In Zoom party for Harris, VCs break out checkbooks and take jabs at A16Z's Trump boosters

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Thu, 08/08/2024 - 13:01

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Tech Insider

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• Tech investors raised around $135,000 for Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris over Zoom.
• Speakers included Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman, and Roy Bahat.
• The Zoom call made plenty of cloaked references to Trump's allies at the firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Tech investors are well-versed in raising money over Zoom. On Wednesday, they put their skills to work for Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris.

The group "VCs for Kamala," which published an open letter in support of Harris a week ago, held a virtual fundraising party with about 600 guests.

Ron Conway, venture's standard-bearer for the Democratic party, kicked off the call with a pledge to match donations up to $50,000.

"We don't need to do due diligence on this candidate," said Conway, adding he's known Harris for 20 years.

"This candidate is absolutely qualified and we don't need to bicker among ourselves about who's for and who's against," Conway said.

He shared a document telling investors how they can get involved, answering the age-old question, "How can I help?"

He said Emerson Collective, founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, created the guide.

Roy Bahat, the head of Bloomberg Beta, made the case for Harris as America's next president, speaking in their "common language."

He presented a pitch deck.

"She's normal," Bahat said. "She's a person who makes decisions like we do. She's going to make the country stable and the conditions that she'll create in this country will help startups to thrive."

"The competition is funded by Andreessen Horowitz and some other funds, but we all know more capital isn't necessarily the thing that makes the difference. It's that plus a plan for execution."

Twenty minutes into the call, a mystery donor contributed $25,000, bringing the funds raised to $125,000, including Conway's match.

The Zoom call had plenty of cloaked references to Trump's allies in Silicon Valley.

Mac Conwell, the Baltimore-based founder of RareBreed Ventures, noted that this group of venture investors for Harris formed "in response to a large VC firm saying they were speaking for VCs."

The founders of Andreessen Horowitz have explained their choice to support Trump came down to a few issues, including taxes and crypto regulation.

Their firm "would have us believe that folks who are backing Kamala Harris are anti-capitalist," said Stephen DeBerry, who runs the Bay Area venture firm Bronze.

"We're not opposed to profits, we're not opposed to high growth. That's what drives us," he continued. "We're not opposed to billionaires. There are several of them on this call."

"What we are opposed to is building a regulatory regime that guts our government and pulls out safeties so that the system can't withstand itself and it collapses and therefore the wealth in the system is aggregated to only a few and we become an oligopoly society like Russia," he said.

Greylock partner Reid Hoffman closed out the call with some fiery remarks.

"Part of the way that I describe Trump is he's a reality television star who is so bad at business, he could lose money running a casino," he said.

He made a case for Harris as the pro-business candidate, pointing to her capacity to solidify America's global strength and her familiarity with the needs of the tech industry.

Hoffman took a jab at the A16Z founders, saying, "people who worry about little corner cases in crypto or taxation or regulation are missing the fundamental importance of a stable, unifying force both domestically and internationally."

"Kamala Harris is definitely the blue lightsaber in this election," Hoffman said.

By the call's end, 98 investors had donated roughly $135,000 to the Harris-Walz campaign.

The next gathering of venture investors for Harris will take place on September 4, "conveniently after Burning Man," said a group organizer.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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Tags

Tech, Startups, venture-capital, vice-president-kamala-harris, 2024-election

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In Zoom party for Harris, VCs break out checkbooks and take jabs at A16Z's Trum…