’s pocket and he suddenly does an about-face on the people-powered crypto economy?

Vitalik Buterin, a Canadian computer programmer and co-founder of Ethereum wrote:

“The goals that motivate people to build and participate in blockchain applications often have implications outside of technology as well: if you care about freedom, you might want the government to respect your freedom to have the kind of family you want. If you care about building more efficient and equitable economies, you might want to look at the implications of that in housing. And so on.”

These guys aren’t freedom lovers for everything and everyone. They just want to be free to make their buck at anyone else’s expense—or in Marc’s case, free to influence a central government’s zoning policy to prevent housing to be build in his backyard, but more on that later.

Buterin further writes:

“If you see a politician being crypto-friendly, one thing you can do is look up their views on crypto itself five years ago. Similarly, look up their views on related topics such as encrypted messaging five years ago.”

Do these guys not remember the Trump administration wanting a backdoor to all private communications and a ban on warrant-proof encryption? Transact free from government surveillance and control my butt. Is this argument lazy, stupid, or completely disingenuous?

No more lazy and stupid than Ben likening the regulation of AI to when “the automobile is coming out and we think that somebody's going to make an automobile that drives 500 miles an hour nobody can control, so we're going to just outlaw cars now.”

Guys, we regulate cars around safety issues and pretty heavily, too—reducing the rate of automobile-related death by 95% per car since 1913 and more recently thanks to stricter drunk driving laws, increased seat belt use, and the advent of crashworthiness standards for vehicles.

Most high school debaters could make this counterargument.

Further bad arguments can be made around their “final straw”—the Biden Administration’s proposal for a 25% wealth tax on the unrealized gains of anyone with over $100 million. In explaining how this will kill the startup industry, they get the basics of how it works wrong—leaving out exceptions for illiquidity, the five-year amortization, the fact that you can also write off unrealized losses, and not factoring in the obvious factors of vesting, common stock 409a discounts. Not only that, they fail to mention the certainty that banks would undoubtedly line up with new founder-friendly products to cover short-term tax liabilities in the same way they’ve historically lined up to lend unicorn founders money against their private shares.

I’m not saying I favor this proposal exactly as described, but I’m not going to pearl clutch over it the same way as two billionaires who accuse the administration of “lying” because “it’s marketed as a tax on billionaires” but the threshold is actually only $100mm.

Cry. Me. A. Hundred. Million. Rivers.

Most Americans support some form of a wealth tax. Almost four in five Americans, including majorities of Democrats, independents, and Republicans, support raising taxes on the wealthy and large corporations. Knowing that, they dare to suggest that tax incentives for long-term investment should be a concern for anyone that, oh… to pick a completely random example out of thin air… cares about the homelessness problem, since bad policy would cause people not to want to build new housing for people.

Ben brings this up and Marc nods with a straight face as if he didn’t rail against new multifamily housing construction in his own backyard in a public comment to the Atherton City Council, despite the Bay Areas astronomical growth in the cost of housing:

“Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.”

But yeah, it’s bad tax structure that causes homelessness—not billionaire NIMBYs who wield their influence on local city councils.

Listening to these two for 90 minutes, I was expecting something along the lines of, “Yeah, he says racist and outlandish things, and yes, he stokes grievance among his supporters that often turns to hate online and off, but here are some important policy choices that we feel we need to be on this side of, and we think fears of about the end of democracy are overblown.”

It’s the least you can do when your candidate says, publicly, that this will be the last election you’ll ever have to worry about casting a vote in.

I have to admit to being super curious about how the conversation plays out at home for Ben when this is the guy you want to be President:

Does he not hear the way Trump says “Black” or how he handled being questioned by a Black female journalist—berating her for being “nasty” when all she was doing was asking him to stand behind the litany of public comments he’s made?

But enough about Trump and his supporters.

Let’s talk about Kamala Harris. Let’s talk about a woman who, as a child of two immigrants, completely understands the contributions that immigrants make to our country. If we’re going to talk about tech, we need to talk about human talent before we even get into things like AI.

