Before becoming Trump’s vice presidential running mate, JD Vance worked in the venture capital industry

J.D. Vance first came into the public eye as the author of the 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which catapulted him to fame. Eight years later, in July 2024, he took the stage at the Republican National Convention as Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee.

But there is another chapter in Vance’s life — beyond his childhood in the Appalachian Mountains and his rise to political power as a senator from Ohio — that has arguably shaped his perspective as much: his time in the venture capital industry.

Vance has come across as a decidedly conservative voice, though a review of his history in the venture capital industry shows he invested in funds that appeared to align with so-called impact investing strategies.

However, he has publicly criticized impact investing, which balances financial returns with positive social and environmental impacts. ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and SRI (Social Responsible Investing) are two strategies that are considered impact investing strategies.

“ESG is basically a giant scam designed to enrich Wall Street and enrich the country’s financial sector at the expense of industries that actually employ a lot of Ohio workers in middle-class jobs,” Vance told Breitbart News in 2022.

Below is an overview of Vance’s time in the venture capital industry and his involvement in impact investing.

Capital of Mithril

“Elegy for the Poor” chronicles the life of Vance, who grew up in poverty but when he entered the venture capital industry, his circumstances changed significantly as he worked alongside elite tech billionaires like former PayPal CEO and Republican Party big donor Peter Thiel and AOL founder and philanthropist Steve Case.

Vance first met Thiel as a speaker at Yale Law School, where Vance was studying, in the early 2010s. After graduating in 2013, Vance worked briefly at Circuit Therapeutics, a biotech company in which Thiel was an investor.

READ MORE: PayPal Billionaire Thiel Gets Tax Advantage With $5 Billion Roth IRA, ProPublica Finds

The two stayed in touch.

Vance joined Mithril Capital, Thiel’s venture capital firm based in Austin, Texas, as a principal in 2016. Around the same time, Vance’s memoir began climbing the charts, becoming a bestseller.

Mithril Capital, which Thiel co-founded with Ajay Royan in 2012, says it invests billions of dollars in companies “agnostic of sector, geography, and conventional credentials.” Most of the companies the firm invests in use science and technology as a core part of their business models.

According to “Wall Street Journal”Vance was rarely seen in the office, spending most of his time promoting “Hillbilly Elegy.” In early 2017, Vance left Mithril after a conflict with Royan, according to New York Times.

Revolution LLC

That same year, Vance moved out of San Francisco and split his time between Ohio and Washington, D.C., as a partner at Revolution, a venture capital firm run by AOL founder Steve Case that sponsors a range of funds and focuses on “high-potential regions” outside of areas that typically receive VC funding.

Case told the New York Times in 2017 that Revolution “is not an impact investment fund.” However, Case reversed his comment after criticism, writing in a blog post on Alpha Strike“I wanted to make one thing clear: I absolutely believe that social impact investing can deliver the same market returns as other types of investing.”

READ MORE: 5 Ways to Advise Clients on ESG and Impact Investing

Although Vance later rejected impact investing, he launched a fund at Revolution that incorporated elements of the strategy. One of the funds he helped launch was Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, a project aimed at investing in underfunded startups located in underserved areas. Vance accompanied Case on a bus tour of some of those areas, stopping in several cities in the South and Midwest.

Rise of the Rest’s initial backers included billionaire investors from across the political spectrum, including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Bridgewater CIO Ray Dalio, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and investor John Doerr, as well as members of several wealthy American families, including the Pritzkers, Waltons and Kochs.

During Vance’s time at Revolution, he also worked with Ron Klain, now-President Joe Biden’s chief of staff. Vance left Revolution in 2019 to start his own firm.

The capital of Narya

In 2020, the same year Trump lost his reelection bid to President Joe Biden, Vance founded Columbus, Ohio-based VC firm Narya Capital with Colin Greenspon, with whom he had previously worked at Mithril. Leveraging the connections he had forged with tech billionaires during his earlier tenures, Vance was able to recruit $93 million in the year of its premiere.

Although Vance stepped down from Narya’s leadership team after being elected to the Senate in 2022, he remains an investor in the company and his relationship with it has not been completely severed.

AND The Funds That Won Podcast Episode from July 17 featured Greenspon, currently CEO of Narya, who discussed “insights on their strategic partnerships, including co-founders JD Vance and Peter Thiel, and their focused investment strategy.”

According to The Wall Street Journal, Vance’s rise to the national stage as Trump’s vice presidential running mate has led to growing interest at the company, which prompted Narya to extend the closing date of Fund II.

According to March Form ADV Narya’s assets amount to almost $185 million and its investors are 109 people.

The firm focuses on investing in forward-thinking science and technology companies. While Narya doesn’t describe her approach as “impact investing,” her portfolio includes companies that could be considered ESG-aligned, such as those that, as she puts it, “make Medicare understandable and feasible for eligible citizens,” “grow fruits and vegetables on our soil in a way that provides fresher, healthier, and more affordable food for more families,” and “use technology to make auto and home insurance more affordable.”

READ MORE: What values-based investing means to religious clients can vary greatly

Some of Narya’s environmentally conscious investments include startups like App Harvest, which tried to boost indoor farming but went bankrupt last year, and Acretrader, a farmland investment firm that includes environmental concerns as part of its core strategy. according to Politico.

As with Revolution’s Rise of the Rest, Narya is looking to potentially add to its portfolio from coast to coast. Greenspon spoke on the Funds that Won podcast about Narya’s interest in Midwest companies.

“We spend time in these esoteric industries, these geographies where people have real industrial acumen to build these companies in agriculture and energy,” Greenspon said. “So we spend a lot of time in … places that traditional venture capitalists don’t go, so we can be the first provider of strategic venture capital, get that company through its first few inflection points, and then bring in our friends from these larger funds and help the company start growing.”

Vance alluded to this in his speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, saying he “founded companies to create jobs in the places I grew up.”

From green to red

Narya’s portfolio also includes companies that seem to lean more towards the red political side than the green.

“We started getting together and saying, what are the categories that venture capitalists are focusing on a little less, that are really changing based on the state of the world?” Greenspon said on the podcast.

One such firm is Strive Asset Management, founded by Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur whose failed GOP presidential bid. Ramaswamy is a limited partner in Narya.

Another is Rumble, a video platform used by conservative commentators that also hosts Donald Trump’s Truth Social network. Greenspon said Narya funded Rumble to address free speech issues.

“We were the only VC that was involved, and it’s a huge company,” Greenspon told Funds that Won. “At the time, other VCs were saying, ‘Oh, it’s free speech.’ Same thing with religion, ‘Oh, you can’t do that, it’s taboo.’ They’re not, these are important issues that affect all Americans, and we have an opportunity, maybe even an obligation, to support these types of companies because they’re going to have a real impact on our citizens and they’re also going to create very good returns for our investors.”

Project 2025

Unlike Trump, who has distanced himself from Project 2025, Vance has made no effort to disassociate himself from controversial political strategy.

READ MORE: Project 2025 Goals Will Change the Wealth Management Landscape

In fact, he is writing the foreword to an upcoming book. book by Kevin RobertsPresident of the Heritage Foundation and author of the foreword to Project 2025’s detailed plan for Conservative leadership.

The 922-page policy document outlines several goals that clearly oppose social impact investing, including calling on policy bodies like Congress and the Department of Labor to eliminate ESG considerations from programs like the Employee Retirement Income Security Act and the Thrift Savings Plan.

While it is unclear how much Vance’s investment philosophy and experience in the venture capital industry will influence the Republican Party’s agenda, his experience as a venture capitalist will likely influence his thinking during his vice presidential campaign and beyond.