The Tech Industry and VC Case for Kamala Harris for 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.