[gumby]

> I don't want any elites getting special treatment either...

These days I normally roll my eyes and stop reading when I encounter someone saying "the elites" but in this case it is 100% appropriate: she was a member of a wealthy elite, and both deliberately and casually used her connections from the get go.

[explaininjs]

Did you mean "causally"? Not sure the degree of formality is relevant.

[gumby]

No, (and I'm not sure that "causally" would even result in a comprehensible sentence).

Her deliberate use was exploiting her very close childhood friendship with Tim Draper's kids to get Draper to fund her and use his network to find other investors and to get the message out. Another was her using her network to get a number of distracting and bizarre board members (ex generals and the like), especially when Vally VCs (other than Draper) refused to give the company the time of day.

The casual way I noticed was how she just slipped into a milieu of Ted talks, various "though leader" pieces, and circulated at Davos and wherever. No gawky fish-out-of-water period.

This is quite different from the typical nerd "has to get used to things" situation and gave her tremendous credibility with the rubes outside the valley.

I would drive or bike past their office on Page Mill and for a long time had no idea what they did, despite having been in the life sciences myself at the time. They were weirdly physically in Silicon Valley but simultaneously not part of it.

[explaininjs]

“She both deliberately and causally used her connections” would mean she concisely chose to use the connections and the use of those connections was a necessary condition of whatever transpired.

Seems to me to be a much stronger statement than “she used her connections and didn’t seem to care too much about doing so”.

Regarding her seeming effortless transition into the public spotlight, I’d imagine it’s learned from a young age as an “elite”. Fun fact, her great* grandfather made the yeast company you probably use.

[pianoben]

As an idiom "casually used her connections" can mean "without due consideration" or "without compunction". It implies that "using her connections" was an easy and simple choice for her, as opposed to one in which she wrestled with the moral dimension.