office building, with hundreds more packed into an overflow room next door, eager to discuss strategies Investing in US could put to work in the upcoming midterms.
In mid-November 2017, hundreds of people crammed into a conference room in a D.C. Racing to reassure jittery Democrats, Mehlhorn scheduled a public debriefing for after the election, open to any and all Democrats interested in seeing what they’d learned. Beneath it all lay a fear that Hoffman, in typical Silicon Valley fashion, was trying to mine Democratic voter data to make money off the resistance. Rumors circulated that Hoffman was using his money to pay politicos who might one day help his business interests, or, perhaps more generously, that Hoffman was being scammed by political grifters who knew nothing about winning local elections. But where Hoffman and Mehlhorn saw a political sandbox, Democratic Party officials saw a Bay Area interloper. For Hoffman, an early employee at PayPal and the co-founder of LinkedIn, the off-cycle Virginia race was the perfect laboratory for their fund, Investing in US, to test-drive disruptive new electoral strategies. In early 2017, Hoffman joined forces with political strategist Dmitri Mehlhorn, among others, investing some $3 million in Democratic candidates and groups in Virginia with the goal of flipping the state’s Republican-held legislature. Billionaire Reid Hoffman’s venture capital–fueled crusade to save democracy had a bit of a bumpy start.
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