# Tech Right Group Chats The **tech right group chats** are a loose network of private WhatsApp and Signal groups, most of them organized around the venture capitalist [[Marc Andreessen]], that took off in the spring of 2020. Founders, investors, right-wing writers and eventually Trump administration officials used them to argue about politics away from public social media. Ben Smith of Semafor reported the network in detail in April 2025. He called it the single most important place where Silicon Valley's turn toward [[Donald Trump]] was shaped and negotiated. [[Sriram Krishnan]], one of the main organizers, had already called the chats "the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion." There's a paradox at the center of the network. Its members spent 2020 saying they couldn't speak freely in public. Their answer was to move the conversation somewhere the public couldn't see it at all, often with messages set to disappear. The "free speech" coalition did much of its real deliberating off the record. Then the people in the chats took jobs in the government, and the chats came with them. ## Origins (2018–2020) Andreessen was already running group chats by 2018, according to The Verge. The network grew quickly in the first months of the [[COVID-19 Pandemic]]. In April 2020 Andreessen published [[It's Time to Build]], and it was discussed widely on [[Clubhouse]], where Krishnan was hosting rooms. According to the story the two have told friends, Andreessen and Krishnan talked about recreating the free-wheeling early days of the Hacker News forum and settled on group chats instead. They weighed Signal, WhatsApp and [[Telegram]], and dropped Telegram over concerns about its security and Russian ties. Krishnan gave two reasons for the shift in his 2024 essay "Group Chats Rule the World": the "great culture wars of 2020" made people in tech unwilling to share their views in public, and lockdowns pushed everyone online for community. ## Build According to Semafor, Krishnan, then working as a consultant, launched a WhatsApp group called **Build** in spring 2020 with about a dozen of Silicon Valley's elite figures. Smith described it as a chat Krishnan set up for Andreessen. Andreessen loved it, and within a year Krishnan had launched dozens more on engineering, design, project management and artificial intelligence. The membership hasn't been made public. The name echoes Andreessen's essay; Semafor doesn't say whether that was deliberate. Build was first reported by Semafor in April 2025. [[Gil Durán]] also describes it in his 2026 book [[The Nerd Reich]]. Krishnan's own essay describes the chats in general terms but doesn't name any of them. Two participants told Semafor that these early tech chats rarely mentioned Trump. Instead, executives talked through the specific political pressures on Silicon Valley leaders, such as employee demands that they declare that Black Lives Matter or back transgender-rights policies they didn't actually support. ## The political chats Separately from Krishnan, [[Erik Torenberg]] set up tech chats on WhatsApp and more political chats on Signal, which is more fully encrypted and supports disappearing messages. He told Semafor that in 2020 people felt social media was a "monoculture," and group chats became a safe space to debate, build consensus and "feel that you're not alone." Andreessen joined many of them. Semafor traced the political chats through several stages: - **The liberal phase.** Andreessen spent time in a group with liberal intellectuals connected to the 2020 *Harper's* "Letter on Justice and Open Debate," then split with them. - **The right turn.** Andreessen pressed the right-wing writer [[Richard Hanania]] to start a chat of "smart right-wing people." Hanania later said he grew alienated as the group moved toward partisan pro-Trump politics and came to see it as a "vehicle for groupthink." - **The recruiters.** [[Christopher Rufo]] told Semafor he saw the chats as a good use of his time to radicalize tech elites, whom he considered the most promising new coalition partners for the right. ## Chatham House The best-known chat is **Chatham House**, a large Signal group named for the London think tank's off-the-record rule. Reported participants have included [[Joe Lonsdale]], [[Mark Cuban]], [[Tucker Carlson]], [[Ben Shapiro]], the Democratic data analyst David Shor and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Smith wrote that the chats' influence ran from mainstreaming the monarchist writer [[Curtis Yarvin]] to a "particularly focused and developed dislike" of the reporter [[Taylor Lorenz]]. In April 2025, Trump's tariffs split the group. Lonsdale clashed with [[Balaji Srinivasan]] over China. [[David Sacks]] wrote that the group had become "worthless" because its loudest voices had "TDS," and told Torenberg to start a new one "with just smart people." [[Shaun Maguire]], [[Tyler Winklevoss]] and Carlson left. Rufo told Semafor there was "a big split on the tech right." ## From chats to government The chats moved into the administration with their members. Krishnan became Trump's senior White House adviser on AI. Semafor noted that no one in the network was surprised when Trump officials were caught using a Signal chat for war planning in March 2025 ([[Hegseth Signalgate]]). In July 2025 The Washington Post obtained messages Andreessen had sent to a WhatsApp group that included Trump administration officials, tech leaders and AI researchers. In them he attacked Stanford, MIT and the National Science Foundation, and wrote that universities would "pay the price" for their diversity policies. Fortune and TechCrunch followed up on the Post's report. See [[Andreessen Group Chat Leak]]. ## Why it's on the map - **Private power, by its own account.** The organizers don't claim the chats are idle talk. Krishnan called them the "upstream" of mainstream opinion, and Andreessen told Torenberg the members were having private conversations because they "weren't allowed to have the public conversations." - **The free-speech paradox.** The coalition built on complaints about public censorship moved its most consequential arguments into rooms the public can't see. Disappearing messages mean there may never be a record. - **The next step after Clubhouse.** The same people who used [[Clubhouse]] to talk around the press in 2020 moved to closed chats the same year. See [[Social Audio]]. - **Radicalization by design.** Rufo's account and Hanania's "groupthink" both describe the chats as places where views were deliberately shifted. - **A record-keeping problem.** Once officials took part, policy arguments with the president's advisers happened in private, deletable messages. ## Connections - [[Marc Andreessen]] · [[Sriram Krishnan]] · [[Erik Torenberg]] · [[Andreessen Horowitz]] - [[It's Time to Build]] · [[Clubhouse]] · [[Social Audio]] · [[Tech Right]] - [[Christopher Rufo]] · [[Curtis Yarvin]] · [[Joe Lonsdale]] · [[Balaji Srinivasan]] · [[David Sacks]] · [[Tucker Carlson]] - [[Taylor Lorenz]] · [[Hegseth Signalgate]] · [[WhatsApp]] · [[Telegram]] - [[Richard Hanania]] · [[Mark Cuban]] · [[Andreessen Group Chat Leak]] · [[Gil Durán]]