How Pete Buttigieg became the new toast of Silicon Valley's wealthiest donors

[applegrove]

How Pete Buttigieg became the new toast of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest donors 

Inside the tech network that is trying to turn a small-town mayor into a fundraising dynamo. 

By Theodore Schleife at Vox 

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/7/18527646/pete-buttigieg-silicon-valley-donors-mark-zuckerberg 

"SNIP...... 


“You have all these people who have spent years cultivating Silicon Valley, but yet clearly Pete is on fire,” said Joe Green, an early Facebook adviser who is the mutual friend that introduced Zuckerberg and Buttigieg in advance of the South Bend trip two years ago. “Somebody who has not been on the national fundraising circuit has really taken off.” 

Among Silicon Valley donors, Buttigieg does not have the long-standing chits collected of a Kamala Harris, or the personal friendships and zeitgeisty mores of a Cory Booker. What he does have is a tech-friendly bedside manner, along with connections to the LGBT, millennial, and highly educated communities that overlap with some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest. (Those connections, though, could certainly fuel the perception that he is too cozy with the tech industry.) 

And one gets the sense that, with a few twists in his life story, Buttigieg could easily be running around Silicon Valley pitching some startup rather than begging for dollars to fund a presidential campaign. 

He was one of the first several hundred people on Facebook (current user count: 2.4 billion). He calls his national finance committee of top fundraisers his “investor circle.” And he can wax eloquent about bitcoin or the risks of unfettered automation or artificial intelligence with the best of them. 


.....SNIP" 

[crazytown]

1. Pete 'was one of the first several hundred people on Facebook'

2017

[radical noodle]

2. They are personal friends n/t