Delian Asparouhov on Hill & Valley Forum: tech-DC collaboration, defense budget, and Ramp for government

Summary

Delian Asparouhov, general partner at Founders Fund and a co-organizer of the Hill and Valley Forum, makes the case that the annual DC gathering has become one of the more functionally useful venues for tech-government alignment — not just for optics, but because it's one of the rare occasions when members of the House Armed Services Committee and their Senate counterparts are in the same room without a hearing in progress. Asparouhov says some bills have been sketched out during cocktail hour because the forum creates informal density that the congressional calendar rarely allows.

Hill and Valley's positioning

The forum started as a dinner of 30 to 40 people that quickly grew to include 12 or 13 elected officials at its first iteration, then expanded to a public daytime program as demand outgrew the private format. This year's lineup includes Jensen Huang, Alex Karp, Kevin Weil (OpenAI's chief product officer), Ruth Porat (Alphabet's president and chief investment officer), and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum — timed deliberately to coincide with the week Congress reconvenes to debate the reconciliation bill.

Asparouhov frames the forum's core premise simply: after years of genuine estrangement between Silicon Valley and Washington — Google abandoning Project Maven in 2018, VCs likening defense investment to gambling — the goal is to maintain a durable communication channel that survives changes in administration. He notes that even in the 2024 election cycle, Silicon Valley's political donations ran roughly 85% Democratic on a dollar basis despite the visibility of tech-right voices, which he says illustrates why the forum can't afford to be captured by either side.

Defense budget and reconciliation

The reconciliation bill being debated next week is expected to add $150–200 billion to the defense baseline, pushing total defense spending close to Trump's stated target of $1 trillion. Asparouhov identifies the president's stated priorities as nuclear weapons modernization, Golden Dome missile defense, hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, shipbuilding, and general reindustrialization. Members of both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees will be at Hill and Valley the same week, which Asparouhov treats as more than coincidence.

Key panels and policy asks

The panel Asparouhov is moderating with Weil, Porat, and Burgum is oriented around a single request: streamline EPA permitting and land-use restrictions so that data center and energy buildout isn't bottlenecked by regulation. The argument is explicitly framed as a soft-power one — if the US doesn't build enough AI infrastructure, DeepMind's or China's models become the default for users in lower-income countries who can't afford ChatGPT or AlphaFold, ceding influence over what those systems will and won't discuss.

On space, Asparouhov is moderating a session with Tim Hughes (SpaceX's head of business), Representative George Whitesides (former Virgin Galactic CEO, now a congressman), and Major General Bucky from the Defense Innovation Unit. The ask is essentially that NASA redirect SLS budget toward commercial launch providers, which Jared Isaacman signaled in his congressional hearing as the likely long-term direction anyway.

Vinod Khosla is doing a fireside with Asparouhov on AI in healthcare, centered on the argument that Medicaid and Medicare — not DEI line items — are where meaningful government efficiency gains actually live. Asparouhov points to Sword Health, a shared portfolio company valued at roughly $4 billion, as a model for AI-driven physical therapy that could scale through government reimbursement programs.

Meta and the antitrust distraction

On the FTC's case against Meta, Asparouhov is blunt: relitigating acquisitions approved over a decade ago is a distraction at a moment when the US needs its largest AI companies focused on the competitive race with China. He acknowledges Zuckerberg has antagonized both parties — Democrats blame him for 2016, Trump for 2020 — and sees no political incentive for either side to call off the case, even if the national-security logic for dropping it is clear.

Ramp for government

Asparouhov endorses the idea of deploying Ramp inside the federal government's procurement infrastructure. The GSA's current smart-card system, he says, is antiquated, and Ramp has already demonstrated it can surface spending inefficiencies even among traditional defense contractors operating on the commercial side. He stops short of calling it a done deal but says it would be good for the country if it happens.