Uncapped #35 | Trae Stephens from Founders Fund
Episode description
Trae Stephens is a Partner at Founders Fund. He is also Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril, a defense tech company focused on autonomous systems, and Co-founder of Sol, a next generation wearable e-reader. Previously, Trae was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he led teams focused on growth in the intelligence/defense space as well as international expansion. He was also an integral part of the product team, leading the design and strategy for new product offerings.
Prior to Palantir, Trae worked as a computational linguist building enterprise solutions to Arabic/Persian name matching and data enrichment within the United States Intelligence community. He began his career working in the office of then Congressman Rob Portman and in the Political Affairs Office at the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, D.C. immediately following the installation of Hamid Karzai’s transitional government.
We covered:
- Hard tech and the future of warfare
- AI morality and “good quests”
- How Anduril scales manufacturing
- Founders Fund’s investing philosophy
- Contrarianism and concentration
- The ethics of autonomy and national defense
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Timestamps:
(0:00) Intro
(0:35) Choosing good quests in the AI era
(7:35) Ethics behind solving certain problems
(11:29) Working with regulators
(16:54) What’s left to prove at Anduril
(18:32) Anduril, SpaceX, and Tesla at scale
(22:30) The future of warfare
(24:48) Juggling Anduril and Founders Fund
(29:07) A system that rewards going deep
(31:21) What’s made Founders Fund great
(37:30) The king-making strategy in VC
(40:26) Concentrating in the winners
(43:55) Where there’s alpha in the market
(47:22) Theological revival in traditional faith
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