Jeff Giesea

Last updated
Jeff Giesea
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Stanford University
OccupationEntrepreneur

Jeff Giesea is an American entrepreneur, communications specialist, and national security writer who was a business affiliate of several of Peter Thiel's companies and venture capital groups.

Contents

Education and businesses

Giesea attended Stanford University, where he edited Thiel's libertarian student paper The Stanford Review . Giesea worked for Thiel's first hedge fund, Thiel Capital Management, and Thiel later provided the seed money for one of Giesea's companies. [1] [2] Between Thiel Capital management and his startup, Giesea worked for Koch Industries' public affairs office. [3]

Giesea founded FierceMarkets, an online B2B media company. He sold the company to Questex Media in 2008 and left the company in 2009. [4] AdAge named him a top innovator the small business category for its 2008 Top Innovators list. [5]

He co-founded BestVendor, a free recommendation site for business apps, in January 2011. It entered open beta in November 2011 and by December had over 4800 users. The business received $600,000 in seed money from Peter Thiel, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, and Softbank Capital. By December 2011, it had received $3.6 million from seed rounds and Series A funding. [6] [7] In 2013, BestVendor was acquired by Docstoc. [8]

Following the sale of BestVendor, Giesea did a combination of angel investing and executive coaching. He wrote several articles for Harvard Business Review, including a well-known piece among post-exit entrepreneurs, “Dealing with the Emotional Fall-Out of Selling Your Business.” [9]

NATO and national security writings

Giesea has written several papers for NATO, mostly on the topic of information warfare. In early 2015, he published “It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare” in NATO’s peer-reviewed Strategic Communications Journal. [10] In 2017 he published “Hacking Hearts and Minds,” about the need to allocate more resources to countering foreign information warfare. [11] He spoke at NATO's Stratcom event in Riga that year as well. [12] In 2019 he wrote “Alliance Cohesion in the Age of Populism,” which aimed at helping NATO adapt to the rise of populism while strengthening its original mission. [13] In 2021, he published an article in American Affairs on "The Terrain of Discourse." [14]

Trump affiliations

Giesea supported Trump in 2016 and was an organizer in the early Trump movement. Buzzfeed credited him with being one of the minds behind the Trump meme army. [15] Additionally, he helped organize a "Gays for Trump" party at the 2016 RNC following the Pulse nightclub shooting and was alleged to have been involved with the October 2016 pro-Trump art show where Milo bathed himself in pig's blood as a performance art piece commemorating victims of undocumented immigrants and Islamic terrorism. [3] [16]

Giesea was one of the organizers of the Deploraball, an Inauguration party celebrating the election of Trump in January 2017. He gave a speech there entitled, "A New Type of Republican," explaining that Trumpism was based on three principles: sovereignty, economic nationalism ("in particular a focus on making life better for the middle and working Americans, not just the top one percent") and putting America first. [17]

In October 2017, Giesea formed a Super PAC called #Rev18 alongside Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec. Giesea described the PAC's goal as to promote anti-establishment candidates "who support American sovereignty and prosperity and who put the American citizen first". [18] They closed #Rev18 the following month, explaining that they did not have enough time to devote to it. [19] The Atlantic noted that this Super PAC was among the first examples of Trump supporters—a mostly online, Trump-centric group—venturing into electoral politics outside of support for Trump himself. [1]

Post-2020 political involvement

Giesea was not publicly involved in the 2020 election and has since denounced Trump. Reflecting on his past support for Trump, Giesea wrote in a 2022 blog post that, "By the 2020 election, I had lost passion for Trump and didn’t participate" while advocating that the American Right break from Trump. [20] In another post, he described January 6 as a "coordinated attempt to interfere in the electoral process" and described how this realization impacted him personally. [21] In June 2023, he endorsed Biden in an article titled, "The Trumpist Case for Biden." He wrote that "President Biden is more authentically pro-America than any of the leading Republican candidates including Trump or DeSantis." [22]

Personal life

Family

Giesea's mother is Mexican-American living in Mexico. He is openly gay and has a child.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Thiel</span> American entrepreneur and venture capitalist (born 1967)

Peter Andreas Thiel is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. As of July 2024, Thiel had an estimated net worth of US$11.2 billion and was ranked 212th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The Republican Party in the United States includes several factions, or wings. During the 19th century, Republican factions included the Half-Breeds, who supported civil service reform; the Radical Republicans, who advocated the immediate and total abolition of slavery, and later advocated civil rights for freed slaves during the Reconstruction era; and the Stalwarts, who supported machine politics.

