Hackathon participants had 24 hours to create a new technology program from scratch. Silicon Valley's Libertarian revolution

SAN FRANCISCO – Libertarian and conservative technology types huddled this weekend on Nancy Pelosi’s home turf making big promises about what they can do to help Republicans win more elections — but also lamenting how their ideas could still get lost in the shuffle.

Gathering in the swank W hotel, a confab of wealthy start-up founders, college engineering students, long-shot local GOP candidates and self-described political geeks professed their mutual disdain for heavy-handed government and declared allegiance to a Rand Paul-style of governing that they’d like to think is on the upswing in the American body politic.


Their calls for disrupting the status quo got a nice boost since Paul himself was in the house, delivering a 24-minute keynote that drew comparisons between Ayn Rand and irrational Washington behavior and also slammed President Barack Obama for advancing regulations and surveillance policies that Paul said are out of whack with what Silicon Valley is all about.

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“I come out here and people say, ‘We loved President Obama. We’re all for President Obama. We’re from the tech community,’” Paul said to a standing room only crowd of several hundred attending the Lincoln Labs conference. “Why? Why would you be? He’s not for innovation. He’s not for freedom. He’s for the protectionism crowd. He’s for the crowd that would limit the activities of these companies.”

Paul’s push into the Bay Area’s Democratic stronghold has a clear motive – drawing money from the region’s recently rich and tapping into some of the same engineering talent that Obama used to great effect in his 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Interviews here with more than two dozen conference attendees suggested the prospective GOP 2016 presidential candidate has made some conversions.

“I think politicians usually have so little understanding of this space or they’re so not aligned with our interests. I think Rand both gets it and he’s very aligned,” said Scott Banister, an early adviser and board member at PayPal and marijuana rights activist who accompanied Paul to fundraisers and several round tables across San Francisco since the senator’s arrival Thursday.

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Asked if he had committed to backing Paul’s presidential aspirations in the same way wealthy patrons helped Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich stay afloat during the 2012 GOP primaries, Banister replied, “I will certainly be a person. I think the good news is that I think Rand will have a very broad base of financial support.”

Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal alumni, joined Paul and Banister on a panel discussion challenging the NSA surveillance operations exposed by Edward Snowden’s stolen documents. In an interview, Lonsdale said Republicans had about a decade to start incorporating libertarian ideas on marijuana and surveillance, as well as a more friendly immigration system. Otherwise, he warned, the GOP risks staying relevant.

“For the party’s sake it should shift that way. If it doesn’t then I’m not going to be part of it,” he said.

Democrats in San Francisco and back in Washington acknowledge the libertarians and conservatives in the Bay Area represent a rich vein for financial support and new talent, though they are far from conceding the region to Paul or anyone else in the GOP. Hillary Clinton, after all, is scheduled to be here Monday to tour Facebook’s headquarters and participate in a live Q&A online chat. Obama will also be in San Francisco for a Wednesday fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

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Libertarians have their own issues to deal with just with Republicans too.

Silicon Valley’s right-leaning thinkers don’t like being seen by politicians just as ATM machines, and they are skeptical that their views carry much weight with Republican leaders back in Washington. Publicly supporting Paul has its risks too since he may not survive a crowded GOP primary field and actually make it to the White House. And just by speaking up or donating to conservative or libertarian causes can expose someone to ridicule or worse from left-leaning colleagues, clients and potential venture capital funders.

“There’s a lot of group think,” said Eric Jackson, another former PayPal executive who has gone on to start other technology companies. “The biggest thing I’d point out is you can be shot by stating some sort of right-of-center opinion which in most of the country would just be taken as a fair point but here can also be kind of scandalous.”

Libertarians also are often at odds with establishment Republican who have their own unique political challenges in other parts of the country and don’t agree on some of the same big social issues that aren’t as polarizing in Northern California — from criticizing the NSA to embracing gay marriage, immigration reform and legalizing pot.

