Marc Andreessen, Joe Lonsdale and all other VCs are reportedly running for Trump’s new committees

Because Elon Musk plays such a crucial role on Donald Trump’s transition team, his cronies, a lot of whom are Silicon Valley enterprise capitalists, are reportedly being encouraged to assist.

For example, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and particularly its co-founder Marc Andreessen, is mentioned repeatedly. He, together with Antonio Gracias and Joe Lonsdale, have reportedly been asked to help on Musk’s advisory panel, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is examining ways to beat the technical challenges of collecting data on federal programs. The Washington Post on Sunday.

They are among the many few other Silicon Valley tycoons who are being tapped.

Gracias is the co-founder of Valor Equity Partners, which has done well through the years in backing Musk firms, including SpaceX and Tesla (he was a board member of the latter from 2007 to 2021). Lonsdale is the co-founder of VC firm 8VC and an energetic supporter of defense technologies (reminiscent of Anduril) and other government technologies reminiscent of financial software provider OpenGov. Lonsdale worked under billionaire VC Peter Thiel and helped co-found Palantir. Andreessen Horowitz has been a serious investor in SpaceX since around 2022 and is buying more shares as possible, as TechCrunch previously reported, and Andreessen has been a vocal supporter of Musk.

The DOGE commission hopes to recommend program cuts and fewer federal employees, Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy explained in Wall Street Journal editorial. last week. They wrote that additionally they expected a legal response. The group plans to launch a podcast within the near future, reports the Washing Post.

Meanwhile, Andreessen Horowitz can be said to be running for a position on the Trump administration’s promised cryptocurrency advisory board. It will probably be staffed by several crypto industry executives who need to help the United States set crypto policy, the industry they told Reuters last week. Reuters reports that Brian Quintenz, head of cryptocurrency policy at a16z, has already advised Trump’s team.

Another VC being discussed for a spot on this committee is Paradigm, an investment firm co-founded by Fred Ehrsam, the previous co-founder of Coinbase. Paradigm focuses on cryptocurrency/blockchain investments. Coinbase, which is just not a VC firm but funds its own corporate firm, Coinbase Ventures, can be fascinated by the commission, sources told Reuters.

Meanwhile, Thiel’s former student Michael Kratsios, who served as chief technology officer in the primary Trump administration, was reportedly hired to handle tech policy on Trump’s transition team. The case was reported by “Polityka” last week. Kratsios was known for authoring Trump’s 2020 pro-AI investment executive order. Before joining the federal government, he worked for Thiel Capital. However, Kratsios is just not currently a VC. According to him, he has been working at AI Scale AI since 2021 LinkedIn.

Lonsdale and a16z couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. They also didn’t reply to a request for comment from The Washington Post.