On April 29, the self-described “three musketeers” of tech in Washington stood at a wooden podium in the National Press Club. The three men — incoming Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg, 137 Ventures partner Christian Garrett, and Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov, who coined the “musketeers” label — were kicking off their fourth annual Hill and Valley Forum, a conference they created with the purpose of bringing the Capitol and Silicon Valley closer together.
Helberg, in a navy suit and tie, told the crowd of journalists he was eager to usher in “President Trump’s golden age for America.” Asparouhov, in a T-shirt and blazer, denounced China as a “genocidal dictatorship.”
Garrett, in a black suit with no tie, was comparatively tempered. “It’s just far too early to have an opinion,” he said when asked about Trump’s tariffs. When a reporter asked if the forum would address Trump’s aggressive deportations, Garrett took the lead — acknowledging that tech is an industry of immigrant founders — but not the bait. “It’s a broad topic, and so the best we can do is sort of give insight into our purview and how to have successful policy that gets as much leverage as possible from a technology industry perspective,” he said.
In an industry that’s increasingly losing its fight to keep politics and business separate, Garrett is a rare commodity: someone trying not to piss off the administration while also avoiding being pegged as a Trump appeaser. His quiet diplomacy has helped him maintain a low-key profile in Silicon Valley while guiding his small firm to becoming a major shareholder in rising defense tech firms like Anduril, reportedly valued at $28 billion. For the last few years, he’s also become one of the most important linchpins between Silicon Valley and D.C.
This year’s forum brought a captive bipartisan audience of billionaires and power brokers, with speakers including Josh Kushner, Ruth Porat, Vinod Khosla, and Jensen Huang, alongside political leaders that included Sens. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and a closing note from House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The star-studded lineup came in no small part because of Garrett. Of the “three musketeer” founders, Garrett serves as the “social glue, ultra connector,” according to Asparouhov. “He’s also really well connected in certain congressional offices,” Asparouhov said, crediting Garrett with bringing Sens. Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.) to the forum.
While Helberg and Asparouhov are loud and proud about their support for President Donald Trump and unafraid of making enemies in tech circles (Asparouhov repeatedly called out Benchmark Capital’s recent investment in a China-based AI company), Garrett made his career on being a friend to all. Palantir Technologies CTO Shyam Sankar described him as “the sort of soul you feel like you have known forever,” an “open-hearted” friend who’s uninterested in “status games.” Hadrian founder Chris Power offered a similar take: “Sometimes you run into people that are everyone’s friends, but they’re kind of an asshole,” he said. “Christian’s everyone’s friend, but he’s, like, just the best guy.”
Garrett’s neutrality has worked well for him: At the forum, he would host more than 500 of his peers and more than 30 elected officials, split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans. He said his goal is bipartisanship.
Yet neutrality has its discontents. Outside the Capitol, protesters described the forum’s attendees as “warmongers,” while inside, Gaza supporters heckled Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, and even the most brash Trump advocates were reluctant to endorse the president’s first 100 days. As Garrett positions himself smack in the center of tech and politics, will he have to pick a side?
“It’s sometimes been very difficult to always remain Switzerland, right?” he said. “I think the counterargument is having strong national security, having strong industry, creating jobs, creating abundance, leading in innovation. … It’s always been bipartisan.”
Grandson of ‘The Banker’
The Garrett family story is the stuff of novels and movies and Lenny Kravitz songs.
Around 1950, Garrett’s grandfather, Bernard Garrett, who was Black, trekked from his home in Texas to California in search of a new-age gold rush. He bought hundreds of buildings and, eventually, banks, by hiring white men to serve as puppet CEOs while he and his business partner ran things behind the scenes. In a world where the laws were written to keep him down, he understood how to get power. “The only time a man is really truly rich is when he controls money,” Garrett’s grandfather said.
He became one of the country’s wealthiest Black men; in 2020, Apple TV turned his life into a movie, “The Banker,” starring Anthony Mackie and Samuel L. Jackson.
