Hill and Valley Forum 2025: AVC's Zach White on defense tech, robotics, and the rise of DC-Silicon Valley ties

Three, two, one. You're watching TBPN. It It is Wednesday, April 30th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We're here with Zack White from AVC at the Hill and Valley Forum 2025 breaking down. We're in the We're in the literal capital, which is great.

Uh we're normally in the capital of capital. Today we're in the capital of America. People call this the capital of America. Many people call it. It is. It is. Uh we are here with Zach. Uh can you introduce yourself? What do you do? What do you like to invest in? What what's your takeaway from Hillen Valley so far?

So my name is Zach White. I work at a fund called AVC. We invest in everything from defense to uh biotech, healthcare. I spend a lot of time doing defense stuff. Yep. And the Hillen Valley has been a crazy vibe so far. We had Hamas protesters. Oh yeah.

Uh we've had, you know, a variety of different uh things happening here. So, it's it's been great. Talk about the difference between this year's Hill and Valley versus the last, you know, couple years. Uh, from our understanding, it's been, you know, uh, uh, almost a order of magnitude more people here this year.

I think there's like 10x people here. There's like random influencers here, which is awesome. We have people rapping tefl It's an amazing vibe. Like, it's it's like Coachella for uh, you know, people with G550s. So, yeah. Yeah. I'm sure the tarmacs are absolutely stacked right now.

Um, uh, who who who, have you listened to any of those speeches yet? Is there anyone that you're excited to hear? Who do you think is the best like pitch for an actual concrete plan?

Cuz there's a lot of people that are just like, we want better communication between tech and DC, but then there's other people that come with concrete things. We need to fund this. Yeah.

I think uh Jensen he was talking about how we need to just be like onshoring all of these like fabs and stuff and you know everybody wants to be in and like in in his crazy around Jensen.

Um, so, uh, you know, I think that he has like a really good plan on like what we need to do to make sure that we're not relying on China for all this stuff. And he, uh, he was doing great. And then, um, Brian Shy also, he he killed it at Andre. You know, there's, um, there's a lot of stuff that they're doing right now.

And it's just really exciting to see Arsenal, right? Is the most re-industrialized, pled project right now. There's like a bunch of generals here and stuff. Yeah. And they have the the, you know, an actual factory, not just hype videos, right? that's that's coming out.

Um I I think the it was cool to hear from Jensen personally.

I mean we we've seen these headlines around Nvidia's investment in the United States and uh our big question historically has been you know how much of that is like really real and it seems like he is you know extremely yeah I have a few questions for Jensen we want to follow up with him is like is he a customer of reindustrialization or is he truly a reindustrializer because Nvidia is an American company.

I think they bab with TSMC TSMC now investing very heavily in America in Arizona and we could see that go a lot further in which case I don't know why Jensen wouldn't want to buy chips from Arizona TSMC that seems very logical package with Foxcon like he's going to be very happy with that but is there something that he can do personally to bring back jobs or create more manufacturing infrastructure in America I don't even know if he has the tools or needs to do that but that was kind of interesting it's interesting how Foxcon is always uh doesn't seem to be in the convers.

It's so associated with China despite being a Taiwan totally totally totally that they have the same incentive to in next valley we got to get the CEO of Foxcon. Yeah, that'd be sick. I mean, I think he just needs to start pushing demand here.

Like there's so much demand and if he starts reshoring it here, all of a sudden there's going to be a lot of work that people need to do here. And I think that that's kind of just like what he was talking about at Hill Valley today.

So yeah, the the other line that stood out to me, he was like, "Some people there's going to be new job creation. some people are going to lose their jobs. Uh, and then everybody's job is going to change, right?

So, it's like, you know, basically embracing that change, I think, is except I don't know if you guys saw the Mark Andre clip this morning. Apparently VCs are the only things that stay. Yeah, we we've been saying this actually.

I mean, I I think it's actually it the job of an investor is somewhat uh somewhat in the you know, I would actually compare it to just to come to uh Mark's defense a little bit, I would compare it in some way to the job of a lawyer uh or a doctor where just because a computer can do something well, you still want a human to sort of like sign off on the investment and have responsibility.

Yeah. because it's just not as satisfying to sort of like fire a uh it's not as satisfying to fire a uh you know a robot as it is to say like you know you you have you had responsibility over this capital you know you know etc etc. So the other big question I have is on the robotic side.

I know you've done some AI investing. There's a big question in my mind. Obviously we've scaled up on the pre-training side and these massive data centers have been built out. XAI famously bought a ton of NVIDIA chips. Uh when does that start to happen with robotics companies?

Because robots are generating a lot of data. At a certain point you need to build the big transformer and you need to crunch all that data down. And I haven't seen any of the robotics companies are still early and none you know you see Boston dynamics. You don't hear about the Boston Dynamics data center.

You don't hear about the the physical intelligence data center yet, but it feels like it's coming. Jensen kind of put it as like a 5year timeline. I think anything that we can do to get more sight lines on how that grows is going to be really really key to Nvidia.

Uh because everyone needs a second act and Nvidia is like the king of the second, third, fourth act. It was scientific computing, then gaming, then uh then then AI and robotics. I mean after LLMs could be the thing that really drives like massive massive GPU demand. What's your take?

Uh Brett Adcock might be the guy here, but I I I actually I really think that like you have to be like really talented at fundraising. You just need such an insane amount of capital. You need tens of billions of dollars to do this well.

And so it's really going to come down to the people who can actually raise the money very well. And that's like a very small handful of people. May maybe Adam Newman could do it. Maybe Brett Adcock. I don't know who else. But I was kind of I was hoping for a surprise Elon appearance today.

I don't know if it's uh I don't know if it's happening, but uh he's probably around here somewhere. He's probably Yeah, he's probably approximate to where we are right now. We should single pop in. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, what what else is top of mind for you uh this week?

I know uh in many ways you eight has placed so many bets in this sort of broad category that's relevant to where we are today that I I imagine a lot of it's just kind of like you know being a part of this watching it play out. Um where where do you where do you uh anything specific you're hoping to learn from today?

I don't I don't know. I just think that like this was like this weird heretical space for so long and now you see like hundreds of people here all just like sort of reing in the fact that you know it's cool to do this now.

I I'm just kind of like taking it all in and I don't know Joe uh from our fund has been doing this for so long and he always has this like piffy thing where it's like now this is the cool thing. What's the next sort of contrarian thing to do?

And I don't know it doesn't seem that contrarian anymore which is like really interesting. It's you we see people who are doing all sorts of things uh you know 5 years ago that are now here doing defense. Is there is there more like practical uh like or like tactics that you can do as a founder in an event like this?

Maybe not just looking to get a feel for the vibe of DC, but actually understand okay there there are dollars going towards this. We can make this happen. We can go after this pool of capital. Is this a place where you can learn that? Is that is that a reasonable?

I think this is something that you should have like done some pre-training yourself and learned a little bit about like who are the who are the dealmakers here? Who are the people with the pools of money? Where are the programs of records?

like who are the guys here before and walk up to the people that are actually in control of where this money's coming from. Well, we got Dave Freeberg coming in for a couple minutes. Thank you, Zack. Nice to see you guys. Congratulations. Great. Great to have you on Dave. Welcome to the