As Silicon Valley leaders decry ‘wokeism,’ a group called New Founding that says its “birthright is to lead Western civilization” is among the firms building a new blueprint for VC — and billionaire Marc Andreessen is in.
By David Jeans, Forbes Staff
Earlier this year, a little-known company called New Founding made headlines when it announced plans to build a Christian enclave in Kentucky — an “aligned community’” where owners could “disappear from the cultural insanity of the broader country.” But building a village was just the beginning.
Now, New Founding has launched a venture capital fund to invest in what it calls “aligned companies,” startups that oppose progressive ideologies and are intent on both “cultural and economic disruption.” It’s one of a small but growing number of VCs vocally rejecting ‘wokeism’ and building their investment thesis on core conservative values.
New Founding’s investments are one tentpole of a broader goal: to remake society with a largely MAGA, tech-driven, Christian worldview. It decries leftists as “anti-human,” celebrates technology as a singular force that will define a new era of prosperity, loves crypto and sees the internet (“deeply American in ethos and design”) as a means to its ends. “Our project offers a powerful avenue,” a manifesto on its website published in July reads, “both to develop the class of people who can ultimately challenge the incumbent regime and to acquire the resources, territory, and institutions that will enable this effort.”
So far, it’s raised $3 million, a modest start. But it has made 10 investments in seed stage and series A companies, among them an education startup to help teachers start their own ‘micro schools,’ and an ad-tech company that helps gun manufacturers target consumers. For Presidio, a startup that recently raised a $4 million seed fund led by New Founding to provide Christian-branded, pro-life health insurance, the group has been an effective ally. “They are initiators of a pro-American, Christian movement,” CEO Daniel Cruz told Forbes, adding the group is “well connected and have helped us in formulating our strategy.”
New Founding CEO Nate Fischer told Forbes these investments are the beginnings of a “parallel economy” offering conservative versions of mainstream services it views as too liberal, like Google’s ad-tech products. “There’s a large share of people who feel that their views are almost entirely absent from the institutions that are shaping the future,” Fischer explained. “And there’s a real acute need and hunger for alternatives.”
At least one Silicon Valley leader is on board. Marc Andreessen — a cofounder of the venture giant Andreessen Horowitz, or A16z, who has also railed against “wokeism” — is among those backing New Founding’s venture fund. He’s taken a small stake, investing a “six-figure” sum as a limited partner, according to three people with direct knowledge of the fund. Andreessen didn’t respond to a comment request.
Meanwhile, a rotating cast of prominent Silicon Valley voices have appeared on New Founding’s buzzy podcast. A16z partner Katherine Boyle, who leads the outfit’s high profile American Dynamism fund, has been a guest — along with multiple other mainstream defense tech bigwigs, including Founders Fund partner and Anduril chairman Trae Stephens, and Blackwater founder Erik Prince (none responded to a comment request). They are part of a growing tech counterculture movement that emphasizes patriotism, restoring an American manufacturing base and building weapons for the U.S. military. “We’re not only going to see, you know, interesting companies emerge from this sort of this vibe shift,” Boyle told New Founding’s podcast in March. “But I think we’ll see new political movements.”
Political movements with a message that will translate into solid returns, as some investors see it. Vivek Ramaswamy, the billionaire former presidential candidate and DOGE cofounder, launched an investment firm in 2022 to push companies to abandon ‘woke’ ideals, after lambasting “stakeholder capitalism” in his book Woke Inc. More recently, others are stepping in: Investor Azoria Capital said last week its ETF would shun companies that support DEI, and embraced the ‘anti-woke’ moniker. “If you commit to hiring on race and gender and not merit, your stock will continue to underperform,” CEO James Fishback told Fox News. “Our ETF will call you out.”
Another firm, 1789 Capital, recently hired MAGA First Son Donald Trump Jr. as a partner after its debut. It has raised more than $150 million for a growth equity fund — according to a person with knowledge of the fund — to implement its anti-woke blueprint: investing in companies that reject environmental, social and governance principles, globalization, and bureaucracy. Like New Founding, 1789 sees its portfolio companies as part of an emergent ‘parallel economy.’ The firm has backed nine startups, including Substack, video platform Rumble and the Tucker Carlson Network.
Got a tip? Contact David Jeans at djeans@forbes.com or 347-559-5443 on Signal.
Omeed Malik, 1789’s president, told Forbes he believes other venture firms, like Sequoia, long ignored a clear cultural and political shift, including a move away from globalization. “That’s the firm that went out of their way to create China-only funds and invest in China,” he said. “And it wasn’t until the winds were blowing the other way, as recently as about 20 months ago, that they stopped doing that. So it was me observing their conduct that made it clear to me, we needed an alternative.” (Sequoia didn’t respond to a comment request).
It’s too early to see how the anti-woke thesis will pay out, and compared to Wall Street and mainstream Silicon Valley investors, these funds have raised a “pittance,” said Neil Patel, who leads the Tucker Carlson Network, and negotiated 1789’s investment. But momentum is building, particularly with the arrival of a venture capitalist, J.D. Vance, in the White House. Pointing to the number of people who elected Trump, Patel added that “slightly more than half the country are not being catered to by the normal corporate world, and there’s a huge opportunity there.”
