With Vice President Kamala Harris firmly ensconced as the presumptive Democratic nominee Silicon Valley is hopeful the Bay Area native will be tech and business friendly.
“Kamala literally comes from this area,” Box CEO Aaron Levie told Politico. “Her backers have been in tech.”
Throughout her political career, Harris, who is from Oakland, has worked closely with the tech industry. She was previously the district attorney for San Francisco and then California’s attorney general, both roles which gave her a familiarity with Silicon Valley.
In the past Harris has had close ties to former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg. In 2015, during Harris’ Senate run, the two appeared together at an event at Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters. When meeting with Alphabet employees in 2010, Harris referred to them as “family,” citing the fact the company was based in her home state. During her campaigns for California attorney general and U.S. senator, Harris relied on campaign donations from major tech companies. Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft all contributed to Harris' 2020 campaign for president, according to OpenSecrets. Apple and Alphabet also contributed to her 2016 Senate campaign.
Even in the early days of her current presidential bid, some of the Silicon Valley support continues. Days after Joe Biden endorsed her, Harris got nods of approval from big Democratic donors including Sandberg, Melinda Gates, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, who previously backed Biden’s campaign. On Tuesday, Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings donated $7 million to the Harris campaign.
But all that hasn’t made Harris shy away from regulating Big Tech during her time in state and national politics. In 2019, as a senator, she backed a California effort to give gig workers at companies like Lyft and Uber additional rights, like overtime pay and the right to unionize. The same year she said the government should “seriously take a look at breaking up” Meta.
That track record seems to have made other big tech industry donors wary of backing her unconditionally. Were she to indicate her friendliness to the industry, more donors would support her campaign, Levie told Politico.
“If by the end of the week she had a tech policy framework out there, a 10-point plan for pro-business, pro-tech, pro-entrepreneurship, and it was credible,” Levie said, “I think she could very quickly rally a significant portion of the ecosystem.”
To Levie, a “pro-tech” Harris agenda includes immigration policies that made it easier to hire skilled talent from abroad and eliminating the administration's current proposed tax on unrealized capital gains. “Without unrealized capital gains, you literally don’t have money to invest in equity, in startups,” Levie told Fortune’s Diane Brady.
Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have also taken hardline approaches to antitrust, ensnaring Big Tech’s biggest firms and, in some instances, relying on new definitions of what constitutes a monopoly to open cases against the likes of Amazon and Apple
A spokesperson for the Harris campaign declined to comment on the record about Levie’s comments. Box did not respond to a request for comment.
As part of her White House duties, Harris led the Biden administration's early policy work on artificial intelligence, the current hot button issue in tech. In May 2023, Harris met with CEOs of the top AI firms, including Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, and Sundar Pichai.
A few months later Harris made clear she wouldn’t let the world’s leading AI developers off the regulatory hook, just because their tech was cutting-edge. “President Biden and I reject the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or advance innovation,” Harris said during a speech in London. "We can and we must do both.”
Even when she was announced as Biden’s VP pick in August 2020, Silicon Valley had high hopes for her role in the White House. “She grew up around a ton of innovation and realized how important that is for the California economy,” former Oracle president Charles Phillip told the Wall Street Journal in 2020, a few days after she was announced as Biden’s running mate.
Now, as Harris contends for the top job, Silicon Valley hopes that a second bite of the apple with a Democratic candidate will spell more favorable policy for tech. “A lot of people wish the Democratic party would stop shooting themselves in the foot,” Levie told Fortune’s Brady.
