Y Combinator has been Silicon Valley’s pre-eminent start-up incubator for 20 years. But the organisation that helped launch Airbnb and Reddit only hired its first full-time lobbyist in 2023.
These days, Big Tech companies are constantly fighting lawsuits and regulators over complaints of anti-competitive behaviour. But when Luther Lowe started calling foul over Google’s treatment of rivals in its search results in the early 2010s, Silicon Valley’s giants seemed invincible.
An activist at college who grew up in a family with long-standing ties to Washington DC, Lowe joined local reviews site Yelp in 2008 and led the San Francisco company’s legal campaign against what it alleges is Google’s “illegal self-preferencing” in local search.
Yelp’s legal battle is still ongoing but last August’s US court ruling that Google illegally exploited its dominance in search — followed by another victory for the US Department of Justice in its adtech case against Google in April — has provided vindication for Lowe. Google denies wrongdoing and is appealing both decisions.
Lowe’s current mission is fighting for “Little Tech”, making sure that start-ups have their own voice in Washington and Brussels — whether pushing back against what he sees as onerous regulations or continuing to highlight misbehaviour by some of the world’s most valuable companies.
From Washington he spoke to the FT’s global tech correspondent Tim Bradshaw about how these David-and-Goliath battles have evolved and where he sees the new front lines.
Tim Bradshaw: You made your name running policy at Yelp, the local reviews app, by putting the spotlight on how Google’s search algorithm was harming competitors. How you did you come to join Y Combinator and why does a start-up accelerator programme, working with companies that may not even have launched yet, need to get involved in policy advice and political campaigning?
Luther Lowe: Garry Tan, Y Combinator’s CEO, recognised that in places like Washington and Brussels, there’s plenty of representation for the largest [tech] companies. But “Little Tech”, this phrase that he coined, doesn’t have a seat at the table. So when he became CEO and president [in 2023], he and I got coffee and that’s when the conversation began.
TB: So you’re trying to represent the hundreds of start-ups that go through YC and then the broader tech founder community as a whole — Little Tech as you call it. How do you decide what to focus on when there’s potentially many competing agendas in there?
LL: It’s definitely a lot of juggling. [A lot of my work is] trying to move the needle on the macro issues, like access to talent. YC wants to brain drain the most brilliant people from around the world and bring them into the US to have them build great companies. Sometimes you’ll have these cases where a founder who’s from outside the US, despite being extraordinary, is hitting snags in getting their visa and getting in to participate in our three-month programme. So we care a lot about that access to talent issue.
[Another focus is on] access to markets, which I would define as making sure that competition is robust and that the largest players are not egregiously putting their thumb on the scale through self-preferencing or denying interoperability.
And then another big topic obviously is artificial intelligence. Where we come in on AI is trying to advocate for a more open market, where there’s lots of open source models and founders have lots of options to choose from in building their tools.
TB: Are there any early wins that you feel you can point to? You helped to quash California’s Senate Bill 1047, which intended to prevent potential harms from large AI models but was vetoed by Governor Newsom, who cited concerns that the bill could stifle innovation. [Meta, Google and OpenAI also lobbied against the bill.]
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LL: There’s been a lot of little wins and really big wins along the way. Issue wise, we thought that California bill was going to be overly burdensome to start-up founders working in AI. We put on a big event and created a lot of awareness and energy on that, which ultimately led to the governor vetoing the bill.
I would say there are also individual examples, like there was a bill that dealt with copyright law in the US that was sort of like a laser-guided missile at one of our smaller companies that helps aggregate building codes and make them searchable and easy to use. We were able to get the votes to kill that in the house.
TB: Especially at the moment, there is so much legislative activity, both at the federal level and state-by-state. What’s your radar when there’s legislation coming down the pipe? How do you pick your battles?
LL: DC runs on Signal and really Silicon Valley too. I feel like there’s just lots of Signal and WhatsApp groups that people belong to where they’re sharing intel and that is actually really helpful. We just launched an organisation, the American Innovators Network, with [Silicon Valley venture capital group] Andreessen Horowitz and there’s a good amount of resources going in to help monitor and advocate for Little Tech interests on AI issues in state capitals. And then the founders help flag stuff for me.
Then we decide if this is an issue where YC weighing in could move the needle. I have to be selective, because there is only one of me. So it really runs all over the map in terms of the nature of how I’m trying to help, but generally speaking, it’s a blend of, are we moving the chains on the core issues we care about — open source AI, competition, immigration, some tax issues — and then just this grab bag of random things that bubble up from founders who might need help with federal bureaucracy navigation.
TB: I remember a decade ago when Andreessen Horowitz started hiring lawyers and policy advisers to help their portfolio companies. At that time Uber was battling city authorities, you were [taking on] Google at Yelp, and there was a growing awareness that policy and the law isn’t something that tech start-ups can just ignore. Now it’s almost flipped the other way and there’s so much regulation and litigation around tech. How have you seen those broader dynamics change since you started at Yelp?
