Inside Anduril HQ: Trae Stephens on Anduril’s Origin, Peter Thiel, & Palantir DNA

Trae Stephens, Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of Anduril, & Partner at Founders Fund, joins Sourcery for a behind-the-scenes conversation on Anduril’s 2017 founding, when defense tech was deeply unpopular in Silicon Valley, the cultural shift that followed, and how software, autonomy, manufacturing scale, and ethics now converge in modern warfare and national security. Stephens explains Anduril’s core thesis: software-defined, hardware-enabled, and why the company is building a multi-domain autonomy strategy across sea, ground, air, and space. He also outlines the manufacturing view that “the factory is the weapon,” including Anduril’s expansion into scaled production with Arsenal-1 (a planned ~5 million sq ft campus near Columbus, Ohio) and a broader network of facilities and partners. The conversation also covers ethics and strategy: Stephens discusses Just War Theory (St. Augustine), the goal of increasing precision while removing humans from “dull, dirty, dangerous” roles, and the broader cultural shifts shaping America. He reflects on lessons from Palantir and Founders Fund, including Peter Thiel’s influence, concentration in venture, and “zero-to-one” strategy, and shares what he looks for when investing in founders. Trae Stephens: https://x.com/traestephens Molly O’Shea: ⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠ https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠⁠https://x.com/sourceryy⁠ https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 YouTube : https://youtu.be/9Fdq1TShG2w 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Trae Stephens, Co-founder & Executive Chairman Anduril (01:03) Rise of defense tech & Pete Hegseth visit (03:58) Origin of Anduril & James Bond dreams (05:18) Anduril's multi-domain defense strategy (06:42) China's subsidies & US government investments (08:46) "Factory is the weapon" & re-industrialization (10:30) Arsenal-1 Ohio factory (13:44) What people get wrong about Anduril (17:08) Biggest Lesson from Palantir (19:04) Just War theory & defense ethics (22:16) Cultural shift from AI slop to good quests (23:49) How Anduril is building “Apple for defense” (27:03) Founders Fund investments: Varda, Armada, Cognition, General Matter (29:52) Why is Peter Thiel always right? 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery • Carta https://carta.com/sourcery—Carta connects founders, investors, and limited partners through software purpose-built for private capital. Trusted by 65,000+ companies in 160+ countries, Carta’s platform of software & services lays the groundwork so you can build, invest, and scale with confidence. https://carta.com/sourcery/?utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=sourcery&utm_campaign=20250923-amer-carta_sourcery_data_insights https://carta.com/sourcery/?utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=sourcery&utm_campaign=20250923-amer-carta_sourcery_data_insights • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga http://public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Well, you know that I'm Sam and Jack's little brother, right?

• 0:02Molly O'Shea?

  What?

• 0:03Speaker 00

  When we started Anduril in 2017 is kind of the pariah of Silicon Valley. People will think about us as like a hardware company, but the core of everything that we do is actually software.

• 0:13Molly O'Shea?

  Our interview with Alex Karp when we were walking around the office of Palantir.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  He's got to keep moving, right?

• 0:18Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Got to keep moving. Can't sit down.

• 0:19Molly O'Shea?

  Once you mentioned that, I've been thinking that the whole time. I'm like, I don't know if I even feel comfortable in this chair.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Three of the co-founders were from Palantir. And then a bunch of our early team were from places like Tesla and SpaceX, where there was already a lot of government intersect. From day one in Anduril, we were starting from where Palantir was in year 10. Defense as a sector is multi-domain. And so you have things under the sea, things on the surface of the sea, ground vehicles, aerial vehicles, and space. The Anduril strategy is we want to cover the whole gamut. The most annoying lesson I've learned from Peter Thiel is that he's always right. When he talks, you need to take it very seriously.

• 1:03Molly O'Shea?

  Trey Stevens.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Good to be here. How's it going?

• 1:05Molly O'Shea?

  Welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:07Molly O'Shea?

  Thanks for having me at Anduril.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  It's a much cooler place than most places in Silicon Valley.

• 1:12Molly O'Shea?

