JD Vance, The VC Veep ... or is he

He's weird, he's the hand picked agent of the tech illuminati, and he's a terrible candidate. I share the intro to Bill Cohan's latest in Puck on JD Vance.

One attribute about the alleged couch rapist, I mean JD Vance, that is often touted is his tenure as a VC¹. And sure, he did cycle through the Peter Thiel ecosystem, joining the extremely creepy fuck Blake Masters, failed Senate candidate in Arizona².

The Silicon Valley techbro illuminati all circled the wagons and bent the ear of the mango rhino enough to select JD Vance.

And the relative lack of vetting is beginning to bite Trump and his top advisors in the arse. But beyond the weirdness, there are plenty of things that make you go “hmmmm”.

Sundays are when the Puck News newsletter, Dry Powder by Bill Cohan, drops, a twice a week column where he tells the inside-baseball of money and major media business matters. In fact, he is the primary reason I pay Puck $100 a year, his opinions are that good.

Here’s a gift link to his latest where he talks deeply about Bill Ackman’s Pershing vehicle. But the email that comes from Puck has some quick takes at the top, things that you can’t read unless you subscribe. So, sorry Bill, I am going to quote your entire take on JD Vance here. I did not write this, but I am cribbing from a great, William Cohan.

The phony Vance investor narrative: Kudos to The Wall Street Journal for digging up J.D. Vance’s venture capital and SPAC track record. It’s as inexplicable and brief as his political career. According to the Journal, Vance spent five years as a venture capitalist at two firms before starting his own firm, Narya Capital Management, in Ohio. (He and his partner raised $120 million, mostly from the likes of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Eric Schmidt.) After graduating from Yale Law School, in 2013, Vance moved to San Francisco to try to become an entrepreneur, an atypical path for a law school graduate. He tried to get a job with Thiel’s firm but it wasn’t hiring. He somehow then became the chief operating officer at a small biotech company. (How does that happen?) He pitched the company as an investment to Thiel on several occasions, the Journal reported. Three years later, in 2016, the year Hillbilly Elegy was published, he joined Thiel’s firm as a “junior investor,” which seems like a hood ornament position.

He only worked for Thiel’s firm for a year and then—again, somehow—got a job working for Steve Case’s firm, Revolution, where he was tasked with identifying overlooked investment opportunities in the heartland. According to the Journal, during his two years at Revolution, he was the “lead partner” or “co-lead” on 14 investments. (That strikes me as a lot of deals to do in a two-year period; sounds like Revolution is being overly generous with credit.)

One of his investments at Revolution, AppHarvest, a Kentucky-based indoor farming company, later merged with a SPAC, Novus Capital, giving AppHarvest a short-lived valuation of around $1 billion. In July 2023, AppHarvest filed for bankruptcy protection. Two months later, the company’s assets were sold and the bankruptcy plan was confirmed. Vance invested in AppHarvest twice—first at Revolution and then at his own firm, Narya. He also was an AppHarvest board member. At Revolution, Vance also invested in defense tech startup Anduril Industries and A.I. company Pryon, according to the Journal. He joined Pryon’s board in 2019.

According to an investor report, obtained by the Journal, as of March 2023, Narya returned to investors a multiple of invested capital of 1.67x and an internal rate of return of 24.35 percent. Nothing shabby about that, although certainly not the astronomical returns that are so often associated with successful venture capital investors. Vance left Narya in 2022 to run for the U.S. Senate. According to his Senate filings, Vance had income from Narya in 2023 of $110,146 and $121,376 in book royalties. He had $1.7 million to $3.6 million in mutual funds and owned between $100,001 and $250,000 in Bitcoin. He owns a single-family townhome in Washington that he values between $500,001 and $1 million, a net worth of around $5 million, about right for a onetime venture capitalist waiting for his ship to come in.

What this tells us that whilst JD Vance claims to be a VC, he did it only for a short period of time, and oh, he really didn’t spend any serious time in this space. He’s more like a cat toy for the likes of Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen.

And they clearly made a full court press to get their JD on the ticket, in the presumption that he will whisper to Trump about Crypto, AI, and keeping tech unregulated.

Thus, JD Vance wasn’t chosen to broaden the ticket, or to sew up support in a key swing state (Ohio is crimson red), but instead as a trojan horse bet by the Silicon Valley mafia who are betting that the obese, and completely out of shape dotard Trump will shuffle off this mortal coil, thus placing one of their own in the presidency.

And that should scare the ever-living fuck out of normal people. You don’t need to talk about the rumors of his carnal knowledge of a Chesterfield, or his browser history of looking for aroused dolphins. No, you can talk about how he would be all in on removing the scant guardrails that exist on tech, making Silicon Valley the playground for the libertarian tech-bros. They would be perfectly fine with fascism, as long as they were in the catbird seat.

Vote Harris in the fall to avoid this catastrophe

1. VC is code for Venture Capitalist, essentially a dude with more money than any human should be endowed with, who makes investments in business ideas in the hope that it becomes valuable, thus allowing them to have even more money to invest in more new business ideas, ad nauseum

2. Remember kids, you can’t spell “crazy” without R-AZ…

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