The jump from a best-selling memoir to the Vice Presidency usually involves a few decades of climbing political ladders. For JD Vance, that ladder was made of silicon and venture capital. While the world knows him for "Hillbilly Elegy" or his rapid MAGA transformation, his time in the high-stakes world of private equity is where the real gears of his current power were forged.
Venture capital wasn't just a job for him. It was a bridge. It’s how a kid from Middletown, Ohio, ended up in the inner circles of the most powerful billionaires on the planet.
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The Thiel Connection and the Move to San Francisco
Honestly, you can’t talk about JD Vance venture capitalist without starting with Peter Thiel. They met back in 2011 when Vance was a student at Yale Law. Thiel gave a talk that Vance later described as the most significant moment of his time at school. Basically, Thiel argued that elite institutions were failing and that the tech world was the only place where real change—and real wealth—could happen.
Vance listened.
After a very brief nine-month stint at the law firm Sidley Austin, Vance ditched the legal world. He headed to San Francisco in 2015 to join Mithril Capital, a firm co-founded by Thiel. Think of Mithril as a "deep tech" fund. They weren't looking for the next photo-sharing app. They wanted companies solving massive, complex problems in biotech and hardware.
Vance was a "principal" there. It’s a fancy title that usually means you’re the one doing the legwork—vetted deals, talking to founders, and trying to convince the partners to write a check. He even tried to get Mithril to invest in a biotech company called Circuit Therapeutics. They passed, but the connection stuck.
Why the "Mithril" name matters
If you're wondering why a multi-million dollar investment firm is named after a fictional metal from The Lord of the Rings, you’ve hit on a core part of the culture Vance entered. Thiel loves Tolkien. Later, when Vance started his own firm, he named it Narya Capital—after one of the three rings of power.
It’s a specific, geeky brand of elitism that Vance would eventually claim to despise, yet it’s exactly the world that funded his rise.
"Rise of the Rest" and the Steve Case Era
By 2017, the Silicon Valley vibe was wearing thin on Vance. He wrote a famous op-ed in The New York Times titled "Why I'm Moving Home," where he basically trashed the "condescension" of the tech elite.
But he didn't stop being a venture capitalist. He just changed the scenery.
He joined Revolution LLC, a firm started by AOL co-founder Steve Case. This was a different beast. Vance became a managing partner for the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund. The whole pitch was simple: 75% of venture capital goes to just three states (California, New York, and Massachusetts). Case and Vance wanted to find the "rest"—startups in places like Columbus, Detroit, and Nashville.
Vance spent a year and a half on a literal bus tour across the American heartland. He wasn't just a financier; he was the face of "flyover country" entrepreneurship. During this time, he led or participated in several key investments:
- Pryon: An AI startup focused on enterprise knowledge.
- Branch Insurance: Trying to disrupt the clunky insurance world from Columbus, Ohio.
- FreightWaves: A data and content company for the logistics industry.
This period was crucial for his political brand. It allowed him to say he was actually "doing something" for the Midwest rather than just writing about it. It gave him a track record of job creation—though how much credit he can personally take for those jobs became a massive talking point during his 2022 Senate race.
Narya Capital: The Cincinnati Power Move
In 2019, Vance finally went out on his own. He co-founded Narya Capital in Cincinnati. This wasn't a solo mission, though. He brought in some of the heaviest hitters in the tech world as investors, including:
- Peter Thiel (shocker, right?)
- Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO)
- Marc Andreessen (the guy who basically invented the modern web browser)
Narya raised about $93 million for its first fund. The goal was to continue that "Rise of the Rest" vibe but with a sharper, more ideological edge. Narya wasn't just looking for profits; it was looking for companies that fit a specific worldview of national resilience and "anti-woke" tech.
The Rumble Investment
Perhaps the most famous move Narya made was leading a 2021 investment in Rumble, the video platform that bills itself as the "cancel culture" alternative to YouTube. This wasn't just a business deal. It was a political statement. It signaled that Vance was moving away from being a "bipartisan business guy" and toward becoming a central figure in the conservative tech movement.
Other notable Narya bets included:
- AppHarvest: A massive high-tech indoor farming company in Kentucky (which eventually faced significant financial struggles and bankruptcy).
- True Anomaly: A space security startup focused on protecting satellites.
- Kriya Therapeutics: A biotech company working on gene therapies.
The Complicated Legacy of JD Vance Venture Capitalist
If you look at his financial disclosures from 2025, his VC past is still very much present. He retained stakes in various funds managed by Narya and Revolution, worth somewhere between $600,000 and $1.2 million.
There's a lot of noise about "conflict of interest" here. For example, some companies in the Revolution portfolio, like Hermeus (hypersonic aircraft) and Slingshot Aerospace, received millions in federal defense contracts shortly after the Trump-Vance administration took office.
Critics call it "crony capitalism." Supporters call it "investing in American strength."
But the real takeaway? His time as a venture capitalist taught him how to pitch. In VC, you aren't just selling a product; you’re selling a vision of the future that doesn't exist yet. That is exactly what he did in his political campaigns. He took the "disruptor" mindset of Silicon Valley and applied it to the U.S. government.
What this means for you
If you're watching Vance’s policy moves, don't just look at his speeches. Look at his portfolio. His background suggests a leader who is:
- Aggressively Anti-Big Tech: He views Google and Meta as monopolies that stifle the "little guy" (and conservative voices).
- Pro-Defense Tech: He wants to see more startups—not just the old "defense primes"—getting Pentagon contracts.
- Crypto-Friendly: He’s a known Bitcoin holder and wants the U.S. to be the "crypto capital of the world."
The move from "Hillbilly" to "Venture Capitalist" to "Vice President" is a wild arc. But if you look closely at the deals he made and the people who funded them, it starts to make a lot more sense. He didn't leave the tech world; he just brought it with him to Washington.
To get a better handle on how this affects current policy, you should track the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuits against major tech firms and watch for shifts in how Small Business Administration (SBA) grants are allocated to startups in the Midwest. Those are the areas where his venture capital DNA will show up most clearly.