  No, it's really cool. I remember I was meeting with David Ulivich like a couple of years ago, and we were talking about another like hard tech, defense tech company down here. I'm not going to name names, but I was really excited about it. And he was like, Molly, that's not cool. You need to go to Anduril. And now that I'm here, I'm like, okay, I get it.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  Although, to be fair, this weekend, you did interview Dan Wright from Armada in front of an F-117A, which is pretty cool as well.

• 1:39Molly O'Shea?

  It's pretty cool.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  We don't have an F-117 here, but we do have a lot of other cool stuff.

• 1:44Molly O'Shea?

  Close, right?

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, pretty close.

• 1:46Molly O'Shea?

  You're building the future F-117s.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  That's right. We've got the Fury, although you can't really see it. It's just downstairs, but yeah.

• 1:53Molly O'Shea?

  Well, it's great. I talked to a couple of people in preparation of this, Dan Wright being one of them, Moritz, Eric from Altimeter, Jack Altman, who you were just on his podcast, and...

• 2:08Speaker 00

  Well, you know that I'm Sam and Jack's little brother, right?

• 2:11Molly O'Shea?

  What?

• 2:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  No, I'm not. I'm just, it's just a joke.

• 2:18Molly O'Shea?

  I was like, okay, it could be a cousin.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  Could be. You never know.

• 2:23Molly O'Shea?

  That's cool.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  Very overt.

• 2:24Molly O'Shea?

  I'm gonna have to like actually look through their family lineage. So you recently just had Pete Hegseth here. We just got back from the Reagan National Defense Forum. I want to know, what is the current state of the defense wave? And where are we in the technology of war?

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot going on in defense tech these days, which is kind of crazy thinking back to when we started Anduril in 2017 as kind of the pariah of Silicon Valley. It was like not something people were doing. It was incredibly unpopular. And now, all of a sudden, there's like almost nothing as popular. Maybe AI, SLOP, enterprise SaaS companies are slightly more popular, but you know, defense tech is right up there. So I think there's a tremendous opportunity, given the kind of cultural waves shifting inside of the department, where they're really interested in engaging with innovative companies. And Anduril had the unique privilege, really, of, you know, being there at the very beginning and kind of shepherding that wave to where we are today.

• 3:21Molly O'Shea?

  And what was that like, having Pete Hegseth here?

• 3:24Speaker 00

  I mean, it's fun. Secretary Hegseth is, you know, he's incredibly charismatic. He understands the problems that are going on right now. And he really gets kind of where Anduril fits into that equation. So not only, you know, the secretary, but also his entire senior leadership was here. And so being able to interact with Undersecretary Duffy, Undersecretary Michael, General Counsel, you know, it was a really cool opportunity, not only for, you know, Anduril's founders, but also the entire team who got to all interact with him during that day as well.

• 3:56Molly O'Shea?

  It's exciting. So I want to talk about the origin of Anduril. I hear there's some story about 007 that you're very close with, that I need to hear more about.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I was a senior in high school when 9/11 happened and ended up going to college specifically trying to go to the end of the intelligence community. So after four years at Georgetown, I got a job in the IC and had this expectation that I was going to show up and somebody was going to like throw me the keys to an Aston Martin and I was going to have, you know, a watch with laser beams. And instead, I sat in a cubicle in a windowless concrete basement with two other people who didn't work. They just sat around and talked about sports, like local area sports all the time. And so my James Bond dream was completely, you know, untrue. And then about two and a half years in, I bailed and went to Palantir.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  And it was like the first time that I had exposure to like really crazy visionary people who wanted to change the way that we were doing things inside the Defense Intelligence National Security Apparatus. And so it's kind of cool now in a position where we are where, I don't know if you saw Top Gun Maverick, but you know, basically the bad guy general says like, "You're a dinosaur, Tom Cruise, the future is autonomy." And it's like, wow, they're actually talking about Andro now. It's like a full circle moment.

• 5:17Molly O'Shea?

  In the midst of all of this, there's obviously a lot of excitement. There's increased competition on the private side. Public side has its own bottlenecks. I'm curious, where do you think Defense Tech stands for the competitive state?

