For Vance, an Idyllic Appalachian Startup Became a Hard Lesson

During JD Vance’s brief career as a venture capitalist, few startups attracted his support more than AppHarvest, a now bankrupt plan to build greenhouses across Appalachia.

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JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, spoke in Philadelphia this summer.

For JD Vance, it seemed like the perfect investment.

In February 2018, he was working as a venture capitalist when he learned about AppHarvest. Its founder, Jonathan Webb, was a Kentucky native who wanted to build giant greenhouses in Appalachia that would put locals to work. For Mr. Vance, an Ohioan and chronicler of Appalachia with political aspirations, the idea sounded enticing.

“We really try to identify where a given economic trend matches up with a new technology” and then “put as much money into that company as you can,” he said in a podcast interview a couple of years later. He called AppHarvest “a pretty perfect elucidation of that thesis.”

Within three years, the company would file for bankruptcy.

Mr. Vance, 40, spent less than a half-decade as a Silicon Valley investor, but those years were a pivotal period when he laid the groundwork for his political career — as a Republican senator from Ohio and now the running mate of former President Donald J. Trump.

When he co-founded his own firm in 2019, Narya Capital, some of its investments would mirror his evolving beliefs. One was Rumble, an unfiltered video-sharing service that bills itself as “immune to cancel culture” and is awash in the kind of false claims that Mr. Vance has embraced during the presidential campaign. Both Narya and Mr. Vance also invested in Hallow, a Catholic prayer app; he converted to Catholicism in 2019.

ImageThe AppHarvest facility in Morehead, Ky., in 2021.Credit…Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

None, however, attracted his attention the way AppHarvest did. His memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” had described Appalachia as “hemorrhaging jobs and hope”; AppHarvest was pitched as a solution to the declining coal industry there, ready to provide hundreds of workers health insurance and living wages.

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