Day: September 27, 2025

• 137 Ventures mostly invests in secondary markets, holding stakes in SpaceX and Anduril.
• It scaled an early “few million bucks” in Palmer Luckey’s Anduril into a $100 million position.
• The firm also focuses on deep tech, with investments in Applied Intuition and Impulse Space.

From Capitol Hill gatherings with President Donald Trump to Silicon Valley boardrooms, 137 Ventures has built its edge by scooping up stakes in hot startups like SpaceX and Anduril through the secondary market. This means it buys and sells stakes in companies that have already been issued or owned by another investor. It’s now doubling down on deep tech bets that other VCs have stayed away from.

“Can we find the next four Facebooks?” Christian Garrett, 33, a partner at the firm, asked, bluntly framing the firm’s ambition. “Or 40 Facebooks?”

“Our thesis is driven by wanting to build concentrated positions over longer durations in what we think are generational technology companies,” he told Business Insider.

The fund’s investments have also extended Garrett’s reach in DC. In 2021, Garrett cofounded the Hill and Valley Forum, a gathering of tech titans and DC power players focused on countering China’s technological rise. Politico reported that Garrett played host to the July AI summit’s afterparty this summer and is reportedly raising money for a new film production company aimed at making patriotic-coded films, according to Semafor.

“Christian is a super connector,” Chris Power, the CEO of AI manufacturing startup Hadrian, said, adding he is “helpful in thinking about how the world is going and where we can be best positioned.”

‘Zero to One’

Moments before President Donald Trump took the stage at July’s Winning the AI Race Summit in Washington, DC, Garrett, seated in the front, stuck his arm out for a selfie.

He says he “always knew he wanted to be a venture investor” because they can “use their position to do a lot of good.” His inspiration came largely from his grandfather, Bernard Garrett, a prolific investor who became one of the US’s wealthiest Black men of the last century. Bernard was also the subject of Apple TV’s movie, “The Banker,” and started a children’s scholarship fund.

Like many in Silicon Valley, the younger Garrett read Peter Thiel’s 2014 book “Zero to One” when it first came out, which he says was “a big unlock.”

Justin Fishner-Wolfson, 43, 137 cofounder and managing partner, didn’t always have as high a conviction as Garrett: “Honestly, I doubt most kids could even tell you what venture is,” he told Business Insider.

Fishner-Wolfson received a master’s degree in computer science and a bachelor’s degree in management science and engineering from Stanford and eventually landed at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. In 2010, he cofounded 137 Ventures with S. Alexander Jacobson and Kathy Chan.

Garrett joined the fund in 2019 and graduated from the University of Kansas, where he played Division 1 basketball.

While venture capital firms and retail investors alike are warming up to secondary markets as a way into the most coveted companies, 137 Ventures has bet on this model since the beginning.

“Our belief was that it wasn’t going to be an anomaly,” Fishner-Wolfson said, referring to Facebook, which remained private for eight years before going public in 2012. “It was this longer-term trend, which is, as it turns out, exactly what happened.”

The through line remains the same: Gain access to breakout winners, no matter the entry point.

Like many other venture capitalists, Fishner-Wolfson thinks he gets the best deal flow from relationship building. “How do you befriend people?” he asked. “That’s the question. I don’t think it’s that complicated.”

Betting Big on Deep Tech

137 Ventures, with $6 billion in assets under management, has always leaned into deep tech, betting early on category winners like defense tech-and-data-juggernaut Palantir.

Fishner-Wolfson said he wrote the firm’s first check into SpaceX on “day one,” and scaled an early “few million bucks” in Anduril into a $100 million position.

The firm’s flexibility on funding rounds and types of investment has allowed it to double down on defense tech, especially as the industry has gone mainstream. “There’s been a real shift,” Fishner-Wolfson said, noting the widespread change in tone since Google employees protested “the most prosaic of tech products,” he added, during the Project Maven fallout in 2018.

Today, 137’s current deep-tech portfolio also includes autonomous vehicle startup Applied Intuition and satellite startup Impulse Space.

“The goal is to get into the best companies,” Fishner-Wolfson said. “If you are, who cares about the other details?”

• Dr. Steven Austad is the scientific director of the American Federation for Aging Research.
• Austad believes too many people are obsessed with longevity, focusing on dubious trends.
• Austad follows 2 habits for his health: heavy exercise and time-restricted eating.

Dr. Steven Austad, the scientific director of a nonprofit researching healthy aging, never fretted too deeply about his own longevity.

“I used to train lions for a living,” Austad told Business Insider. “It was not something that you would do if you were thinking about living a long time.”

Prior to his career at the American Federation for Aging Research, Austad was a biologist who focused on field work in places like Venezuela and East Africa. He became interested in aging research not because he wanted to crack the code to living forever, but to learn why healthy cells age at all. When he entered the field, he said many researchers had the same question, and were not necessarily motivated by extending their own lifespans.

Things have changed since, as more people pursue anti-aging trends — often, Austad said, with dubious science backing the claims. “I’m not one of those people who spends an hour a day in a hyperbaric chamber or gets infusions of some weird protein-vitamin cocktail,” he said. “But in fact, I’m quite healthy, despite the years I spent in the field, and I had malaria.”

For example, Austad doesn’t take supplements, citing a lack of strong-enough evidence of their guaranteed longevity benefits, and he enjoys a glass of wine here and there. “If you spend all your time thinking about how long you’re going to live, you kind of forget to live,” he said.

