As tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage for President Donald Trump's inauguration on Monday, dozens of founders attended parties across Washington to try to connect with the new president meet the inner circle.
To hear them tell it, it's not that hard. Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor spent his weekend partying hard, rubbing shoulders with Sean Spicer or conservative podcaster Jordan Peterson. Taylor's company hopes to use nuclear power to produce synthetic hydrocarbon fuels. He even got three separate invitations to Mar-a-Lago last month by sending a two-page document to anyone he knew with ties to Washington about the changes he wanted to see in nuclear regulations. "People say, 'Tell me, how do we fix this? We need to build back," he said of the government.
His story is surprisingly universal. Across the nation’s capital, founders are enjoying the fruits of industry political jockeying. They watched Snoop Dogg perform at David Sacks' Crypto Ball, attended an early morning crypto bash sponsored by Milady NFT Group, and dressed up for a "Coronation Ball" hosted by a publishing company associated with Curtis Yarvin, a A controversial thought leader. Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.
Tyler Sweatt, CEO of defense tech startup Second Front Systems, said one of his big complaints with the federal government is the opacity of the bureaucracy. The founders often don’t even know who they are Get in touch with the government, let alone get huge contracts.
But Sweet, coming off events like the Vice President's Dinner and Trump's pre-inauguration candlelight dinner, feels the country may be entering a rare moment in which the federal government, big tech companies and the startup ecosystem will all come together to focus on what's going on within the government. This may also occur with operating coverings. be lifted. "From a political perspective, it's very interesting for what we can do as a country," he said.
At a watch party hosted by the conservative group American Moment, congressional staffers wore suits and red ties, while techies wore sneakers. Jacob Martin, general partner at cryptocurrency fund 2 Punks Capital and co-founder of gaming guild Ready Player DAO, has been following Trump’s immediate pardon of notorious Silk Road founder Ross Oubley Ross Ulbricht, who is currently serving his sentence in prison. Despite promising to do so at the Liberal Party conference in May, he has not done so.
Martin also lamented that he missed the opportunity to launch a Trump meme coin at the Sachs Crypto Ball, when top cryptocurrency donors were away from their computers. The coin’s trading volume quickly soared. "I could have bought it. But I didn't because it was obviously a scam, right?" Martin laughed. “There are people making hundreds of millions of dollars off of it.”
He hopes the Trump administration can do this so that "people can use blockchain technology to create better things and launch tokens when necessary without fear of going to jail."
Several founders believe that Musk's Government Efficiency Department will open the door for startups to market their products to the government to fulfill its promise of improving government efficiency. James Layfield, chief sales officer of Samplify.ai, which helps companies identify redundant software, created a website called "DogeProof.com." The concept, he said, is to offer Samplify.ai's products for free to government agencies so they can get rid of irrelevant subscriptions before Musk cuts costs.
Layfield presented the project to Florida Rep. Byron Donalds at the inaugural ball and said he seemed interested in it. “The whole experience was very rewarding to see how open people were to the possibility,” he said.
Meanwhile, Counter Health founder Rabi Alam hopes DOGE will support his company's mission to simplify the health care system while maintaining high-quality care. First, though, like everyone in this country, he had to figure out what DOGE was. Fortunately, Alam got an invitation to the inaugural ball, where he planned to discover some DOGE employees. “I wanted to get to something that I would call more granular and more colorful,” he said.
If this weekend is any indication, the toughest challenge founders face in between prom and Mar-a-Lago trips may just be focusing on their day jobs. "Some people are trying to get into the right room," Taylor said. "There are people trying to get the job done."