I Interviewed Dozens Of Tech Executives About Trump and Thiel. Here’s What The Numbers Tell Us.
It is difficult to overstate Silicon Valley’s overwhelming disdain for Donald Trump: over 140 prominent technologists recently penned an open letter denouncing his politics, the entire well-heeled tech industry has publicly donated a paltry sum of $2,566 to his campaign and, during the early primary last year, a moderate sized poll of startup executives found not a single person who supported his nomination over Republican contenders.
For months, an unbroken string of anti-Trump attacks from Silicon Valley had propped up a theory that the nation’s most innovative people all shared a rejection of populist nationalism. Then, a fury of confused speculation followed news that one of the most respected minds in The Valley, Facebook investor Peter Thiel, would speak at Trump’s nomination.
To understand whether Thiel was simply a rogue contrarian or represented some larger underground political movement in tech, I privately spoke to a number of the industry’s wealthy conservatives and conducted an anonymous, randomized poll of startup founders.
I learned that Thiel’s brazen cowboy politicking had exposed a deep ideological fissure in Silicon Valley: while most Internet startup executives opposed Trump and many were infuriated with Thiel’s decision to speak at his rally, a sizable minority of the tech community felt that only a political outsider would be disruptive enough to overhaul Washington DC’s unimaginative two-party system.
Below I explain why many, if not most, of the tech industry overwhelmingly supports Democrats and oppose Thiel’s decision to speak at the Trump rally, but also why a strong minority are secretly rooting for a political movement to burn the establishment down (and, directly below is a data visualization of the survey results).
Tech is a big fan of Democrats — period
The tech industry is arguably the biggest supporter of Democrats in the country: in 2012, roughly 80% of donations from top companies went to Barack Obama over Mitt Romney and many of the areas top executives, including Google’s Eric Schmidt, worked with Obama’s campaign team.
The very few conservative Silicon Valley elite have shifted to the Democrats as Trump himself has attacked multiple tech CEOs for outsourcing jobs (Apple), encouraging immigration (Facebook), and funding newspapers that criticize him (Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post).
Much of the tech industry subscribes to a unique political ideology that sees “government as a platform” for innovation — a phrase famously coined by publisher Tim O’Reilly. Under this view, the government has an essential role in innovation as an investor in research, education and immigration, while providing ample low-regulation opportunity for experimental entrepreneurship (after all, the Internet began in a military lab, spread to public universities like Berkeley, and then was adopted by startups in the surrounding cities).
For adherent’s to government-as-platform, the state is a pillar of stability.
“You want a predictable future when you are investing, hiring and doing business. Trump provides none of these things,” wrote Geoff Mcfarlane, founder of a online Wine subscription service, Club W.
In private, Thiel’s allies could only conjecture reasons for his unexpected partnership with Trump and many others expressed frustration with how anyone could support a candidate so unpredictable.
In my anonymous poll of 42 randomly sampled startup founders from the database Crunchbase*, only a fraction supported Trump (21%). Likewise, many (40%) opposed Thiel headlining for Trump and a sizable minority (33%) of respondents said they would not personally do business with him as a result.
“As a lifelong Republican I am ashamed of our party for nominating Trump,” said one anonymous founder, who indicated that he would be voting for a Democrat for the first time and would refuse Thiel’s business.
Jim Fowler of research startup, Owler, agreed, “Thiel is making the Tech community look bad.”
The-Burn-It-Down Faction
Yet, I was shocked by how Trump’s support had grown in Silicon Valley since his nomination, roughly quintupling from a similar poll I ran last January (from 5% to 22%). It appears that the anti-Clinton crowd converged on a single opponent.
To be sure, no one I interviewed was really inspired by the GOP’s ultimate pick, but they seemed to describe Trump as kind of necessary risky investment.
“He reminds me of a startup, a little shaky, a little rough, but lot’s of potential upside!”, wrote on startup founder respondent.
Many Trump supporters just didn’t see a bright economic future under the current two-party system.
“I feel trump is a huge gamble, but it’s insane to keep putting these career politicians back in power. Something needs to change,” expressed another respondent.
In other words, in a culture that so often celebrates “disruption”, we shouldn’t be too shocked that at least some technologists can’t bear to vote for any establishment candidate. Indeed, this sentiment jives with a smaller, but vocal, movement within the industry to just completely remake Silicon Valley.
For instance, technologists have proposed separating California into six states, relocating Silicon Valley to another location, and there is even a stealth lab at Google rumored to be imagining how to build better cities.
Trump, perhaps, represents one (very aggressive) way of betting a politician can accomplish similarly disruptive results.
The Let’s-Pop-The-Culture-Bubble-Faction
Thiel is often regarded as one of the sharpest minds in Silicon Valley. He’s also the mirror opposite of Trump on many issues, from free trade to immigration. In fact, Thiel does not even consider himself a pure conservative. In an interview with me in 2014, he expressed admiration for John F. Kennedy and a role for big government:
“I’m not dogmatic about government having to have a small role, but it depends on how well the government works,” he said. “If you had a government as effective as the New Deal government or say the Kennedy administration in the ’60s, you could have a much larger role for government.”
So, for what possible reason would a shy cosmopolitan gay Internet billionaire economic policy wonk speak in favor of a brash populist demagogue who attacks tech CEOs and deputized an arch-christian conservative governor?
The one publicly acceptable reason appears to be that Silicon Valley needs to become more than an ossified monoculture of liberal upper-class privileged ethnic groups.
“Tech industry is primarily out of touch by being too far to the Left,” tweeted investor Keith Rabois, in a conversation about Thiel.
“I don’t agree with my friend Peter Thiel on Trump, but this is an excellent point from Keith,” responded noted investor Marc Andreessen, a once-prominent Republican donor now publicly supporting Clinton.
Thiel has spent years lauding the value of ‘contrarianism’, and goes out of his way, even in job interviews, to ask people about their unpopular ideas. Thiel may use his primetime spot to espouse the values of open-mindedness to his coastal elite colleagues, who have lost touch with much of the country. Or, perhaps, there is some other ideas that his colleagues in the tech community ignore that he wants to spotlight.
In my poll, a majority (60%) felt that the tech community should respect Thiel’s decision to speak at the RNC, a sign that most will compartmentalize their admiration for his business savvy from his unpopular political beliefs.
But, if history is a guide, he may not be greeted so kindly: the former Mozilla CEO, Brendan Eich, who backed an anti-gay marriage law in 2014 suffered severe backlash for his political beliefs.
Whatever people decide in Silicon Valley, I suspect that much like the rest of the country, the outcome of Thiel’s talk will be more partisanship.
*The Ferenstein Wire is a syndicated news column. More information here.
*Method notes: Ferenstein Wire survey data is based on several polls of Internet startup founders sampled from an exhaustive user-generated database of the technology industry called CrunchBase. Polls range from 42–52 respondents. So-called “elite sample” polls of CEOs traditionally have a large margin of error. Results from elite samples can better tell us what “many” or a “majority” of respondents think, rather than very specific point estimates. See theageofopimitists.com to more method details and to contact the author.