Silicon Valley cemented America’s tech dominance largely on progressive ideals like free trade, immigration and social justice, spawning world-changing companies and a powerful class of new billionaires with culture-shaping reach — people like Andreessen, who built one of the first web browsers and was an early backer of Facebook and Twitter. He is among the most prominent of a coterie of Silicon Valley leaders who have in recent years turned against many of those same ideals, taking aim at “woke” agendas, which they now claim have stalled innovation, hamstrung business and limited American prosperity. “In the 2010s through 2024, being woke and repressive was the height of cool,” Andreessen proclaimed on X last week. “Starting in 2025, resisting wokeness will be the height of cool.”
With that view, Andreessen’s investment in New Founding isn’t particularly unusual: He is a prolific angel investor, and often backs emerging funds. What’s striking is how his ideas about American tech supremacy — freeing innovators from regulation and government intervention, among them — align with the firm’s mission.
In his Techno-Optimist manifesto, a 5,000 word screed published in 2023, Andreessen wrote, “technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.” Once a self-professed Democrat, in recent years he has moved to the right, publicly endorsing now President-elect Trump. And he has been vocal about his frustration with government and American culture, which he says has evolved into “a left-wing reactionary scream”: “radicalized rage that’s sort of fundamentally anti-capitalist… fundamentally communist…and then fundamentally anti-technological.”
A response to this — Andreessen and New Founding have both suggested — is already underway, a so-called “vibe shift” in Silicon Valley and beyond. Legacy institutions are in accelerating decline and new cultural movements are rising to replace them, they claim.
“The old ways of cutting and slicing the world have broken down,” wrote New Founding’s head of venture, Santiago Pliego, in a widely-shared blog post earlier this year, “and now the most unexpected groups have found themselves as co-belligerents in an existential war.” On Tucker Carlson’s X show, Pliego said Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was the first major step toward altering society: “A lot of people are sensing that things are changing.”
Behind New Founding is Fischer, a Harvard Law graduate and active member of various conservative groups, including the Claremont Institute and the Society for American Civil Renewal, a male-only Christian fraternal group that hopes to train young leaders to replace the U.S. government with “a renewed American regime.” He appears to have made a small fortune from managing a multi-billion dollar real estate portfolio. Another of his companies, Trustwork — an online marketplace for maintenance workers — was shuttered in 2019, and is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit accusing Fischer and a business partner of embezzlement; They have denied wrongdoing and countersued, claiming they were extorted. Then, in 2021, he started New Founding with other Claremont alumni.
On the phone, Fischer is pensive and pragmatic. He is also very much focused on New Founding as a business opportunity built on its alignment with three social groups: Trump’s MAGA followers (“the new right political movement”), the dissident tech world (those fighting “the Google, Facebook, Salesforce woke culture”), and the Christian right (“would-be Christian thinkers who are focused on a more assertive political vision”). “Our thesis was that those would be three components of an emerging movement,” he said.
But in New Founding’s manifesto, he strikes a darker tone. “We are at the end of a civilizational cycle,” he wrote. “Coming years will bring turmoil and peril, but also great opportunity—perhaps the first in nearly a century—to forge new models and institutions that can shape the direction of Western civilization.”
He concludes with a nod to an “inflection point,” an upcoming upheaval, and a call to action. “Even another Trump presidency will not change the current system’s underlying fragility or end the Left’s grip on most legacy institutions,” he wrote, before finishing with: “It is our birthright to lead Western civilization into the digital age.”
Such language appears to share parallels with Accelerationism, a philosophy that claims societal collapse is impending, and measures to hasten its arrival will allow something better — and more aligned — to be built in its place, said Jason Blazakis, a professor at Middlebury College who focuses on extremism. “It’s implied that there needs to be change, there needs to be potentially a blood letting, without saying that there needs to be violence,” he said. “Because there’s no other way to change the fabric of the country in the way that they would like, without having some level of violence or upheaval.”
Fischer insisted this isn’t as grim as it might sound, and said it is not a subtextual call for unrest or civil war. Societal upheaval “could be widespread violence” or it could be “like the financial crisis of 2008 where you saw the collapse of major institutions,” he said. Or the fall of the Soviet Union. “We’re in a world where political volatility is high, meaning, it’s very hard to predict any sort of outcome, and you have a wide array of possible outcomes,” he said. “And I tend to avoid the business of prediction.”
New Founding started as a “dissident” organization, Fischer said, acknowledging that he has leaned into provocation. He even launched a venture last year with an online personality who has a history of posting swastikas and other Nazi imagery (which he has previously described as “ironic trolling” as opposed to “genuine Nazi belief”). “My thesis from the beginning was to be public and be online, and that would attract people,” he said. “Many people are looking for something that has been censored by the mainstream and by being public about our interest in that, we will have something attractive that is scarce in the world.”
It’s still early, but the group is gaining traction. New Founding’s talent network, which promises to place candidates at companies that support the organization’s mission, is 3,000 members strong and growing. It submitted several dozen people for roles to be considered by Project 2025, the alleged far-right blueprint for Trump 2.0 (Trump, notably, distanced himself from its more extreme ideas). With increasing momentum spanning Silicon Valley royalty to the White House itself — one staffer posted a group photo with Vance after he was chosen as Trump’s VP, calling him “our guy” — the firm plans to close its first fund at $6 million, before raising another in 2025.
Now that Trump’s headed back into office, Fischer said he’s thinking about toning down the rhetoric around New Founding’s message, articulating its vision on its own terms, rather than as an anti-woke reaction. “We’ve been progressively defining what the positive vision we aspire to is.”
Will Yakowicz contributed reporting.
Read the full article here
