Gary Tan, the local venture capitalist who for years has railed against progressive politicians on social media and served as an intersection between tech and center-right politics in the city, is formalizing his influence operation.
Tan, CEO of acclaimed startup incubator Y Combinator, announced Wednesday that he has founded a dark money group called “Gary’s List,” which he described as a “voter education group” that is “dedicated to civic engagement, voter education and common sense advocacy for policies and candidates” in a press release. Such groups give donors a way to anonymously support a candidate or a candidate without donating directly to them.
“I want to work to ensure that Californians know the importance of investment and entrepreneurship to our state’s current and future economy,” Tan wrote.
As a 501(c)4 nonprofit, Gary’s List will be able to spend money directly on candidates and ballot measures. It can also print voter guides, host in-person events, take out advertisements and run programs training the next generation of elected officials. Tan said he plans to do all of the above.
But the operation is also a media enterprise: Gary’s List began with a blog that demonized public sector unions as “special interests”, attacked the ongoing teachers’ strike, and condemned the proposed billionaires tax. Tan has for years called on tech executives to create “parallel” media and “replace the unelected parts of the system” such as unions and nonprofits. “We need our own machine,” he said in 2023.
Tan has long been a voice championing tough-on-crime, law-and-order politics in San Francisco. He has spent nearly half a million dollars in local races since 2015, and is known locally for his ruthlessness: He once tweeted that the town’s seven supervisors – all progressives – should “die slow, motherfuckers” in a late-night brawl. The tweet, which Tan described as a joke, prompted hate mail and police reports.
Now his eyes are on statewide change. Tan said he would “take the same education and engagement across California that we took to San Francisco”, and pointed out san francisco standard He thought about “the energy that I felt when we were first working on recalling Chesa Boudin and the school board” in 2022.
Sam Singer, the “Master of Disaster” publicist who is working with Tan, did not disclose the amount or source of funding for Gary’s List, but said it had received donations from more individuals than Tan. Singer said, “There has been a huge amount of support for an organization that is, as Gary calls them, ‘radical centrist’ that is neither Democrat nor Republican, but a pragmatic, centrist and common-sense place.”
Singer said “all 58 counties” in California are “on Gary’s map” and the group will operate “from the Mexican border to the Oregon border.”
Gary’s list is the latest entry in a well-funded network of political donors that has helped boost spending for local elections into the stratosphere.
Similar operations have seen mixed success. TogetherSF, a similar nonprofit backed by venture capitalist Michael Moritz, crashed and burned after the 2024 elections, when its $9.5 million ballot measure to reform the city charter lost to a nearly $117,000 progressive counter-measure. Moritz later pulled the endorsement.
Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, once the biggest spending group in city politics, is still a major player and took in $1 million last year. GrowSF, another operation that once counted Tan as a board member, recently announced it would spend $2 million in the 2026 election cycle.
Tan launched his group with two co-founders – one an experienced lobbyist, the other a rugged local type.
Shaudi Fulp is a Sacramento lobbyist who is leading operations at Grow California, a separate political action committee aimed at fighting the proposed billionaires tax among other issues, which is funded entirely to the tune of $10 million by crypto executives Chris Larson and Tim Draper.
Forrest Liu is a nearly 30-year-old regular member of local political campaigns, who got his start in politics as an intern for former Mayor Ed Lee. In the years that followed, Liu gained a reputation as an organizer focused on protecting Asian seniors from street harassment, and as a bully for, among other things, challenging District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan to a fight. At least two police reports have been filed against Liu for harassment, leading some to believe that his political career was being sabotaged. “I think Forrest is a guy who will be over in politics very quickly,” political consultant David Ho said in a 2024 profile.
Gary’s List is structured as a 501(c)4 nonprofit, a tax designation that lets the group finance campaigns while giving donors a degree of privacy they wouldn’t enjoy if they donated directly. They are traditionally known as “dark money” groups because they can spend on elections without disclosing all of their donors.
501(c)4 rules are complex but generally require that these groups spend less than half their funds on elections. While they can give directly to candidates, they are more commonly used to fund “independent expenditure” committees, which can spend unlimited amounts of money on campaigns, so long as they are not found to be communicating directly with those campaigns.
The 501(c)4’s remaining funds should go toward “social welfare” activities, which could include the “voter education” guides and programs promised by Tan. Because they often raise a group’s public profile, the portion of a 501(c)4’s spending that is “charitable” is often more important in laying the groundwork for long-term political power than donations made during a single election.
Tan says that’s the plan. He told the Standard that his aim was to build “the political infrastructure for the next 20 years”.
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