Key members of Kamala Harris’s inner circle are deploying across the country for fundraisers, private meetings and meals as part of an aggressive charm offensive to win back the support of the tech industry leaders who say they felt burned by President Joe Biden.
The overtures are intended to shore up support within a sector that was once viewed as a Democratic stronghold and helped propel Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. In this election season, some Silicon Valley power players have flocked to the Republican Party as former president Donald Trump campaigns alongside the most vocal and visible of them all, Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
The focus of Harris’s push is to convince top tech executives and investors that the vice president will chart her own course on regulating Big Tech and cryptocurrency. The engagement has raised uncomfortable questions for Harris as she faces pressure from tech donors to take a more business-friendly approach to antitrust enforcement and cryptocurrency — as well as wariness from party liberals that she will go easy on the sector.
The candidate is steering clear of making the hard promises many tech people want — including to dismiss Biden appointees the industry sees as hostile — people familiar with the meetings say, but leaders in Silicon Valley say the courtship is working.
“They have been public about wanting to take input wherever they can regardless of party affiliation,” Mark Cuban, the “Shark Tank” investor who has served as a key emissary between the campaign and the business community, said of Harris’s team. “That is 180 degrees from where it had been.”
The pace has been unrelenting. On Monday, Tony West, Harris’s brother-in-law and Uber’s chief legal officer, visited New York for meetings with business leaders, including Fred Wilson, a prominent cryptocurrency investor. On Friday, West appeared at a Washington fundraiser co-chaired by Karen Dunn, a key Harris adviser who is representing Google in court against the Biden Justice Department. On Saturday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) will appear at a Harris fundraiser in Seattle co-hosted by David Zapolsky, the general counsel of Amazon, which is also locked in antitrust litigation with the Democratic-controlled Federal Trade Commission.
Tickets for the fundraisers can run as high as $50,000 a person, according to one invitation viewed by The Washington Post, suggesting that the tech sector figures prominently in Harris’s record-breaking haul of $1 billion in campaign contributions.
West, former California Department of Justice official Brian E. Nelson and prominent California fundraisers Kristin Bertolina Faust and Stefanie Roumeliotes have played a core role in orchestrating the outreach. They have huddled with tech executives in company offices, on video chats, in living rooms and in hotel rooms during the Democratic National Convention. Attendees say they see the feedback from these sessions reflected in the campaign’s comments on digital assets, artificial intelligence and small-business policies.
Harris and West have had discussions with Ben Horowitz, a longtime Democratic donor who endorsed Trump in July but earlier this month said he and his wife would donate “significant” funds to groups supporting Harris.
This article is based on interviews with a dozen tech executives and Democratic officials who have been involved in the engagements, as well as copies of fundraiser invitations viewed by The Post.
The Harris campaign doesn’t have an easy sell. Many prominent tech investors have criticized Biden for adopting antitrust policies that they say have chilled acquisitions, for taking a tough line on artificial intelligence that they say could harm innovation and for bringing aggressive enforcement actions against cryptocurrency. After years of coziness between the tech sector and the Obama White House, many top investors felt ignored by the Biden administration as it cracked down on the tech industry.
Before Harris’s outreach effort, the party was at risk of losing the support of the next generation of start-up founders, said a cryptocurrency executive who attended a meeting with West and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.
“They’ve grown up with a Democratic Party that, on average, considers tech entrepreneurship and the [venture capital] ecosystem nothing to celebrate,” the executive said, giving them the “sentiment that the Democratic Party just doesn’t value what they’re pursuing with their life.”
There are some signs that is changing. Horowitz has said that while Trump is the stronger candidate for fostering the start-ups he calls “Little Tech,” he is optimistic following conversations with West and Harris that he could work with a Harris administration on tech, too, said a person familiar with the outreach, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private conversations. Others have expressed similar hopes that Harris’s family ties to the industry and her decades of personal relationships with tech executives as a California native will at least give them a line to the Oval Office.
Yet the vice president has to hold together a delicate political coalition that includes liberal Democrats who have railed against corporate concentration and called for the breakup of major tech companies like Google, Amazon and others. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Mindful of that, the Harris campaign has avoided specifics on how her tech policies will diverge from Biden’s. West and Nelson, who until August served as an undersecretary in the Treasury Department, usually tell executives that they are in listening mode in their private meetings, which typically include five to 10 executives in a particular sector of the tech industry, such as artificial intelligence, the sharing economy, biotechnology or transportation.
“So much of life with these things is, ‘Do you feel the people are actually listening to what you have to say?’” said a person who has attended some of the meetings, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private encounters. “If there was a tech leader available, Tony and Brian made themselves available and accessible.”
The Harris campaign has sought Silicon Valley’s input on its policies. Just before Harris spoke in late September before the Economic Club of Pittsburgh, West huddled with leaders of the crypto industry, who told him they questioned whether a Harris administration would be “just as hostile toward emerging tech” as they viewed Biden to be, said one attendee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting. The executives proposed that Harris could forge a different path by referring to crypto as a frontier technology, like AI.
In her speech, Harris promised that the United States under her administration would “remain dominant in AI and quantum computing, blockchain and other emerging technologies,” making her first clear nod to the technology behind crypto.
Harris has, however, sidestepped touchy questions of central importance to many in Silicon Valley. One is whether she would retain Federal Trade Commission ChairLina Khan,whose aggressive antitrust enforcement against Meta, Microsoft and Amazon has sparked backlash from prominent tech donors, including Reid Hoffman, who called on Harris to replace her if she is elected. Another lightning rod for many tech executives is Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, who has brought numerous enforcement actions against crypto markets and compared them to the Wild West.
Executives have proposed that Harris come out and say she will get rid of both officials if elected. West and Nelson have responded strategically, executives recount, saying Harris would make her own decisions as president and reminding tech executives that she ran against Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) in the 2020 Democratic primaries, when Warren made antitrust action against the tech industry a wedge issue.
Being more specific could test the party’s cohesion. Replacing enforcement officials whom big donors don’t like, said Dan Geldon, Warren’s former chief of staff, would “send a signal to every federal enforcer that if they go after the rich and powerful, they are at risk of losing their jobs.”
The Harris campaign’s fundraising schedule shows the candidate trying to appeal to the CEOs and investors within smaller companies who could benefit from greater regulation of Google and other companies.
In early October, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared at a “Little Tech for Harris” fundraiser at the home of Garry Tan, the president and chief executive of the start-up incubator Y Combinator and a Khan supporter. The event was co-hosted by Box CEO Aaron Levie and Jeremy Stoppelman, the CEO of the review company Yelp, which has brought its own antitrust lawsuit against Google.
Stoppelman described the event as “electric” and said it would be very difficult for a Harris administration not to reappoint Khan. He suggested that dropping her would be viewed as “corrupt” after key Democratic donor Reid Hoffman — the subject of multiple FTC investigations — publicly called for the move.
“If very powerful people are complaining loudly, it probably means antitrust enforcers are doing their job,” Stoppelman said in an interview. Hoffman did not respond to a request for comment.
Earlier that day, Nelson appeared at a Y Combinator alumni event, where the start-up incubator’s policy chief Luther Lowe pressed him on whether Little Tech — the smaller companies that would benefit from greater antitrust enforcement of Big Tech — would always have a seat at the table in a Harris administration. Nelson responded yes.
Levie, the Box CEO, said he planned to keep reminding his 2.5 million X followers in the final days of the campaign that Harris’s connections could be a boon to industry as AI, climate tech and biotech continue to grow and that she has “a very strong pro-business, pro-tech agenda.”