JD Vance first entered the public eye as author of the 2016 memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," which skyrocketed him to fame. Eight years later, in July 2024, he stepped onstage at the Republican National Convention as Donald Trump's vice presidential running mate.
However, there is another chapter of Vance's life — beyond his childhood in the hills of Appalachia and his rise to political power as a senator from Ohio — that likely shaped his perspective just as much: his time in venture capital.
Vance has positioned himself as a staunchly conservative voice, though an overview of his VC history indicates that he invested in funds seemingly aligned with so-called impact investing strategies.
Publicly, however, he has criticized impact investing, which balances financial profits with positive social and environmental impacts. ESG (environmental, social and governance) and SRI (socially responsible investing) are two strategies that are considered impact investing strategies.
"ESG is basically a massive racket to enrich Wall Street and enrich the financial sector of the country, at the expense of the industries that actually employ a lot of Ohio's workers for middle-class jobs," Vance told Breitbart News in 2022.
Below is an overview of Vance's time in venture capital and what is known about his participation in impact investing.
Mithril Capital
"Hillbilly Elegy" describes Vance's life growing up in poverty, but by the time he began operating in venture capital, he had changed his circumstances remarkably, working
Vance first encountered Thiel as a speaker at Yale Law School, where Vance was a student in the early 2010s. After graduating in 2013, Vance worked briefly at Circuit Therapeutics, a biotechnology company where Thiel was an investor.
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The two stayed in touch.
Vance joined Mithril Capital, Thiel's Austin, Texas-based venture capital firm, as a principal in 2016. Around the same time, Vance's memoir began climbing the charts to become a bestseller.
Mithril Capital, which Thiel co-founded in 2012 with Ajay Royan, says it puts billions of dollars into companies "agnostic to sector, geography and conventional credentials." The majority of companies the firm invests in use science and technology as a core part of their business models.
According to the
Revolution LLC
Vance moved away from San Francisco that year, splitting his time between Ohio and Washington, D.C., as a partner at Revolution, a venture capital firm led by AOL founder Steve Case that sponsors a family of funds and focuses on "high-potential geographies" outside of areas typically funded by VC.
Case told the New York Times in 2017 that Revolution was "not an impact investing fund." However, Case amended his comment following criticism, writing in a blog post on
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Though Vance would later disavow impact investing, at Revolution he kicked off a fund that exhibited elements of the strategy. One of the funds he helped launch was the Rise of the Rest seed fund, a project to invest in underfunded startups located in underserved areas. Vance accompanied Case on a bus tour to some of these areas, stopping in several cities throughout the South and Midwest.
Rise of the Rest's initial funders included billionaire investors 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, chief of staff for current President Joe Biden. Vance left Revolution in 2019 to start his own firm.
Narya Capital
In 2020, the same year Trump lost his reelection campaign to President Joe Biden, Vance co-founded VC firm Narya Capital in Columbus, Ohio, with Colin Greenspon, whom he worked with previously at Mithril. Using the connections he developed with tech billionaires during his earlier stints, Vance managed to raise
While Vance stepped back from the leadership team of Narya when he was elected to the Senate in 2022, he is still an investor in the firm, and his association with it has not been entirely severed.
A
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Vance's elevation to the national stage as Trump's vice presidential pick has led to
According to a March
The firm is focused on investing in forward-looking science and technology firms. Though Narya does not describe its approach as "impact investing," its portfolio includes companies that could be construed as ESG-aligned, for example, firms that — as it puts it — are "making Medicare understandable and actionable for eligible citizens," "growing fruits and vegetables on our soil in ways that bring fresher, healthier and cheaper food to more families" and "using technology to make car and home insurance more affordable."
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Some of Narya's environmentally angled investments include startups such as App Harvest, which sought to strengthen climate-focused indoor farming but went bankrupt last year, and Acretrader, a farmland investment company, that includes environmental considerations as part of its core strategy,
And similar to Revolution's Rise of the Rest, Narya looks between the coasts for potential additions to its portfolios. Greenspon spoke on the Funds that Won podcast about Narya's interest in companies in the Midwest.
"We're spending time in these esoteric industries, in these geographies where people have the real industrial acumen to build these companies in agriculture and energy," Greenspon said. "So we're spending a lot of time in … places where the traditional VCs aren't going, so we can be that first provider of strategic risk capital, get that company through the first couple of inflection points and then bring our friends in from these larger funds and help the company begin to scale from there."
Vance alluded to this in his speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, saying he "started businesses to create jobs in the kinds of places I grew up in."
From green to red
Narya's portfolios also include companies that seem to fall on the more red-aligned than green political side.
"We started huddling up and we said, what are some categories that are maybe a little less focused on by venture investors that are really changing based on the state of the world?" Greenspon said on the podcast.
One such firm is Strive Asset Management, which was founded by Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur whose campaign to be the Republican presidential nominee fizzled. Ramaswamy is a limited partner at Narya.
Another is Rumble, the video platform used by conservative commentators that also hosts Donald Trump's Truth Social network. Greenspon said that Narya funded Rumble to address the issue of free speech.
"We were the only VC to be involved there, and it's a massive company," Greenspon said on Funds that Won. "At the time, these other VCs were like, 'Ooh, that's free speech.' Same thing with religion, 'Ooh, you can't do that stuff, that's taboo.' It's not, these are important issues that pertain to all Americans, and we have an opportunity and perhaps even a duty to back these kinds of companies because they're going to have an impact in the right way for our citizens, as well as create very nice returns for our investors."
Project 2025
Unlike Trump, who has distanced himself from Project 2025, Vance has not made an effort to disassociate himself from the
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In fact, he is writing the foreword of an upcoming
The 922-page strategy document lays out several goals that explicitly oppose impact investing, including calling on political 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 to what extent Vance's past investing philosophy and VC history will affect the Republican platform, his chapter as a venture capitalist is likely to inform his thinking as he runs for vice president and beyond.
