Jeff Giesea | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Stanford University |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur |
Jeff Giesea is an American entrepreneur, communications specialist, and writer who was a business affiliate of several of Peter Thiel's companies and venture capital groups.
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]
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]
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]
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] In August 2024, he endorsed Kamala Harris for President, writing that "Trump is fundamentally unfit." [23]