LL: I think it is still true — just like it was true 10, 15 years ago — that Silicon Valley and Washington are sort of intrigued by each other. When I go back to San Francisco, people are very excited to talk to me because they see Washington, especially what’s going on right now, is like a buzzy place. They want to get all the gossip. I do think that there’s probably some connection to the growing frustration at some of the larger tech firms that probably started back then. Around summer of 2016 was probably the biggest inflection point in the US, when [Democratic senator] Elizabeth Warren gave a speech that namechecked a lot of these companies. Then after the 2016 election . . . you started to see some fracturing between this sort of love affair between the Obama Democrats and Big Tech.
I think President Trump in his first term, rightfully, viewed these companies with suspicion and hostility, which culminated in the US vs Google [antitrust] filing in his last couple months of his first term. And then when the Biden administration came in, there was the choice to bring on Jonathan Kanter and Lina Khan [to lead the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission] and double down on that approach. Now you’ve got the Trump team carrying on that important work.
The VCs becoming more invested in Washington, apart from YC, is a somewhat connected trend. As these dominant platforms sucked up a lot of the oxygen that would normally go to consumer services, I think the investment world started looking at what are the other types of technology and end markets that we can look at. So “dual use” or technologies that can be created for consumers but can also be sold to government or even defence tech. And if you are creating a new rocket, you have to have in your Series A deck an explanation of what is your game plan to communicate with the government and comply with all the necessary regulations.
TB: When the agitation began against the Big Tech companies as being potential monopolists, it felt like they were almost invulnerable at that point. How did Europe play a role in galvanising the US to act?
LL: This all started in 2010, 2011. Twenty ten was when the first complaint with the European Commission was filed against Google. Twenty eleven was when Yelp, my former employer, kind of came out of the closet and started talking about how Google was putting its thumb on the scales, stealing their content. And then eventually the FTC opened an investigation later that year.
The Obama-appointed FTC ultimately voted against bringing charges. And then the ball was in the court of Joaquín Almunia, the European Commissioner [for Competition, from 2010 to 2014] who preceded Margrethe Vestager. He, to his credit, decided not to settle the case, despite overwhelming pressure to follow what the FTC had done. And that teed things up for Vestager, when she entered office in late 2014, to take a fresh look at the issues. That led to Vestager in April of 2015 announcing the intention to do a statement of objections.
I feel like that was the firing gun for the anti-Big Tech “techlash”. Eventually you had US politicians like Elizabeth Warren begin to make political arguments along the lines of, ‘why are European consumers poised to enjoy better protections than US consumers?’ And so it sort of boomeranged back to the US. And now you’ve got the EU’s Digital Markets Act [DMA, designed to curb tech leaders’ dominance of the digital marketplace], which we’re eagerly awaiting, [to see] how that is going to shake out. Then Google has lost two antitrust trials; Meta is in the middle of its own; Apple’s is going to commence pretty soon.
TB: But right now, it feels like Europe is getting a fairly bad rap from the Trump administration on almost everything. What do you feel like Europe has done right and wrong in trying to tackle Big Tech?
LL: What was surprising to me about first going to Brussels is that it seems like a lot of the political energy and advocacy about what should happen in Brussels is actually coming from US companies. It’s coming from small and medium-sized US companies that are saying, from 2010 through 2016, ‘nobody in the US government would listen to us regarding these abuse of dominance issues’. And so Brussels became sort of this objective venue.
There is this reputation and stereotype that Europe does not innovate, it regulates — that Europe is just jealous of all these great Silicon Valley companies and so it just needs to regulate them. And there are certain regulations that I think Little Tech or the tech crowd is probably fair in being concerned about, such as the Digital Services Act and GDPR and the AI Act — although it looks like they’re tinkering with the AI Act and trying to make that better.
What we’ve been trying to do is make sure folks see that the Digital Markets Act stands apart from some of the stereotypes — that it really is about ensuring that companies like Apple and Google are not choking off all the oxygen. We’re encouraging people to think opportunistically and provide evidence, open up lines of communication with the European Commission so they can contribute to how that’s enforced. Because it promises to unlock a lot of innovation and investment in those markets.
TB: Are small companies in general willing to challenge the big incumbents? Because for a time, big tech companies — especially Google and Meta — were places they ultimately would look to sell their businesses to. Have start-ups, especially at the early stage, become more willing to be seen to take on those companies?
LL: I think there still is a valid fear of retaliation. That’s why I think my role is so important.
[Among smaller start-ups, the chat app] Beeper Mini was an example of a company that was vocal about Apple and took the moral high ground. It created interoperable messaging that enabled iMessage usage between Android and Apple devices. It was this cat-and-mouse game for a while but Apple eventually sort of disabled their functionality. [Beeper’s efforts to create a workaround ultimately failed and the service shut down in early 2024].
We think it’s really important for somebody that’s fighting for Little Tech to exist and be a voice that can privately back channel these things to policymakers, and help flag opportunities for discrete interaction with regulators when appropriate.
TB: How much of what you did at Yelp created a playbook for what you do today? Because it seems like you need a combination of public chest-beating and a fairly one-to-one process of winning hearts and minds.