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Defense as a sector is multi-domain. And so you have things under the sea, things on the surface of the sea, ground vehicles, aerial vehicles, and space. And kind of all of those domains are critical for the Department of War to have dominance in. And so, you know, the Andro strategy is to go multi-domain. We don't have like a niche approach to delivering autonomy or attractiveness in any single domain. We want to cover the whole gamut. And this is the way that traditionally defense companies have done work. This is the way Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, this is how they do their work as well. And we believe that there's a lot of shared autonomy components that can cut across all

• 6:15Speaker 00

  of those domains that give us an interesting competitive advantage. And you see like in Silicon Valley even, companies that are being started that are attacking each of those layers as well. And we welcome the competition. We think it's really great to have more companies in the space that are moving away from kind of the semi-communist, centrally-planned economy way that the department has been doing business for really the last 30-plus years.

• 6:41Molly O'Shea?

  I recently had Bradley Tusk on the podcast, and he's all about the regulatory environment, political advisement. He thinks that the recent investments in private sector companies from the government is somewhat, someone might say, communist strategy. Do you think that? What do you think about the investments in like Intel and MP Materials from the government's standpoint?

• 7:05Speaker 00

  We have to be competitive on a global stage, and there's an argument that the government needs to get involved in order to make that work. China is playing a subsidization game with all of their kind of domestic national champions. And they're also running a very effective 4D chess strategy with the Belt and Road Initiative, which has put the United States and our allies and partners in a weakened position since they've devised that. I don't know if you've had the opportunity to read The 100 Year Marathon. It's a brilliant book and basically talks about how Chinese culture has taken a very different approach to Western culture in the way that they are seeking dominance. We have a tendency to show our strength at every stage, whereas the Chinese strategy

• 7:48Speaker 00

  for a long time was, buy time, don't show your strength, and then once you're at a position of dominance, you can strike. And this has been the success of Belt and Road, is that they've gone out and they've done this to the point where they're now threatening us for global power dominance, which is really important for our ability to set standards and be global leaders and enforce ethical pathways of deterring conflict. And so I think... You know, the strategy that the government is taking, you could criticize the very specific aspects of it, like should we have taken ownership in intel as part of a social security strategy or something like that? You could criticize the specifics of that,

• 8:32Speaker 00

  but we have to secure raw materials. We have to maintain access to cutting-edge semiconductors. You know, there's all of these things that we have to do, and I'm glad that the Department of Commerce, Secretary Lutnik and others are thinking critically about how to make that work.

• 8:45Molly O'Shea?

  In American Affairs, you wrote "The factory is really the weapon."

• 8:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 8:50Molly O'Shea?

  Could you share more about that?

• 8:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, for decades and decades, the United States was the global manufacturing powerhouse. I mean, we had the ability during World War II to outproduce our adversaries. And, you know, you had companies like Ford that turned over their production lines to build bombers for the Allied war effort. You know, fast forward to the last 30 years, the fall of the Soviet Union, we've atrophied massively in our manufacturing chops. We offshored a lot of manufacturing work to lower-cost labor locations like China. And not only did they soak up a lot of that manufacturing capacity, but they also developed advanced tooling and know-how to build the things that, you know, we use every day, whether it's, you know, the microphones

• 9:37Speaker 00

  that we're wearing today or the iPhones that are in our pockets. And so, at this point, even if there was complete labor cost parity, we still don't have the ability to just magically reshore a lot of these critical components that are going to be important to the next 50 or 100 years. And so, you know, we're in this place where we really need to re-industrialize. It's incredibly important. It's incredibly important culturally, geopolitically, strategically. And, you know, this is what Andrew is really focused on right now, is bringing back our ability to not build hundreds of things or thousands of things, but tens of thousands of things or hundreds of thousands of things efficiently, scalably, and to do it in a way that enables us to retain that, like, magazine inventory advantage

• 10:22Speaker 00

  against our adversary. And so, I think that's really what I was saying with, the factory is the weapon, because without the factory, you have no weapons.

• 10:29Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, in previous wars, World War I, World War II, The United States had to utilize non-traditional weapons factories to create weapons. So are you doing everything here internally? Or are you also outsourcing and finding different ways to manufacture?

