Donald Trump’s selection Monday of Senator J.D. Vance to be his running mate elevates a figure with long-standing financial connections that are sure to play a role in the rest of the 2024 campaign.
And if Trump wins in November, Vance will instantly become a key conduit to wide swathes of the business world — from powerful corners of Silicon Valley to manufacturers he championed both as a venture capitalist and as a senator.
"I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio," Trump posted on social media.
"J.D. has had a very successful business career in Technology and Finance," the former president added.
The 39-year-old Vance worked for years as a venture capitalist and has spent more of his career in the business arena than in the political one.
It was in this early phase of his career that Vance forged connections that then shaped his political career.
The contacts first helped him bring investor dollars to his home state of Ohio. They then helped fund his campaign for the Senate and have already helped Trump fill his own campaign coffers.
What Vance has proven able to do again and again is move through a varied array of business worlds while also keeping a public identity rooted in his childhood growing up poor in Ohio as a self-described "hillbilly at heart."
"Sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn," he wrote in his bestselling memoir, adding what seemed to frustrate him most was these elites were "beating us at our own damned game."
Time living in San Francisco
After graduating from Yale Law School in 2013, Vance spent time living in San Francisco, where he worked at Mithril Capital. That firm was co-founded by Peter Thiel, the former PayPal CEO who has long been a major giver to Republicans, and Ajay Royan.
Vance also spent time in his early career in the Washington, D.C., area, where he worked for former AOL CEO Steve Case's venture capital firm Revolution LLC on a project to expand capital opportunities to towns like Middletown, Ohio — where Vance was born.
"J.D. Vance has become a leading voice for people across the country who feel left behind, so he is the perfect person to help us expand Rise Of The Rest," said Case in 2017.
It was also during this era that Vance, in 2016, published a memoir called "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis," which became a New York Times bestseller and rocketed him to national prominence.
Vance described himself in the book as nobody special who shops at a Washington, D.C., area Walmart and has "a nice job, a happy marriage, a comfortable home, and two lively dogs."
The book also described Vance’s return to live in his home state of Ohio, where he continued to work in venture capital and settled in the Cincinnati area.
He launched his own fund in 2020, reportedly with the backing of figures like Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Eric Schmidt, and Scott Dorsey. That Cincinnati-based firm — Narya Capital — was founded to help redirect big East Coast dollars into investment opportunities in states like Ohio.
Vance then entered politics and ran for Senate in 2022, where his technology contacts continued to come in handy.
Thiel contributed $5 million to support Vance’s Senate run in 2022 through a donation to a Vance-aligned group called Protect Ohio Values, according to Federal Election records.
Vance won that race and entered the Senate in 2023, where he continues to serve today.
Thiel has stayed out of the 2024 election so far, but Vance is also close with billionaire investor David Sacks, who has become a key Trump backer.
Vance and Sacks helped orchestrate a recent Silicon Valley fundraiser for Trump. The event was at Sacks’s home and marked Trump’s first visit to San Francisco in years. The foray into the deep blue area raised a reported $12 million for Trump's campaign.
"These are some of the leading innovators in AI who are in that room," Vance said during a follow-up appearance on Fox News after the fundraiser.
Sacks is also set to speak at the Republican National Convention Monday night.
An evolution from Trump critic to insider
Vance’s time in San Francisco also coincided with his time as a fierce critic of Trump, comments that Democrats are sure to raise continuously in the coming months.
In a 2016 Atlantic essay, he talked about the drug problems in his home state and argued that Trump wasn’t the answer to the problems in Middletown, Ohio.
He concluded by calling Trump "cultural heroin."
It’s just one of a lengthy list of past anti-Trump stances from Vance that have been well documented during his rise in national politics.
Vance has long since distanced himself from his stinging commentary and has become one of Trump’s most outspoken defenders in the years since.
In recent days, following the assassination attempt on the former president, Vance went further than most and attributed the shooting to President Joe Biden’s rhetoric.
"That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination," he posted on X.
His connections with Silicon Valley have remained active and would surely make Vance a central voice on Big Tech policy and other business world issues in a potential second Trump administration.
Vance has often — like Trump — focused on what he calls Big Tech censorship of conservative voices and made that a theme of his time in Washington.
Vance has also been involved in economic issues directly linked to his home state of Ohio since he came (back) to Washington as a senator.
In one example, Vance reached across the aisle and worked with Democrat Sherrod Brown on the Railway Safety Act of 2023. It’s a bill aimed at preventing future train disasters following a Norfolk Southern (NSC) derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
It’s part of a focus on Ohio and factory building that have marked his time in the Senate.
During another recent Fox News appearance, Vance was asked what "a J.D. Vance economy" would look like.
"A lot more manufacturing jobs than we have right now," he responded. "If you look, the economies that really, really thrive, they've got a foundation of strong manufacturing. They're developing their own energy."
Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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