Inside JD Vance’s short-lived career as a venture capitalist

JD Vance touted his career in venture capital last week in his address to the Republican National Convention. His foray in technology investing, though, was brief by industry standards.

“I started businesses to create jobs in the kind of places that I grew up in,” the vice presidential candidate said in his convention speech. “My work taught me there is still so much talent and grit in the American heartland.”

That sentiment is core to Vance’s mythos as a tech investor who cut his teeth in Silicon Valley before leaving the Bay Area to focus on revitalizing his native Appalachia. In Vance’s five years as a venture capitalist, he worked for two firms before co-founding his own venture vehicle, Ohio-based Narya Capital Management.

“I don’t think he had a long enough career in venture to have demonstrated the successful VC narrative that’s being expressed,” said David Hornik, a founding partner of venture-capital firm Lobby Capital. Hornik is a Democratic donor who first met Vance at an investor gathering in Silicon Valley around the time that Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was published.

Colin Greenspon, who co-founded Narya with Vance, says the nature of early-stage venture investing means it’s too early to tell if his investments will ultimately be successful. But “it’s 100% not too early to tell that he was a good investor,” he said.

Vance’s most recent financial disclosures from 2022 show stakes in more than 100 private companies, most of which were valued between $1,001 and $15,000.

His record isn’t without blemishes. One of his bigger investments—AppHarvest, a Kentucky-based indoor farming tech company—eventually filed for bankruptcy after it faced lawsuits that claimed, among other things, that it was creating jobs in the state that the labor force either didn’t want or lacked training to do. Vance, who briefly sat on the company’s board, invested through two different venture firms.

A spokesperson for Vance declined to comment.

His whirlwind ascendancy from venture capitalist to the potential heir apparent of the GOP is atypical. Vance left the investing world in 2022 after he was elected to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate—his only experience in public office—and was named Donald Trump’s running mate less than two years later.

Vance moved to the Bay Area shortly after graduating from Yale Law School in 2013 to pursue a career in entrepreneurship. He visited the offices of Mithril Capital, a San Francisco-based firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, for a meet-and-greet with parts of the investing team, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mithril wasn’t hiring at the time, and Vance eventually landed a role as chief operating officer at a small biotechnology company.

Vance pitched the biotech company several times to Mithril investors, the person said. In 2016, he left the biotech firm to join Mithril as a junior investor. Vance’s memoir was published that summer and became a bestseller with its unrelenting portrayal of poverty in working-class America.

In the year Vance worked at Mithril, a former colleague said he never once saw him in the office. Another colleague said he remembers seeing Vance at the office, although he did travel a lot to promote his memoir. Neither remembered significant deals that Vance drove during his time at Mithril.

In March 2017, Vance left Mithril to join Revolution, an investment firm founded by Steve Case, a co-founder of AOL. Vance was hired to focus on the Rise of the Rest initiative, a seed fund within Revolution that looked for investing opportunities outside the typical tech ecosystems of Silicon Valley, New York and Boston. He joined Case for several stops on a bus tour through cities like Chattanooga, Tenn., and Louisville, Ky.

During Vance’s 18 months at Revolution, he was the lead partner or co-lead on 14 deals, according to a person familiar with the deals. They included California-based defense tech startup Anduril Industries, North Carolina-based artificial intelligence startup Pyron, as well as AppHarvest.

Vance joined Pryon’s board in June 2019. Pryon’s chief executive, Igor Jablokov, said Vance was an engaged investor who helped the company forge connections with venture capitalist Jim Breyer and with Chase Koch, the son of billionaire libertarian tycoon Charles Koch.

Vance left Revolution at the end of 2019. Shortly after, he started Narya with Greenspon. The pair raised $120 million in their first fund with backing from Thiel as well as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, according to a person familiar with the fund’s financials. That fund generated a multiple on invested capital of 1.67 and an internal rate of return of 24.35% after fees as of March 2023, according to an investor document.

Since its founding, Narya has made 14 investments, one of which is in stealth, the person said. They include Rumble, a video platform popular with the political right which went public through a special-purpose acquisition company, better known as a SPAC, while Vance was running for the Senate seat, and Hallow, a Catholic meditation and prayer app. Three others have ties to Vivek Ramaswamy, a businessman who once vied for the Republican presidential nomination and was a law school classmate of Vance’s.

Vance invested again in AppHarvest through Narya and joined the board in July 2020, according to the company’s securities filings. Other board members included Martha Stewart and investor Jeffrey Ubben. In February 2021, the company went public through a SPAC. Vance resigned from the board two months later to make his run for the Senate.

Months after Vance left the board, AppHarvest was sued by individual investors and a county retirement association in five separate lawsuits. These suits alleged that the company had misled regulators and investors and failed to disclose adverse facts about its operations, including a “lack of employee training and an inability to hire and retain employees due to attrition.” The company filed for bankruptcy in mid-2023.

“I can say JD is a good man, and it’s very challenging to start a fund no matter who you are,” said Alex Kolicich, an investor at 8VC, a venture firm started by Palantir co-founder and Trump donor Joe Lonsdale, in emailed comments. “In his short time in venture JD accomplished what many don’t in a career: starting their own firm.”

Vance’s 2022 financials reveal an income of $110,146 from Narya and $121,376 in royalties from his book. He reported holdings in several mutual funds, collectively valued at $1.7 million to $3.6 million. He also owned between $100,001 to $250,000 in bitcoin and a single-family townhome in Washington valued between $500,001 and $1 million.

Vance’s brief stint in tech appears to have informed his beliefs about the very industry in which he grew up. At a panel for The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival in May 2021, Vance said, “I’ve certainly personally been very close to the technology sector. Because of that experience, I inherently mistrust it or at least worry about its influence in the broader economy.”

Peter Rudegeair and Anthony DeBarros contributed to this article.