The name of JD Vance’s venture capital firm is a homage to fantasy author JRR Tolkien — and billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel.
Co-founded by Vance in 2020, Narya Capital is a reference to one of the “rings of power” in The Lord of the Rings and a nod to Thiel’s penchant for companies with Tolkien-inspired monikers.
The PayPal co-founder’s influence has marked Vance’s career, seeding him millions of dollars to launch Narya, before funding a successful campaign to win a US Senate seat in 2022.
Donald Trump’s choice of Vance as his vice-presidential running mate this week further extends Thiel’s political reach, who as a Silicon Valley kingmaker has a network of devoted technologists and investors so vast it has been dubbed the “Thielverse”.
Meanwhile, Vance’s brief career in venture capital also encapsulates how a libertarian strand within Silicon Valley represented by Thiel has come to align with Trump’s MAGA Republican fans.
Vance and his co-founder led Narya’s investments in Rumble, a video platform favoured by the political right for its free speech ethos, and Anduril Industries, an artificial intelligence defence and weapons group whose early funding came from Thiel — and whose name is also a Tolkien reference.
Vance’s VP candidacy has been cheered by prominent tech figures such as Tesla and X chief executive Elon Musk and Jacob Helberg, a Palantir executive and Trump donor.
“JD attracts support from people like Peter and Elon because he is the rare policymaker who is both tremendously smart and who thinks deeply about the future,” Blake Masters, another Thiel protégé who is running for US Congress, told the Financial Times.
“As a venture capitalist, JD’s job was . . . to imagine a different and better future and to help make it happen. And the American future the Trump-Vance agenda will usher in is very bright indeed.”
Vance’s ties to Thiel began more than a decade ago. In 2011, Thiel gave a talk at Yale Law School, where Vance was a student, about the “stagnation” of technological innovation in the US. “He was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met,” Vance later wrote about that day.
Vance soon abandoned a planned career in law, and even credited Thiel for his subsequent conversion to Christianity. “He defied the social template I had constructed — that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists,” Vance wrote.
In 2016, the same year Vance published his best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, he joined Mithril Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm founded by Thiel and another veteran investor, Ajay Royan — and which has yet another Tolkien-inspired name.
Two years later, Vance was recruited by AOL co-founder Steve Case for a new venture: a $150mn Washington-based fund that tapped big investors such as Jeff Bezos and Ray Dalio to jump-start young companies in overlooked American cities.
That philosophy would also become the foundation of Narya Capital. Vance relocated to Cincinnati in his home state of Ohio to launch the fund with a former colleague from Mithril, Colin Greenspon.
Narya was backed with about $100mn from Thiel and a cadre of his acquaintances, including former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and prominent venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Scott Dorsey.
As well as Rumble and Anduril, Narya owns a stake in dozens more private companies, including Strive Asset Management, an investment fund started by former Republican presidential candidate-turned-Trump backer, Vivek Ramaswamy — who was also a former Vance classmate at Yale. Strive has built stakes in corporate giants such as Apple and Disney to urge them to keep “woke” politics out of their businesses.
When Vance decided to run for US Senate barely a year later, Thiel was his biggest donor in the 2022 Senate race, giving $15mn to a super Pac that backed him. He also introduced Vance to Trump for the first time at his Palm Beach golf club, Mar-a-Lago.
Vance left Narya after being elected to the Senate, by which time he had built stakes in more than 100 start-up companies, according to federal records that showed Vance’s financial interests that year. Many of them are companies Thiel founded or backed.
Since then, Vance has won important support within Trump’s inner circle. One of Vance’s champions is the former president’s son, Donald Trump junior, who said this week that Vance had a “very high chance” of being elected president in 2028.
“Don Jr is close to him and has been lobbying for a long time,” said a tech policy expert who knows Vance, adding that he is “his own man and a brilliant young guy”.
But the expert added, Vance is also someone “good at ingraining himself into systems and becoming a big player. How else do you get to be the VP pick aged 39?”
His selection could have far-reaching ramifications for US tech policy. Vance’s experience of investing in fledgling technology companies turned him into a champion of “little tech” — pioneering start-ups — and a staunch cynic of Big Tech groups such as Google, which he believes should be broken up.
He also has a positive stance on cryptocurrencies, owning up to $250,000 in bitcoin in 2022, according to the most recent Senate disclosures. Andreessen Horowitz founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, whose fund has made a huge $8bn bet on crypto, came out in support of Trump for the first time on Tuesday.
Like Trump, Vance has accused social media giants such as Facebook of censoring conservative viewpoints, and called for reform of a US law known as “Section 230”, which protects these groups from liability for the content hosted on their platforms.
The policy expert said Vance’s support of higher corporation taxes for big business, and tough line on tech monopolies, meant “he is not a gift to Big Tech”. The person added: “The big corporate donors in the GOP are pissed that he’s the guy.”
Additional reporting by Hannah Murphy in San Francisco