Liz Fong-Jones was featured on an old (
2019) episode of a venture capitalist podcast called the
"Your First Million" podcast. This episode mainly covers Liz's early career and how he made his first million.
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/...sodes/3-liz-fong-jones-you-can-be-su-40565976 [
Archive]
Liz Fong-Jones is a Site Reliability Engineer and former high-ranking Google employee who used her talents as a coder and some strategic planning to take her out of a tumultuous early home life and into the life of a multi-millionaire. Arlan and Liz met up in New York City to speak candidly about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
- 1:32 - The interviewer (Arlan Hamilton) discloses that Liz Fong-Jones is investing in her venture capital fund, called BackStage Capital. Arlan discloses this again at timestamp 5:20.
- 1:50 - Liz likes to focus on investments that "move forward" activism for LGBT folx - especially for troons.
- 3:05 - The interviewer mentions that Liz is a multi-millionaire.
- 3:33 - Liz is "one of the most successful trans people in the US, by career and by capital."
- 6:04 - Liz describes having a "moonlighting job" as an "advisor and investor" in both startup and nonprofit companies. He prioritizes activism over making a profit.
- 6:44 - Liz affirms that he's wealthy.
- 7:20 - Liz affirms that he's one of the most successful trans people that he knows.
- 8:01 - Liz got into tech very early in his life. Says he has multiple software engineers in his family who taught him to code.
- 8:56 - Liz shills CareerKarma for getting into tech. (He was an early investor in this company.)
- 10:05 - Liz says he had to run away from his abusive family at age 16 (when he trooned out). He bounced around staying with friends and his grandparents. Then he went back to living with his parents, which he regrets since they were transphobic.
- 11:05 - Despite his sob story, it doesn't sound like he ever -actually- struggled financially. He had a bank account, and he even had a decent job. He says he was making $20/hr doing systems administration work for a group of math teachers. This was in 2004.
- 12:41 - At this time, Liz had a goal to save $20,000 to pay for the stinkditch surgery. He didn't have insurance that would cover it for him.
- 13:30 - Liz also had a goal to buy his own house. Liz's grandparents paid for him to go to college, although he dropped out after 2 years. This was also when he got the stinkditch (age 20). Liz says he didn't mind dropping out of college because (1) he didn't want to go into debt and (2) he was already getting internship offers from companies like Google and Facebook.
- 14:25 - With his stinkditch installed and now a job at Google, Liz prioritized buying a house.
- 15:00 - Liz was living in the San Francisco Bay Area, but because housing was so expensive, he decided to move to Boston and buy a house there instead. He was able to get a mortgage on a 5-bedroom house in Boston thanks to an FHA loan.
- This was in 2009 (after the 2008 Stock Market Crash), so he was pretty lucky getting in at a good time.
- 17:40 - About a year later, Liz met his future spouse, who was working as a software engineer at Google. They then got married about a year after they met.
- 17:50 - Liz and Elly combined their finances, which "really accelerated things". They paid off Liz's mortgage early.
- 18:25 - Elly is from a very wealthy family.
- 20:00 - It was around this time that Liz dropped his "scarcity mentality". Claims he was a "half-millionaire" at this point.
- 22:58 - Liz went back to college to finish his degree now that he was well-off. Still worked part-time at Google while doing this.
- 23:25 - Liz was already making "six figures" at his software engineering job. He says that going back to school (at MIT) was still a good idea because he was able to do a lot of networking there. MIT also looks good on his résumé.
- 24:13 - Liz started climbed the ranks at Google after this. His salary and stock-based compensation grew a lot. Liz especially gushes about the stock stuff.
- 24:43 - By the time Liz left Google, his stock was "easily double" his salary.
- 29:57 - Liz is wealthy and successful, so he starts doing the whole investing / activism thing and making a public nuisance of himself at Google.
- 30:25 - Liz says that, in 2015, Google leadership appreciated him for "channeling dissent within the company" and telling them about it. Maybe I'm wrong, but it sounds like he was a rat.
He partially credits this for why he rapidly rose through the ranks at Google. He was rewarded and getting paid like he was "senior staff" even without the job title reflecting it.
- But then in 2019, Google leadership changed their attitude about him. (I assume this was connected to the Google Walkout or the lead-up to it.)
- 31:22 - Liz basically said and did whatever the hell he wanted at Google.
Troon privilege for sure. He then left the company.
- 31:50 - Liz was just trying to "advocate for the needs of marginalized communities" at Google.
He was sounding the alarm!
- 33:28 - "I used to have a seat at the table, and then they kicked me out from that seat at the table and said, "'OK, we don't need you here anymore"." Basically confirms he was fired / forced to resign.

