Trump’s VP candidate JD Vance has long ties to Silicon Valley, and was a VC himself

Former President Donald Trump picked Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate on Monday, as he runs to reclaim the office he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020.

Vance, who’s best known for his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” spent years as a venture capitalist before leaving the industry when elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022.

After graduating from Yale Law School in 2013, Vance moved to San Francisco, where he was a principal at Mithril Capital, a fund co-founded by Peter Thiel and Ajay Royan. Mithril raised two funds, a $540 million and an $850 million vehicle in 2013 and 2017, respectively. Thiel was publicly active in politics in 2016, backing Trump’s first presidential campaign, and helped fund Vance’s Senate race, but has said he’s not planning to donate to any Republicans in the 2024 election.

In 2017, Vance left Mithril and joined Steve Case’s Washington, D.C.-based Revolution as a managing director. His move came when his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, landed a role as a Supreme Court clerk.

While at Revolution, Vance helped Case launch Rise of the Rest, a strategy focused on investing in startups outside the main U.S. tech hubs. At Revolution, the Republican VP nominee led deals into Michigan-based Aatmunn, a startup that develops software and wearable devices for on-the-job safety for construction workers. He also backed and served on the board of Kentucky-based AppHarvest, an indoor farming startup, that went public via a SPAC in 2021 but filed for bankruptcy protection in 2023.

However, Vance didn’t play an active role in Revolution’s second Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, which closed in 2019 with $150 million in capital commitments. Around the same time, he was focused on raising funds for his own firm, Cincinnati-based Narya Capital. By early 2020, the new firm raised $93 million for a fund targeting $125 million from limited partners including Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Eric Schmidt. Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who later joined the race as a Republican presidential nominee and was believed to be one of the front-runners for Trump’s VP, was also one of Narya’s limited partners, according to Axios.  

Narya, just like Rise of the Rest, is primarily focused on backing startups in underserved areas of the U.S. While it’s unclear if Steve Case backed Narya’s first fund, the AOL founder has publicly distanced himself from Vance’s political views and career. 

“I have not talked to [Vance] since he announced last year that he was running for Senate, and I’ve not supported that campaign,” Steve Case told TechCrunch in September of 2022.

After winning the Senate race, Vance stepped back from running Narya. The firm is currently managed by Narya’s co-founder, Colin Greenspon, a former partner at the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund and former managing director at Mithril. The firm is in the process of raising its $125 million second fund, according to a regulatory filing submitted to the SEC in late 2022.