Kenneth Gerard Langone Sr. KSG is an American billionaire businessman best known for organizing financing for the founders of The Home Depot. He is a major donor to the Republican Party.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joe Ricketts</span> American businessman (born 1941)

John Joseph Ricketts is an American billionaire businessman. He is the founder, former CEO and former chairman of TD Ameritrade. He has an estimated net worth of US$4.1 billion as of 2024, according to Forbes. He has pursued a variety of other business ventures including DNAinfo.com, High Plains Bison, The Lodge at Jackson Fork, and The American Film Company. Ricketts also engages in philanthropy through The Ricketts Art Foundation, Opportunity Education Foundation, The Cloisters on the Platte Foundation, and The Ricketts Conservation Foundation. He and his family have been the owners of the Chicago Cubs of Major League Baseball since October 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reid Hoffman</span> American internet entrepreneur (born 1967)

Reid Garrett Hoffman is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman is the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. He is also chairman of venture capital firm Village Global and a co-founder of Inflection AI.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David O. Sacks</span> South African American entrepreneur (born 1972)

David Oliver Sacks is a South African-American entrepreneur, author, and investor in internet technology firms. He is a general partner of Craft Ventures, a venture capital fund he co-founded in late 2017. Additionally, he is a co-host of the All In podcast, alongside Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg. Previously, Sacks was the COO and product leader of PayPal, and founder and CEO of Yammer. In 2016, he became interim CEO of Zenefits for ten months. In 2017, Sacks co-founded Craft Ventures, an early-stage venture fund. His angel investments include Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, and Airbnb.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Russia–United States relations</span> Bilateral relations

The United States and Russia maintain one of the most important, critical, and strategic foreign relations in the world. Both nations have shared interests in nuclear safety and security, nonproliferation, counterterrorism, and space exploration. Due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, relations became very tense after the United States imposed sanctions against Russia. Russia placed the United States on a list of "unfriendly countries".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ted Harvey</span> American politician

Ted Harvey is an American politician. In 2001, Harvey was elected to the Colorado House of Representatives as a Republican, representing the 43rd House District. Elected in 2006 to the Colorado Senate, he represented Senate District 30, which encompasses Northern Douglas County—Highlands Ranch, Lone Tree, Parker, and Roxborough Park. He was also one of Colorado's delegates to the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, in addition to Republican National Conventions in 2012, 2016, and prior election cycles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Keith Rabois</span> American technology executive and investor

Keith Rabois is an American technology executive and investor. He is a managing director at Khosla Ventures. He was an early-stage startup investor, and executive, at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide, and Square. Rabois invested in Yelp and the Xoom Corporation prior to each company's initial public offering (IPO). For both investments he insisted on being a board of directors member.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ryan Holiday</span> Stoic philosophy marketer, author, and businessman (born 1987)

Ryan Holiday is an American marketer, author, businessman and podcaster, notable for marketing Stoic philosophy in the form of books.

Robert Leroy Mercer is an American hedge fund manager, computer scientist, and political donor. Mercer was an early artificial intelligence researcher and developer and is the former co-CEO of the hedge fund company Renaissance Technologies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blake Masters</span> American venture capitalist and author (born 1986)

Blake Gates Masters is an American venture capitalist and former political candidate. Frequently referred to as a protégé of businessman Peter Thiel, Masters co-wrote Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future with Thiel in 2014, based on notes Masters had taken at Stanford Law School in 2012. He later served as chief operating officer (COO) of Thiel's investment firm, Thiel Capital, as well as president of the Thiel Foundation.

Charles Carlisle Johnson is an American political activist who was a public figure in the years 2013 to 2019. A self-described "investigative journalist", Johnson is often described as an internet troll and has been repeatedly involved in the proliferation and spread of multiple fake news stories. Johnson was owner of the alt-right websites GotNews.com, WeSearchr.com, and Freestartr.com, all of which were short-lived. He wrote two books, both published by Encounter Books in 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JD Vance</span> American politician (born 1984)

James David Vance is an American politician, author, and Marine veteran who has served since 2023 as the junior United States senator from Ohio. He is the Republican vice-presidential nominee in the 2024 United States presidential election.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Committee to Defeat the President</span>

The Committee to Defeat the President was first established as the hybrid Stop Hillary PAC in 2013. The PAC changed its name to the Committee to Defend the President in 2017. Ted Harvey, a former Colorado state senator, chairs the committee.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karla Jurvetson</span> American psychiatrist, philanthropist, and political organizer (born 1966)

Karla Jurvetson is an American physician, philanthropist, and major Democratic donor. She has particularly focused on supporting candidates who are women, people of color, and from underrepresented communities, and she is a prominent activist in the movement to protect voting rights and American democracy. Jurvetson is vice chair of EMILY's List, which supports Democratic pro-choice women and has more than five million members.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2022 United States Senate election in Arizona</span>

The 2022 United States Senate election in Arizona was held on November 8, 2022, to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent the state of Arizona.