- 33:39 - Topic shifts to how Liz invests his wealth. Liz claims that he's not trying to "accumulate" money, but rather wants to give it back to the trans community. All of his investments and donations are for this goal.
- 34:52 - He gives large donations - in the six figures - to various organizations like the National Center for Transgender Equality (Liz also says he's a board member for the NCTE). NCTE does a lot of political lobbying in Washington DC for troon issues.
- 35:37 - In the "nonprofit world", Liz funds & focuses on three things in regards to troonery: Legislation, Lawsuits/Litigation, and Direct Aid.
- Trans Lifeline is given as an example of Direct Aid.
- The Transgender Law Center is given as an example of Legislation.
- Conspicuously... no specific example is given for Lawsuits.

- 37:00 - Liz and his husband, with the help of other troon donors, want to spend $10 million over the next 5-10 years. He thinks that's enough to drive Trans Rights™ in the right direction.
- 38:20 - Liz doesn't like the ACLU. He prefers donating to or investing in smaller organizations.
- 39:06 - Liz shills for Effective Altruism. Holy shit!

- 40:00 - Liz recommends that small donors should prioritize giving to 501(c)(4) organizations, although I'm too dumb to fully understand his point.
- 40:59 - Topic shifts to for-profit investment.
- 41:23 - Liz brings up Tall Poppy.
Keep in mind that this interview is from 2019.
- Tall Poppy is focused on "solving the issue of online harassment. [...] Solving it by getting workplaces to think about harassment online as a workplace safety issue. That they are at legal risk unless they support their employees."
- Liz then talks about it like it's insurance, but I dunno... this sounds an awful lot like his email campaigns to get Kiwi Farms deplatformed / dropped by upstream providers... Remember Cloudflare dropping KF due to a fictitious "imminent threat to human life"?



- 42:02 - Liz: "I wound up investing 200 thousand dollars in it, because this is an issue that's very very personal for me."
- Liz: "Corporations are going to pay for this service. I can get corporations to wind up - easily like tripling the amount of inflow of money. In solving this problem."
tl;dr
Liz Fong-Jones is a multi-millionaire who's very well-connected. He invests his wealth in several small for-profit companies and makes large donations to activist nonprofits.
This interview is from
2019, and he brought up
Tall Poppy! For reference, Liz
started attacking the Kiwi Farms in 2017/2018. It seems to me that Tall Poppy is a natural evolution of this.
Tall Poppy is obviously some kind of online reputation manager - in the business of scrubbing inconvenient or embarrassing information about their customers from the Internet. However, Kiwi Farms has been extraordinarily resistant.
@Null generally refuses to take down content without a lawful US court order. So... from the perspective of Tall Poppy customers who want their information taken down from KF, what is the solution?
It's obvious (to me, at least) that Liz Fong-Jones' efforts to deplatform KF is the "solution" that many Tall Poppy customers are paying for.
Also: In my
previous post, I showed that Liz referred to Tall Poppy as one of his "portfolio companies".

I think it's reasonable to believe that Liz Fong-Jones is motivated (in-part) to take down Kiwi Farms because he will monetarily profit from it (via Tall Poppy). He will also benefit by having embarrassing (but true!) information about himself disappear from the Internet.