• 10:46Speaker 00

  We have a lot of manufacturing partners. Obviously, we're not building every subcomponent of everything that we're building. So we're working with other vendors. We're working with other machine shops. We're working with other manufacturers. And then we're pooling it all together generally in our own facilities. But in the first quarter of next year, we'll be opening our soon-to-be 5 million-square-foot factory campus called Arsenal One, just outside of Columbus, Ohio, which is where we'll start ramping up our collaborative combat aircraft, the autonomous fighter plane production. And we have other facilities around the country. We have shipyards. We have loitering munition assembly that's happening in Atlanta, Georgia. We do some stuff right here in Costa Mesa at our headquarters.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  So I imagine that there will be multiple factories across not just the United States, but across allied and partner nations as well, where we're ramping that manufacturing muscle at the same time.

• 11:39Molly O'Shea?

  What was it like to open up Arsenal One? I know it's under development, but choosing Ohio where you're from, what was that like?

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, at some point, when we got down to the final three states, I realized that the bias was going to look really bad to the company. So I just kind of sat back and I'm like, you know what? I don't want to push this. I think Ohio is great. Obviously, as a native Ohioan, I thought it would be awesome to land there. The reality is that when it comes down to just the competition for where we were going to end up doing this, and that was some combination of facilities, the access to utility, scale, power, water, things like that, as well as the labor force that could scale with us as we grew out to that 5 million square feet. Ohio just had the most competitive opportunity or offer for us. So we kind of natively ended up going there.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  And when we did the ribbon cutting earlier this year, I brought my mom with me, since she lives right down the road. And having her meet the governor and having the governor thank her as if somehow she was the one that convinced us to go to Ohio was somewhat entertaining.

• 12:46Molly O'Shea?

  Opening something so large like that, does this feel real? I mean, primes have existed for a very long time, but you're known as the new prime. So how does that physicality feel?

• 12:57Speaker 00

  Well, I'm certainly experiencing the realness of it with all the LinkedIn messages from my high school classmates that I haven't heard from in 20 years that are now looking for jobs. So it feels pretty real. Now, I mean, one of the cool things to remember is that Ohio is the birthplace of aviation. And so in some ways, it's like you're starting with the Wright Flyer and then coming back with fully autonomous fighter planes to be built, you know, less than an hour drive away from where the Wright brothers were building the first airplane. And so there's a tremendous history. GE Aviation, GE Aircraft, where they build the jet engines is also right down the street, about an hour away from where we're setting up the factory. So it's a cool kind of cultural moment, I think, not only for us and what we're trying

• 13:41Speaker 00

  to deliver to the department, but also to the state of Ohio.

• 13:44Molly O'Shea?

  It's interesting because when the company was started, like you said, it was seen as a pariah. You kind of, I would say, like, got a lot of support for a while, but now it seems like there's some backlash coming back. So what do you think people get wrong about Anduril and what do you want to correct?

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Well, I tend to not really think about what the media says. I'm not super concerned about, you know, the Wall Street Journal or Reuters or whatever. Honestly, they just looked kind of silly talking about, you know, crashes during test flights. It's like, that's what happens, guys. That's what happens when you move fast. If you're not crashing when you're testing, you're not testing very hard. So I'm not really concerned about that. I think, like, broadly across the defense industry, this is a pattern that you saw happen with both Palantir and SpaceX as well, is that the big players, the primes, they don't really pay attention at all until their lunch is being eaten. And then the moment they realize their lunch is being eaten, they're going to get more aggressive. And so that was always our expectation.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  I'm under no illusions that, you know, we're going to be gladly welcomed with, you know, a big hug or something by the companies we're competing with. As far as like what people get wrong about Andorl, I think that... People will think about us as like a hardware company where we're building all of these big systems, many of which you can probably see in the background of the camera here. But the core of everything that we do is actually software. And that was the original idea for the company when Matt, Brian, Palmer, Joe and I started talking about building this company. It was always, we want to build a software-defined and hardware-enabled defense company, rather than a hardware-defined and software-enabled company.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  And so, most of the people that are sitting around in this office today are writing software, actually.