LL: Yelp was a canary in the coal mine and there were many years at the beginning of the process in 2011 where I think people looked at me like I was crazy and it was sort of heterodox to suggest that a company like Google might not be acting in everybody’s best interests. The tables have definitely turned, I think that people are definitely more suspicious of the actions of [Big Tech].
The big obvious one that people are talking about now — and California has awoken to this, though I’m not sure that Brussels and DC have fully appreciated it — is the fact that we’ve had large language models (LLMs) as a mass consumer product for over two and a half years — and then on the other hand, we have Siri, which is embarrassingly stupid, and Alexa, which is embarrassingly stupid.
It would be technically trivial to connect these two technologies and have these voice endpoints [on smartphones like iPhones or smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo] driving our interactions with LLM-powered assistants. There have been plenty of brilliant start-up founders that have built those types of voice interactions, but the ability to access deeper APIs [application programming interfaces] and the operating systems, which would allow some kind of alternative to overtake Siri as a default, is just not possible now. And so we are now to a point where these larger companies are basically denying consumers the fruit of this incredible innovation.
I think it’s finally becoming apparent that [Big Tech] can be a drag on innovation. The commitment to an LLM-powered Siri has been kicked out to 2027. They’re just not as equipped as these more nimble start-ups to create innovative stuff. And in fact, they’re worried about the innovation at this point, because I think the second that you hand the keys to a start-up that builds an LLM-powered voice assistant and let that be the default, then it somewhat commoditises your device. Then maybe suddenly people buy the device from the company that’s created the assistant in the future.
TB: For a number of years, internal pressure and employee activism was such a big part of making tech companies pay attention to some of these political issues. Is that something that you can still harness or has it gone away?
LL: To get to the root of why that was happening — no [political] party owns this and so you wind up interacting with misfits in both parties. At a recent YC event in DC, we had [Democratic senator] Cory Booker and [Republican senator] Josh Hawley. We had Rohit Chopra, who was the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Biden and is an Elizabeth Warren protégé, sitting next to Steve Bannon . . . The title of the Bannon panel was Can Techno-Optimism and Populism Coexist?
Something that concerns me about some of the sentiment in Washington around tech is that the anti-Big Tech vibes have turned into anti-tech vibes. And that’s not good, because technology is actually a great thing. We are very pro-tech, and we want to create an environment where the market is open and lots of new, exciting tech can emerge. The point I’m making though is what strange bedfellows emerge when you want advocate on these issues. I’m personally a Democrat, but I have become good friends with a lot of people in the Republican party.
Look at people like [vice-president] JD Vance who have been real leaders on these issues. The people that have leaned into these issues have performed really well electorally . . . The party that truly figures this out first is probably going to benefit the most electorally. And it seems like Republicans are figuring it out faster than Democrats, but certainly there’s a growing set of Democrats who I think are also embracing a lot of the anti-monopoly issues.
Being able to jump back and forth between those sides on these issues, that has tactically been the thing that keeps the wind in the sails of this work.
TB: How do you see efforts by the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and some other Silicon Valley leaders to get the Trump administration to line up on their side against European tech regulation? In effect harnessing an argument about free speech and content moderation to both inoculate themselves from criticism from Trump, but then also using that as a weapon against Europe?
LL: If I had to guess what’s going on, it’s tech lobbyists that represent companies like Apple and Google, which are intentionally conflating the Digital Services Act [which regulates social networks and other online platforms, to prevent disinformation and other harmful activities] and the DMA to people in the White House. And like I said earlier, I think that there are fair criticisms of the DSA, but if those two things get conflated and that becomes some kind of element in some kind of trade tit-for-tat, then that would be unfortunate for Little Tech.
We’re really excited that the White House has even used the phrase Little Tech in announcing some of these leaders [in antitrust enforcement], like Gail Slater and Andrew Ferguson. And again, putting Vance on the ticket was just a really powerful signal that they care about fostering the next generation of technology companies.
So what we’re trying to do is just underscore that not everything that Europe does on the regulatory front is bad for Little Tech.
TB: You mentioned earlier you were concerned about AI regulation. Why do you think it’s important to protect open source AI in particular, given the concern that this would hand a potential advantage to Chinese start-ups like DeepSeek?
LL: What’s going to allow the US to compete against China is our innovative spirit and that innovation is unlocked when there is open competition. And I think it’s crazy to me to suggest that we should just hand the keys to the largest firms that produce AI products to save us from China.
What’s happening in AI is the opposite of the antitrust debate, in a way — because actually what you want to see in the technology space is vibrant competition, because that’s what’s producing all this innovation. So we’re really excited by that. We should not be parachuting in with lots of heavy-handed regulation in a market where there is incredible competition.
When there’s not competition, when competition fails, then you want to enforce the antitrust laws. And then when that fails, then you regulate, because you failed to enforce the law. And we’re not close to that stage when it comes to AI.
It’s the open source projects that are giving the other firms a run for their money and putting competitive pressure on them to keep innovating. And so it just moves the whole ecosystem forward in a highly competitive direction. Like if you’re working at these [AI foundation model] companies, you’re barely clocking out. Everybody just feels like they’re in a race to build [artificial general intelligence, a kind of AI that surpasses human ability in any given field]. And so that’s super exciting.
This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity