Spyglass - Backing the Winner

The past several months have seen a turn of the tide. Whereas historically when you think/hear about Silicon Valley, you probably think of a liberal stronghold. I mean, it houses San Francisco, often the poster child for the image of a liberal city (in ways good and bad). But even “Silicon Valley” as a concept has long seemed tilted in a liberal way. Sure, there are plenty of well-known counter-examples, but the reason they’re well known is largely because they’re very clear counter-examples of the “norm”. Most of the employees working at the various tech companies skew liberal as the donations coming out of those companies have made clear over the past many years. That may or may not be changing, my guess would be that it won’t, but what is changing is how vocal the counter-examples are becoming. Yes, the contrarians.

But that’s the thing. As more and more high-profile investors and entrepreneurs come out of the woodwork to vocally support Donald Trump, they’re actually not being contrarian at all. In fact, they’re doing something tried and true in Silicon Valley: backing the winner.