Austad shared a few simple longevity habits he’s followed for years, which he said are both science-backed and “basically the things that my mother probably told me.”

He exhausts himself at the gym

When Austad was a field biologist, he traveled to Papua New Guinea. Upon landing, his group had to climb to the top of a mountain. The village headman gave Austad’s bag to his 12-year-old daughter to carry, because Austad would “slow them down too much.” Offended at first, Austad was grateful to be baggage-free an hour later. He was also stunned by the girl’s level of fitness.

“To me, that was a window into what our bodies evolved to be like,” he said. The villagers never had osteoporosis or other conditions caused by sedentary lifestyles.

It’s a huge reason he prioritizes serious exercise almost every day of the week.

“I am kind of a gym rat,” Austad said. Because of an old lion injury on his knee, he bikes for his cardio, ranging from 40 minutes to an hour and a half. He also prioritizes strength training, alternating areas of his body and always including some core exercises.

“I probably spend one to two hours a day in the gym, which it’s a big commitment for someone who’s in academics,” he said. “I basically physically exhaust my body into submission.” Being athletic since youth, he said he always loved the feeling extremely tired at the end of a workout.

Research shows many benefits of exercise. “It used to be that we thought this exercise good for your heart and lungs, good for your muscles, keeping your bones strong,” Austad said. “Now we know there are cognitive benefits, there are immune benefits, there are all kinds of benefits that we never appreciated.”

One of the biggest ones for him is quality sleep, so much so that he sets strict boundaries around his workout time. “I don’t have great sleep unless I physically exhaust myself, and I just figure I have to live with that.”

He only eats twice a day

Austad was practicing time-restricted eating, a form of intermittent fasting, before it became trendy in the longevity space. It felt like his “natural rhythm” to eat a late breakfast around 11 a.m., skip lunch, and finish the day with dinner around 6 or 7 p.m.

“Now, recently it’s come out that there are all kinds of health benefits associated with that kind of timing, and I’m kind of embarrassed that I didn’t appreciate that earlier,” he said.

Intermittent fasting schedules vary and can potentially be risky, according to some studies. Austad’s schedule aligns with his circadian rhythm, which researchers believe can improve metabolic health.

He also generally follows the Mediterranean diet, eating lots of fish as his protein source, cutting back on red meat, and eating a diverse range of fruits and vegetables. “But again, I don’t obsess,” he said.

He recalled speaking at a calorie restriction conference and attending the banquet after. “It was basically leaves and nuts and zero-calorie dressing,” he said. “Even if it made you healthier, and I’m not convinced that it does, it’s just too much for me.”

• I flew 2,950 miles to Berlin for the Welt AI Summit — two days of discussions on the future of AI.
• OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Palantir’s Alex Karp, and the head of Germany’s DOGE-like ministry spoke.
• My main takeaway was that Germany needs to scale back regulation so that new tech can flourish.

This week, Axel Springer hosted business leaders and politicians to debate the present and future of artificial intelligence.

Full disclosure: Axel Springer and our emcee, CEO Mathias Döpfner, own Business Insider.

The sleek, futuristic set, ringed with microphones, notebooks, and coffee, made me feel like I was on the bridge of a starbase.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman may run a startup, but Berlin greeted him as a visiting head of state.

He’d brought good news. OpenAI said Wednesday it will partner with German software giant SAP to enable millions of the country’s public sector employees to use ChatGPT.

Germany is OpenAI’s fifth-largest market, and “virtually all” Germans ages 18 to 24 use ChatGPT, Altman said.

Döpfner recited a popular criticism of Europe that it regulates new technology before it can take root. He asked if a more iterative approach to rule-making made sense.

“The tech is moving so fast,” Altman said, “that trying to write the regulation now and have it be correct over decades to come is an impossible task.”

Altman proclaimed fusion the “end state of power on earth.”

And he forecast a flood of small to midsize businesses run by solo founders and ChatGPT.

As their talk wrapped up, I slipped into the hallway to try to catch Altman on his way out.

Success! We talked about his meeting with the German chancellor and the changing visa policy back home.

Altman is a tough act to follow. Maybe that’s why organizers put Germany’s version of Elon Musk onstage next.

Karsten Wildberger is Germany’s first-ever federal minister for digital transformation and government modernization. Think DOGE for Deutschland.

He wants to scale back regulation. “We have to start to open up the gates and allow our companies to innovate much, much faster,” he said.

Deregulation became the battle cry of the day.

Entrepreneurs and politicians asked how else they could jump-start Germany’s tech hub.

One venture capitalist said Germany has an abundance of seed capital, but not enough growth capital to help startups scale. So they end up migrating to other countries.

Richard Socher, a German-born founder who runs You.com, pointed out that venture capital translates as “risk capital” in German. He said this indicates that Germans often focus more on the downsides than the potential rewards.

The last speaker gave the room a pep rally buzz more than a conference vibe.

Palantir’s Alex Karp dialed in to motivate the Germans. He cheered Germany’s focus on vocational schools and “a culture of industrialization that’s second to none.”

Karp, a fluent German speaker who studied at a university in Frankfurt, argued that Germany shouldn’t try to clone Silicon Valley but instead define its own model — one that draws on the country’s strengths and channels its native talent.

“You’re not going to build Silicon Valley in Germany,” Karp said, “You’re going to build a German version.”