I went to the 'Conclave of Silicon Valley.' It showed the hold tech has on DC.
In the slow-creeping security line outside the Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, DC, Silicon Valley looked stately.
On Wednesday, at the fourth Hill and Valley Forum — a hush-hush gathering of tech titans and political power players — it was difficult to discern DC dealmakers from West Coast wunderkinds. Then, one suit-clad VC ahead of me saw Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen like a mirage in the desert. We were in the right place, he assured his fellow money men.
This year's Hill and Valley theme was "rebuilding America," cofounder Jacob Helberg said in his opening speech. A former senior advisor to Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp, Helberg also lobbied for the TikTok ban and is currently awaiting confirmation as Trump's pick for Undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment.
Helberg also launched the "conclave of Silicon Valley," as Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum put it in an opening speech, four years ago with Christian Garrett, a partner at 137 Ventures (backers of SpaceX, Anduril, and Palantir), and Delian Asparouhov, a Founders Fund partner and cofounder of space-weapons-and-pharma startup Varda Space.
The roster was, quite literally, a who's who of the tech heavyweights. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia; Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google; Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir; Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures; Josh Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital; Keith Rabois, managing director at Khosla Ventures; Kevin Weil, chief product officer of OpenAI; Jack Clark, cofounder of Anthropic; and others spoke at the Forum.
In the event's scrappier days, attendees "met in private because they had to," Helberg said — back when going full throttle on autonomous weaponry and American reindustrialization was considered edgy.
Now that such sentiments seem to be the norm for policymakers and X posters alike, Helberg is saying the quiet part out loud: "We've made the 2021 counterculture the 2025 mainstream culture."
If the Forum showed attendees anything, it's that Trump's first 100 days were marked by tech's prolific influence on the Hill, from VC David Sack's appointment as crypto czar to Elon Musk's DOGE effort.
"There's no difference between Silicon Valley and DC," CEO of consumer health startup Nucleus Kian Sadeghi told BI. "Silicon Valley is DC."
'An absolute crisis' over China
Rallying the Valley to treat China's AI and defense tech rise with Cold War-level urgency has quickly become techno and political orthodoxy. In the wake of Deepseek and Trump's 145% tariff on Chinese goods, that anxiety pulsed through panels and investor side chats Wednesday.
Garrett put the Forum's focus this way: "The theme of the year always ends up presenting itself versus we come up with it," he told BI in an interview. "We extrapolate what's a very obvious discussion in the zeitgeist."
Discussing tech's role in rising geopolitical tensions felt par for the course for the Forum's cofounders, a China hawk and two defense tech investors. All day, speakers hammered the message home.
Some were skeptical of US-based venture firm Benchmark's recent investment in Chinese AI startup Manus. "It was very curious, to say the least," Emil Michael, Undersecretary of Defense, said of the fundraise. "It's not like there's not a plethora of US companies doing AI to invest in that are high quality."
OpenAI's Weil called for the best open weights models to be built in the US "on democratic values," he said. "I don't want the best open weights model to be a Chinese model."
Nvidia's Huang urged attendees to think about the AI race as an "infinite game," that requires an understanding of where engineering talent is located. "Fifty percent of the world's AI researchers are Chinese," he said. "Just take a step back and recognize that."
Later that afternoon, Huang told reporters that "China is right behind us" in the race for AI chip dominance.
And not everyone was on board with Trump's approach to negotiating with China. Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire criticized budget cuts to universities and research institutions, warning that they may precipitate a loss of future American scientists. "Our ability to compete with China is not just on a military level — it's on an economic level," she said.
To all, the stakes couldn't be higher. "What would the consequences of another nation state that does not share democratic values leading in these efforts be?" Thrive Capital's Kushner said. "Treat this moment, even though we're in first place, as an absolute crisis."
A live X feed
Inside, the vibe was akin to my (and everyone else's) X feed. One investor told me Hill and Valley was basically his nightly scroll materialized in person. The panels weren't much different either, he added, noting that much of the material discussed seemed to be the usual thread-fodder and takes tossed around online.
Organizers insisted that Hill and Valley was bipartisan. The companies involved weren't officially tied to any one party, just "affiliated with America," Asparouhov said at a media event on Tuesday, "so much so that we committed to the bit of bipartisanship that Jacob made sure to put on a bipartisan tie this morning."
There were indeed a few Democrats, like Khosla and Senator Shaheen, on the docket. Republicans were represented, too: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson closed out the Forum, and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick — a fierce Trump ally — spoke at the Forum's dinner later that evening.
"We have the best leader in the world," Helberg said in his opener. "President Trump is objectively and truly a sample of one."
Despite its bipartisan branding, the Forum wasn't exactly isolated from criticism. Two pro-Palestine protesters interrupted the first panelist of the day, Palantir's Karp, who was discussing his recent book about Western society and Silicon Valley.
After security removed the protesters, Karp shrugged it off: "I haven't had this much fun in a long time," he said. "Maybe I should come back tomorrow."
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