Not only have nearly 45% of Fortune 500 companies in 2023 been founded by immigrants or their children, but the majority of billion-dollar startups have at least one immigrant founder. Kamala Harris is our best chance at sensible immigration policy and reform—because she starts from a position of understanding the potential of the people who want to come here to learn and to work.

There is no tech industry, and hell, no economy if the GOP has its way and starts mass deportations and draconian limits on immigration. The world’s smartest people will not want to come to the US to build the next generation of tech startups here if they have to fear getting ripped out of their neighborhoods or separated from their families for any reason.

Kamala Harris is also not mounting a war against our institutions of higher learning, where some of our best and brightest founders are coming from, as well as our most cutting-edge research. She will continue the Biden administration policy of investing in STEMM, regional innovation centers and in new clean infrastructure.

Some in the tech industry would have you believe that any attempt to stop and assess new tech before we can make sure it is safe for consumers, can’t be manipulated to undermine our national interests, or doesn’t wind up in the control of too few entities is somehow inherently anti-innovation. These are the same folks that look the other way when social media is used to subvert elections, incite violence in Myanmar, and is proving to isolate and depress younger generations.

I believe that we can innovate responsibly. I think it can be time to build without it being time to build on top of the same people that get built on top of all the time with no stake in the outcome. Don’t tell me crypto is the way to get everyone a stake in the outcome when you don’t support liveable wages and you’re getting behind an inherently anti-worker, anti-union platform.

Kamala Harris will make sure that access to healthcare, for everyone, is never the deciding factor in starting a new company. Do you know how many smart people want to bring new ideas to life in the form of new companies, but can’t—not because they can’t go without a lower salary for a while, but because they can’t access affordable health insurance?

How about childcare’s impact on innovation? In the United States, women have been earning more bachelor's and master's degrees than men for several years, yet their ability to impact the economy in innovative ways is stifled by a lack of access to affordable childcare.

Reproductive freedom, which Kamala Harris will fight to restore, is critical to innovation as well—and this is a topic I previously wrote about:

It is a "fiduciary responsibility to support a woman’s right to choose when she wants to have a family, if at all. To have anything less is to artificially hold back returns for the whole asset class, which betrays the responsibility VCs have to their Limited Partners.

I’m not going to argue that you can’t build or join a tremendously successful startup and have a family at the same time—but I will most certainly argue that it’s nearly impossible to do without a lot of planning. Unplanned children, given the sorry state of childcare in this country, cost women educational attainment—shrinking the talent pool of both founders and startup employees.

If startup success and asset class performance correlate with having the best and brightest available and fully prepared for the kind of work that building a startup requires, you’re going to shrink that talent pool unless they can choose when it works for them to start a family.

The same is true for men, too. Unplanned pregnancies can cause men to leave the startup talent pool because they’re not able to take on early stage risk with either a new family at a young age, or additional family members they didn’t budget for later.

In an ideal world, we’d fully fund childcare and healthcare so that the tradeoffs between having and raising kids and getting an education or working harder on career goals weren’t so steep.”

This isn’t something Donald Trump, who inherited massive wealth from his father and never had to worry a day in his life about being able to afford to see a doctor or being able to pay someone to watch his kids, will ever understand.

The United States has proven to be a resilient economic engine—but it isn’t so resilient that it can withstand the impact of climate change or another ball dropped on response to a future pandemic. In fact, climate and healthcare tech are two areas we absolutely need to be investing in.

Kamala Harris will never confuse weather and climate and she won’t question the dedication and ethics of the top doctors who dedicate decades to the treatment of disease and the advancement of science.

If the United States is going to continue to solve tough problems with technology, we have to have the ability to collaborate—to work together as a diverse population. That starts at the top, by example.

Kamala Harris represents the best American story we can write—the daughter of two PhD students from different cultures who came here to study. She went on to serve her fellow citizens for decades in the legal system and then in national elected office, keeping people safe and fighting for justice.

She even gets high marks from her husband’s first wife, who considers her a dedicated co-parent and a valued part of her family. This is the kind of person you would co-found a startup with—not a guy who destroys the careers of just about everyone who works alongside him.

The people who simply don’t get paid by Trump comparatively consider themselves lucky.