Inside the U.S. Capitol building Wednesday morning, a who’s who of Silicon Valley chugged coffee and nursed hangovers. Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire, Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner, and Conviction’s Sarah Guo had their choice of parties the night before: dining at private club The Ned, taking free whiskey shots at conservative hub Butterworth’s, rehydrating after David Sacks’ weekend rager at The Occidental.
Basically, the hottest place for Silicon Valley this week was some 2,500 miles away in Washington, D.C., at the Hill and Valley Forum, a conference meant to bring together policymakers like Sens. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah) with tech royalty like Jensen Huang, Ruth Porat, and Vinod Khosla. Their assignment: plot America’s technological dominance.
For many in the room, the fourth annual forum was a victory lap — a time to celebrate backing the winning presidential candidate and getting tech execs placed into his administration, from Elon Musk at DOGE to Hill and Valley cofounder Jacob Helberg’s nomination for under secretary of state. (He awaits confirmation.) “This is an unleashing of the real American spirit,” Safra Catz, the CEO of Oracle and a vocal Trump supporter, said in a prerecorded statement.
But even the most ardent Trump backers acknowledged that the president’s first 100 days have been a roller-coaster, marked by aggressive tariffs that sparked extreme market volatility and sent some founders who source from China into a panic.
So, as I mingled with the drowsy crowd, I wanted to know: Is anyone having MAGA remorse?
Three founders visibly winced and offered a “No comment.” One VC at a major firm shrugged and said the firm’s in “wait-and-see mode.” Another investor gave a spit take: “Who’s going to talk to you about that?”
Maguire, who was an energetic online backer of Trump’s campaign, is reserving judgment for now. “A lesson for me from watching Trump over the last eight years is I don’t think you can judge him in the short run,” he said. “I don’t know if he’s doing well or not. I think history will be the judge. When I look back on his first term in office, I think he did a much better job than people thought in real time.”
Maguire went on to praise Trump for launching DOGE and shaking up global trade. “Irrespective of the specific tactics, which I think there’s a lot of valid criticism of, I think the goal of resetting the trade relationships is a very worthwhile and rational goal,” he said.
Others commended Trump’s expediting of defense tech. “Love that he’s just going bold with the executive orders,” said Delian Asparouhov of outer-space manufacturing startup Varda Space, referencing, in part, the president’s order to modernize the U.S. defensive base and prioritize commercial solutions. “Some of those are very relevant to next-generation defense capabilities like shipbuilding and the Golden Dome. And I think it’s great to see that leadership from the top.
“There’s obviously a lot of volatility in a lot of other areas,” he added. “As venture capitalists, our job is to receive the volatility and know how to adapt to it and coach the portfolio through it.”
Lux Capital’s Josh Wolfe chastised Trump for his “shock-therapy moves” but similarly complimented the administration’s “very real and very new openness for defense-tech upstarts to not just be welcomed, but to win.”
I figured there would be more overt pushback against the tariffs, as many of Silicon Valley’s hardware companies source parts from China. But Asparouhov, who is also a partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, said Trump’s China crackdown didn’t come as a surprise, at least for his cohort of startups. “We were already preparing them ahead of time,” he said. “So I already have a handful of portfolio companies that have shifted basic supply chains out of China very rapidly.”
Augustus Doricko, the 24-year-old founder of cloud-seeding startup Rainmaker, was also prepared for the tariffs. “Because I was a bit of a lunatic patriot when I started the company, even before the tariffs, we vertically integrated almost all of our supply chain and also bought mostly American,” he said.
However, when I asked him to grade the administration, he gave it a five out of 10, before saying the quiet part out loud: “I think that I’m supposed to say something higher, because, like many people here, I want to work with the government for the sake of my own interest in making America great,” he said. “But I’m not sure that the vision that was promised is going to be fulfilled, based on the current trajectory.”
He wants to see the government commit to its own “Apollo program,” a moonshot goal that unites the public and private sectors.
The sharpest moment of critique came in Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp’s opening talk Wednesday morning, when a protester leaned over the balcony to shout, “Palantir kills Palestinians with their AI and technology. You’re killing my family in Palestine. What kind of person are you? How do you sleep at night?”
Karp sincerely tried to answer the question, before the protester interrupted him again. “I think you came to the wrong event,” Helberg suggested before security escorted her out. Karp took the moment to espouse the importance of free speech.
The room erupted in applause.