“She’s recommending 20th century solutions to 21st century problems,” he said of Warren. “It’s not like breaking Google up into four mini-Googles would somehow improve the marketplace because no one wants to use the fourth best search engine. There’s a reason why we’re not using Bing.”
Yang has early roots in the tech industry. He grew up in upstate New York, a self-described nerd who often spent more time with computers than people. His father, who worked at International Business Machines Corp. and generated 69 patents, encouraged his son’s early interest in technology. After Yang earned a law degree from Columbia University, he found he didn’t like being a lawyer and launched a startup allowing people to donate to celebrities’ favorite charities (it failed), then he drifted to a health care startup and eventually joined an online test prep company as an employee. By the time test titan Kaplan Test Prep bought it a few years later in 2009, Yang had risen to become its chief executive. He used part of his windfall to start a non-profit called Venture For America, matching recent college graduates with tech startups in sometimes-overlooked cities like St. Louis, Detroit and Pittsburgh.
The people most likely to donate to Yang’s campaign have job titles like programmer, developer and software engineer. Many of them have jobs at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp., but Yang also has a steady stream of contributions from workers with the same jobs at companies around the country, such as Capital One Financial Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp. and Walmart Inc.
Workers at tech firms contributed $321,664 to Yang through the end of June, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. That was less than the $1.3 million the sector gave to Pete Buttigieg, tops among Democratic presidential candidates, and about as much as Joe Biden, who is polling far higher but whose late entry into the race gave him less time to raise money.
Like most of his rivals, Yang's big three locations for raising money are the New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco metro areas, but tech enclaves rank higher on his list than they do for other candidates. Seattle is fourth and the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area—the heart of Silicon Valley—is seventh.
Richard Shank is one of those donors. A software developer in Beaverton, Ore., he was working on a project to automate school scheduling and listening to a Ray Kurzweil audiobook a few years ago when he had a realization that automation was going to cause a lot more disruption to the economy.
After reading more on the issue, Shank, 50, settled on the universal basic income—sometimes called UBI, or in Yang’s case, the “tech check”—as a solution. He backed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in 2016 in part because he’d said favorable things about the idea, but when he heard Yang on Sam Harris’ podcast, Shank had finally found his candidate.
“I was immediately sold,” he said. “UBI is probably the single most important issue in this race.”
Shank listened to the audiobook of The War on Normal People and checked out every podcast interview with the Yang that he could find. He sets aside a portion of each paycheck to send to Yang’s campaign, and is about $1,000 toward his goal of hitting the Federal Election Commission maximum of $2,800.
Neil Malhotra, a political economy professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, has studied political attitudes in Silicon Valley and the tech sector. One study of tech founders in Silicon Valley found that they favor low regulation to allow businesses to innovate but they also support redistributing wealth and are liberal on social issues. A separate study found similar attitudes among computer science majors at Stanford.