Vance huddles with VCs

The Hill

18-03-2025

'Our workers, the populists on the one hand, the tech optimists on the other, have been failed by this government,' Vance said during his keynote address to the American Dynamism Summit hosted by the Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) venture capital firm.
'Not just the government of the last administration, but the government — in some ways — of the last 40 years, because there were two conceits that our leadership class had when it came to globalization.'
Vance argued the first conceit of globalization — describing the interdependence of the world's economies and services — was the assumption the U.S. would be able to separate the manufacturing of products from their design process.
The vice president described how design firms work with their manufacturing partners and often share intellectual property, practices and sometimes employees as a result.
'Now, we assume that other nations would always trail us in the value chain. But it turns out that as they got better at the low end of the value chain, they also started catching up on the higher end. We were squeezed from both ends,' he said.
The second conceit, Vance argued, was the idea that cheap labor is a positive thing for innovation.
'Cheap labor is fundamentally a crutch, and it's a crutch that inhibits innovation,' the vice president said. 'I might even say that it's a drug that too many American firms got addicted to now.'
Vance, a former venture capitalist, has served as one of the Trump administration's main messengers of technology policy.
Tuesday's address built off his speech at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris last month. Vance on Tuesday echoed his push against excessive regulation, arguing tech companies must be able to 'build, build, build.'