Donald Trump, who used to be president, chose Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate on Monday. Trump is trying to get back the office he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
Vance is best known for his autobiography, “Hillbilly Elegy.” He worked as a venture investor for many years before becoming a U.S. senator in 2022.
Vance went to San Francisco after graduating from Yale Law School in 2013. There, he worked as a principal at Mithril Capital, a fund that Peter Thiel and Ajay Royan help to start. Mithril raised two funds, one for $540 million in 2013 and another for $850 million in 2017. In 2016, Thiel was politically involved and backed Trump’s first presidential campaign. He also helped fund Vance’s Senate campaign. However, he has said he won’t be giving money to any Republicans in the 2024 election.
Vance left Mithril in 2017 and became a managing director at Revolution, which is based in Washington, D.C. and is run by Steve Case. His wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, got a job as a Supreme Court clerk, which made him move.
Vance helped Case start Rise of the Rest while he was at Revolution. This was a plan to invest in startups outside of the big U.S. tech hubs. At Revolution, the Republican candidate for vice president led deals into Michigan-based Aatmunn, a company that makes software and wearable tech to help construction workers stay safe on the job. He also helped fund and served on the board of AppHarvest, a new indoor farming company based in Kentucky. The company went public through a SPAC in 2021 but filed for bankruptcy in 2023.
Vance didn’t do much with Revolution’s second Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, which closed in 2019 with $150 million in committed capital. At the same time, he was working hard to get money for his own company, Narya Capital, which is based in Cincinnati. By the beginning of 2020, the new company had raised $93 million from limited partners like Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Eric Schmidt for a fund that aimed to raise $125 million. Axios says that biotech businessman Vivek Ramaswamy was one of Narya’s limited partners. Ramaswamy later ran for president as a Republican and was seen as one of the top candidates to be Trump’s vice president.
Like Rise of the Rest, Narya’s main goal is to help startups in U.S. places that don’t have enough support. It’s not clear if Steve Case backed Narya’s first fund, but the founder of AOL has publicly distanced himself from Vance’s work and political ideas.
Steve Case told TechCrunch in September 2022, “I haven’t talked to [Vance] since he said he was running for Senate last year, and I haven’t backed that campaign.”
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Vance stopped running for Narya after he won the Senate race. Colin Greenspon, one of the founders of Narya and a previous partner at the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund and managing director at Mithril, is in charge of the company right now. A legal filing sent to the SEC in late 2022 says that the company is in the process of raising its $125 million second fund.
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