“These people think they’re geniuses and they don’t know how to relate to the people in power and trying to shove their message upwards is not always the best way to do that,” said Vincent Harris, an Austin, Texas-based Republican operative who spearheaded Sen. Ted Cruz’s digital campaign in 2012 and noted during one of the Saturday panel discussions that his current clients would be “scared” to hear some of the libertarians’ musings on social issues.

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Establishment Republicans also came under fire from their San Francisco-based counterparts who see the party as slow to match Obama and the Democrats on the political technology front.

“The best the RNC back in Washington can do is manage well. Then they’ve got to get the f—- out of the way of the young people,” said David Carlos Salaverry, a local cabinetmaker and contractor and part-time Uber driver who is running in November for a San Francisco city supervisor position.

Salaverry said he’d been studying the technology in Obama’s 2012 campaign infrastructure and expected the Democrats’ deep bench of expert alumni would continue to be a challenge to the GOP. But he also recalled how Ronald Reagan’s superiority on direct mail led to electoral wins in California that lasted through George H.W. Bush in 1988.

“There’s no reason why we couldn’t leapfrog them. We can reverse engineer what they did,” he said.

Garrett Johnson, a former Jeb Bush legislative aide and startup founder who co-organized this weekend’s conference, said Democrats don’t have a monopoly over the region’s fundraising and talent.

“It should be fair game, both for the intellectual capital they bring to the table, and also the money they bring to the table,” he said.

But he also lamented that the GOP’s technology shortcomings could still stymie any recruiting success that Paul or other presidential contenders have in Silicon Valley.

“If you have all this talent, but if you pour them into a leaky bucket, it’s still an ineffective process,” he said. Republicans, he added, need to “put some duck tape on those holes until they’re completely mended and that’s what we’re in the process of doing.”

Hoping to find some of that new talent, the Lincoln Labs conference staged something of a tryout contest for engineers to build a functional new technology program during a 24-hour span. Ten teams competed in the so-called Hackathon for a share of a $10,000 prize, settling in for an all-night session on the second floor work space of a new technology startup co-founded by Silicon Valley billionaire Sean Parker.

Projects attempted for the competition weren’t all directly related to partisan political issues. One group tried to set up a system that would help people get word of potholes and missing stop signs to local authorities. Another tried to come up with a way to help San Francisco police better use technology in collecting data and solving crimes. Some of the programmers said they had previously been Obama supporters and didn’t have any immediate interest in joining a political campaign — of any party.

“I’m still young and naïve and idealistic that I think that I can with my own ideas change the world. So I wouldn’t want to be a code monkey for someone else at this point,” said Jason Levy, a 29-year old web developer from San Francisco who was working on a team that was trying to create a BuzzFeed-like quiz system that could help young people figure out where they fall on the political spectrum.

“We wanted to make something that appeals to anyone,” Levy said in the closing hours of the contest, as his teammates worked at a table littered with paper plates and empty water bottles and competitors munched on free donuts and dozed on couches.

Republican officials welcomed the prospect that the Hackathon could yield the party some previously undiscovered talent — and they asked conference organizers to share contact information for the participants.

“We’ll see exactly how much that desire to be civically involved and to take on a cause that’s civically minded, how much that translates into them wanting to stay involved in the challenges we’ve got within our party and within the movement,” said Chuck DeFeo, chief digital officer for the Republican National Committee. “These are all people working in Silicon Valley start-up environments. Is this a spark for them to actually become more involved in helping us get center-right candidates elected?”

“In the long run it’s going to amount to a lot,” added Andy Barkett, a former Facebook engineer hired to much fanfare in 2013 as the RNC’s Silicon Valley-based chief technology officer. “We won’t have everything in two years. But every cycle we need to get substantially better than we were the last cycle. Every cycle we need to have more technologists who understand how to use the tools, who have the experience to go on and work in another campaign.”

Surveying the turnout of libertarian and conservative-minded people at the Lincoln Labs conference, which drew several hundred participants from the Bay Area but also from across the country, Barkett said, “I remember when there were only three people in the group.”