Female Founders Call Out Andreessen Horowitz for Trump Support

When Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz released the latest episode of their podcast, The Ben & Marc Show, they likely knew they’d be upsetting a large swathe of their audience–including some founders of their past portfolio companies–but that didn’t stop the venture capitalists from openly endorsing Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Now, several female founders and executives are calling them out on X for choosing “money over values.”

During the podcast episode, which was recorded before President Biden dropped out of the election, Andreessen and Horowitz said that in their opinion, the Biden administration has “subverted the rule of law to attack the crypto industry,” and Biden had refused requests to meet with the pair. Their firm, also known as a16z​, has $42 billion in assets under management. The co-founders said a second Donald Trump presidency would be better for tech startups. They added that Trump had taken a meeting with them, and had given a “full-out blanket endorsement of the entire crypto industry,” with commitments to defend the right for Americans to mine bitcoin and oppose the creation of a central bank digital currency. 

On X, female founders and investors expressed anger and disappointment over Andreessen and Horowitz’s position. Merci Grace, former head of growth at Slack, which a16z owned 13 percent of before the company’s successful 2019 IPO, wrote on X that she was “utterly crushed that A16Z went all in for Trump,” and that she felt “betrayed that they’d trade us away for more money.” 

When asked for her thoughts on seeing VCs ally with Trump, Arian Simone, one of the founding partners of the Fearless Fund, said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference that “if you’re choosing not to support diversity, it’s alarming because are you trying to signal that your desire of oppression and suppression is greater than a desire to make money?”

Arlan Hamilton, founder of Backstage Capital, a VC firm that prioritizes investments in companies run by diverse founders, wrote on X that while she wasn’t shocked by the a16z founders coming out in support of Trump, “I’m more surprised that they said it out loud instead of just funding anonymously like I suspected they have for a while.” She added that Andreessen was an early investor in Backstage Capital but now has her blocked on X. “They want our rhythm and not our blues,” she said.