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?”
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