Startup founders flooded inauguration parties hoping to score a deal

As tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg took the stage for President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, dozens of founders were trying to get an audience with the new president’s inner circle at parties across DC.

It wasn’t that hard to hear what they were saying. Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor spent the weekend rubbing shoulders with Sean Spicer or conservative podcaster Jordan Peterson. Taylor’s company wants to use nuclear energy to create synthetic hydrocarbon fuel. He even received three separate invitations to Mar-A-Lago in the past month, sending a two-page document about the changes he wants to see to nuclear regulations to everyone he knows with DC connections. “People are saying, ‘Please tell me, how can we fix this?’ We have to rebuild everything,” he said of the administration.

His story was surprisingly common. All over America’s capital, founders enjoyed the fruits of their industry’s political jockeying. They watched Snoop Dogg at David Sacks’ Crypto Ball, attended a few hours of crypto fun sponsored by the group Milady NFT, and dressed up for the Coronation Ball, hosted by a publishing company associated with controversial thought leader Curtis Yarvin. cited by both Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.

Tyler Sweatt, CEO of defense technology startup Second Front Systems, said his biggest frustration with the federal government is bureaucratic lack of transparency. Founders often don’t even know who they are contacting the government provides less of a large contract.

But Sweatt left events like the vice presidential dinner and Trump’s pre-inauguration candlelight dinner as if the country might be entering a rare moment in which the federal government, big tech and the startup ecosystem are aligned and the shroud surrounding the inner workings of government. be raised. “Apolitically, it’s pretty exciting for what we can do as a country,” he said.

At a watch party organized by the conservative American Moment organization, congressional staff wore suits with red ties, and technicians wore sneakers. Jacob Martin, general partner of crypto fund 2 Punks Capital and co-founder of the Ready Player DAO gaming guild, continued to follow the news of Trump’s immediate pardon of Ross Ulbricht, the infamous founder of Silk Road, who is currently in prison for life. Despite his promise, he did not do it do so at the Libertarian convention in May.

Martin also lamented that he missed the chance to buy the Trump meme coin when it went on sale at the Sacks’ Crypto Ball while top crypto donors were away from their computers. Trading in the coin soon took off. “I could buy it. But I didn’t, because it was clearly a scam, wasn’t it?’ Martin laughed. “There were people who made hundreds of millions off of it.”

He hopes the Trump administration can make it so that “people can use blockchain technology to do better things, launch tokens when they need to, and not worry about jail time.”

DOGE as their great chance

Several founders felt Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency would open the floodgates for startups to pitch their products to the government to fulfill its promise to make government more efficient. James Layfield, chief sales officer of Samplify.ai, which helps companies identify junk 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 rid themselves of third-party subscriptions before Musk comes in to cut his own costs.

Layfield presented it to Florida Rep. Byron Donalds at his inauguration and said it looked interesting. “The whole experience has been incredibly rewarding to see how open people are to this possibility,” she said.

Meanwhile, Rabi Alam, founder of Counter Health, hopes that DOGE can support his company’s mission to simplify the healthcare system while maintaining high quality of care. First, like everyone else in the country, he needs to understand exactly what DOGE is. Fortunately, Alam received an invitation to the Inauguration Ball, where he intended to discover some DOGE staff. “I’d like to get some of what I would call a finer granularity and more color on what the approach is,” he said.

If this weekend is anything to go by, the toughest challenge founders will face may be focusing solely on their day-to-day business between balls and trips to Mar-A-Lago. “There are people trying to be in the right room,” Taylor said. “And there are people trying to get the job done.”