Bernard Garrett had nine children, the eldest being Christian’s mother, Cynthia. She befriended Kravitz in high school in Los Angeles (and purportedly inspired some of his songs), traveled around the world, and partied with the Brat Pack. In her 20s, she married and flew to Italy on what would become the honeymoon from hell: There, she discovered her new husband was trafficking cocaine, and both were sent to an Italian prison.
A month into her jail time, Cynthia discovered she was pregnant with Garrett. “I was reading the word of God, and everything about my son’s birth has, since then, always been connected to an understanding that God gave him to me,” she said in a 2023 interview.
She made her way back to the States; became one of the first Black women to host a late-night TV show, “Later” on NBC; and wrote several books, the most recent about the importance of purity in a highly sexualized culture. “Make Purity Great Again!” she wrote on Instagram.
Garrett grew up in New York City and Los Angeles, where, in his early years, he seemed primed for Silicon Valley, building computers from scratch and obsessing over futurist authors like Kevin Kelly and Ray Kurzweil. But after high school, when he stood 6 foot 3, his path to tech took a minor detour.
He played basketball as a walk-on at the University of Kansas, which meant he “got to keep the bench warm for a lot of No. 1 draft picks and NBA All-Stars,” he said. After graduating, he wanted to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. Growing up, Garrett’s family had instilled into him his grandfather’s mantra: “The greatest way to have impact, success, and to build wealth was through ownership.”
Instead of owning buildings and banks, Garrett decided he would own pieces of high-flying startups. In 2019, he joined 137 Ventures, a firm founded by Justin Fishner-Wolfson, S. Alexander Jacobson, and Kathy Chan that began by investing primarily in secondary rounds of startups. In a way, this unusual strategy allowed Garrett to become his ideal kind of investor: low-key and friendly but influential all the same. (Since secondary investors don’t lead rounds, their elbows are considerably softer than those of their peers.) The firm is a major investor in SpaceX and, thanks in large part to Garrett, has large stakes in unicorns Anduril, Applied Intuition, and Figma.
Like his mother, he has woven faith into his career — he’s a member of the tech-favored congregation Epic Church, and he’s given talks on finding a life purpose alongside his mentor, Anduril cofounder Trae Stephens, for the nonprofit Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society. Like his grandfather, Garrett wants his business ventures to do nothing less than shape U.S. history.
‘Jacob was ahead of the curve’
In 2021, Garrett was chatting with friends Helberg and Asparouhov on a topic about which they were all passionate: the future of America. How, they wondered, could the country stay ahead if Washington and Silicon Valley wouldn’t work together? The chat turned into an idea for a dinner party that could kick-start conversations around reindustrializing the U.S. and preparing for a cold war with China.
“I was thinking that this was more of, hey, let’s get about 12 people together,” Garrett recalled at a press conference last week. But during the planning process, Helberg brought on an events team. “Jacob was ahead of the curve to realize this is gonna be a little bit bigger than we had anticipated.”
The first Hill and Valley Forum was a dinner for around 100 people in 2021; a year later, it had twice as many attendees. By the third year, the event had ballooned into dinner plus daytime talks with an audience of more than 400. This year’s was the biggest yet, with more than 800 invited, the line to get in snaking around the Capitol. Attendees included Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner, Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf, and Michael Waltz, appearing the day before Trump fired him as national security adviser. Garrett interviewed Schimpf and Waltz onstage.
The forum was key in helping Helberg gain traction for the Biden administration’s ban on TikTok — and it certainly didn’t hurt his campaign to get a spot in the Trump administration. Asparouhov, who cofounded the in-space manufacturing company Varda Space, said Hill and Valley has given founders a forum to engage directly with former Federal Aviation Administration administrators who influence reform. Garrett said he’s been urging policymakers and CEOs to consider starting tech trade schools that could give students a college alternative.
In his opening remarks this year, Garrett turned to the Bible to distill a guiding message. “King David wrote in the Psalms of how beautiful it is when brothers and sisters live together in unity, and let today remind you of that,” he said, dressed in a black suit.
But it’s in the months — years, really — after the forum, that Garrett’s real work begins. “It’s great to have more friends that are in the administration,” he said. “But, quite frankly, for me, success is also having the same friendships with folks in the next administration.”