The Democratic Coalition, formerly known as the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, is an American Super PAC founded in 2016 by Nathan Lerner, Scott Dworkin, and Jon Cooper for the purpose of opposing Donald Trump, with a fundraising goal of $20 million by Election Day. It was originally known as the Keep America Great PAC.

From 2017 through 2021, Donald Trump was the 45th president of the United States; he is the only American president to have no political or military service prior to his presidency, as well as the first to be charged and convicted with a felony after leaving office. He is regarded by historians as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2024 United States presidential election in Georgia</span>

The 2024 United States presidential election in Georgia is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, as part of the 2024 United States elections in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia will participate. Georgia voters will choose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote. The state of Georgia has 16 electoral votes in the Electoral College, following reapportionment due to the 2020 United States census in which it neither gained nor lost a seat. Georgia is considered to be a crucial swing state in 2024.

References

  1. 1 2 Gray, Rosie (2 October 2017). "A New Pro-Trump Super PAC Takes Aim at the Republican Establishment". The Atlantic.
  2. ↑ O'Brien, Luke (7 April 2020). "Far-Right Extremists Helped Create The World's Most Powerful Facial Recognition Technology". HuffPost.
  3. 1 2 Schreckinger, Ben (January–February 2017). "The Alt-Right Comes to Washington". Politico Magazine.
  4. ↑ "Questex Media Group acquires FierceMarkets". Ad Age. 2008-01-22. Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  5. ↑ "'Media Business' names Top Innovators". Ad Age. 2008-05-05. Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  6. ↑ Van Grove, Jennifer (20 December 2011). "BestVendor grabs $3M to help professionals find great apps". Reuters.
  7. ↑ Chikodi (8 December 2011). "BestVendor is the utility belt for small business apps". VentureBeat.
  8. ↑ Pozin, Ilya (26 April 2013). "Docstoc Acquires BestVendor: A Yelp For Business Tools And Vendors". Forbes.
  9. ↑ Giesea, Jeff (2015-09-01). "Dealing with the Emotional Fallout of Selling Your Business". Harvard Business Review. ISSN   0017-8012 . Retrieved 2022-07-13.
  10. ↑ "StratCom | NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence Riga, Latvia". www.stratcomcoe.org. Retrieved 2022-07-13.
  11. ↑ Publications, OPEN (2017-04-06). "Hacking Hearts and Minds". Medium. Retrieved 2022-07-13.
  12. ↑ Giesea, Jeff (2021-02-02). "Jeff Giesea's Remarks At NATO's StratCom Dialogue". Medium. Retrieved 2022-07-13.
  13. ↑ Publications, OPEN (2019-11-29). "Alliance Cohesion in an Age of Populism". Medium. Retrieved 2022-07-13.
  14. ↑ "The Terrain of Discourse". American Affairs Journal. 2021-05-20. Retrieved 2022-07-13.
  15. ↑ Bernstein, Joseph (2017-01-19). "This Man Helped Build The Trump Meme Army — Now He Wants To Reform It". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  16. ↑ "LGBTrump rally at #RNCinCLE". The Clarion-Ledger. Retrieved 2022-04-29.
  17. ↑ "Jeff Giesea's Speech at the DeploraBall › American Greatness". American Greatness. 2017-01-23. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  18. ↑ Carroll, Ed (5 October 2017). "Super PAC formed by 'Alt Lite'-labeled bloggers backs Mandel". Cleveland Jewish News.
  19. ↑ Carroll, Ed (14 November 2017). "Mandel-supporting Super PAC formed by 'alt lite' bloggers shuts down". Cleveland Jewish News.
  20. ↑ Giesea, Jeff (2022-04-28). "Why the American Right Should Break from Trump and Trumpism". Medium. Retrieved 2022-04-29.
  21. ↑ Giesea, Jeff (2023-06-06). "Facing the Truth About Trump's Electoral Interference, and Ourselves". Medium. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  22. ↑ Giesea, Jeff (2023-06-09). "The Trumpist Case for Biden". Medium. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.