• 15:30Molly O'Shea?

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• 17:08Speaker 00

  We always had sort of an unfair advantage in that, you know, three of the co-founders were from Palantir, and then a bunch of our early team were from places like Tesla and SpaceX where there was already a lot of government intersect. You know, I spent six years at Palantir learning how to sell to the government, made every mistake you could possibly imagine. And so we didn't have to do that. You know, and from day one in Andro, we were starting from where Palantir was in year 10. And so, kind of a great cheat code.

• 17:35Molly O'Shea?

  What was your biggest lesson from Palantir?

• 17:38Speaker 00

  I mean, there are so many. I wouldn't say that there's any one. It's kind of like death by a thousand cuts. Like, you know, you have to hire a strong government relations team because your customer is not the budget appropriator. Like, they're not the same. So you have to be able to work the administration. You have to be able to work Congress. You have to work political appointees in the department and the customer, the person that will be using the tech at the end of the day. And so you really have to understand that stack. You know, there's a long history in companies that are doing business with the department where they have these massive advisory boards of retired generals and things like that. And it was just clear that that's never worked. And so that was never really part of our strategy, thankfully, because these are lessons, again, learned from Palantir.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  I'm super grateful for, you know, the trailblazing that was done by people like, you know, Elon, Gwen and Tim at SpaceX and Karp, Shum and Lonsdale and Aki and others at Palantir. So I just feel really lucky to have been able to benefit and stand on the shoulders of those giants.

• 18:39Molly O'Shea?

  One thing that was kind of the central focus of our interview with Alex Karp when we were walking around the office at Palantir.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  He's got to keep moving, right?

• 18:49Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Can't sit down.

• 18:50Molly O'Shea?

  Once you mentioned that, I've been thinking that the whole time. I'm like, I don't know if I even feel comfortable in this chair. This is hard. But one of the things that was like core to our conversation was like moral and ethics around this.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:03Molly O'Shea?

  Christian Garrett, he's a big fan of you. We've done so many interviews with him at this point. He's great. But one of his questions he wanted me to ask you was about the just war theory and St. Augustine. So how does that play into all of this?

• 19:18Speaker 00

  I mean, since the very beginning, this was always a big part of the conversation that I was drawing the rest of the team into is, you know, just war theory, which was developed, you know, over a thousand years ago by St. Augustine, talks about like how you engage in lethal defense activity in the most ethical way possible. And if you look back at like the course of all human civilization, you had this massive ramp up in lethality. So we started with like hitting each other with rocks. And then it was like, you know, at some point, somebody is building and making a knife. And then someone makes bow and arrow. And then you have catapults that could do like one to many destruction, trebuchets. And then you have the advent of gunpowder.

• 20:02Speaker 00

  So you have guns and simple bombs. And that just kept going up and up and up until the atomic bomb in 1945. And at that moment, I think humanity looked around at each other and they said, I don't think we want to do this. Like global nuclear war is a pretty bad bet. And so from then until modern day, you see the climb back down the ladder. And so you had precision guided munitions. You know, you see like some of the counterterrorism work we were doing was literally shooting non-explosive AIM-9X missiles into windows to take out individual targets without blowing up buildings, no collateral damage. We've become really, really good at being accurate. And so people are constantly talking about kind of the freak out of the intersection of

• 20:47Speaker 00

  AI and defense and autonomy and what does that do from an ethics perspective? The goal is take humans out of dull, dirty, dangerous jobs. So we're not putting our, you know, men and women, brothers and sisters in horribly dangerous situations and become as accurate and precise as possible. And that's really what just war theory is all about. Principles of discrimination, principles of, you know, just cause, like how much, how good is the information? Do we know for sure that this action that we're going to take is actually going to address the problem that needs to be solved? So this is very, it's a big part of andro culture. We talk about these things internally a lot. And I think we would only do something that we fundamentally believe would be better,

• 21:31Speaker 00

  more just for humanity.

• 21:33Molly O'Shea?

  Where do you get pushback on that?

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, there's a lot of pushback from, you know, people who don't necessarily understand why defense is important. You know, pacifism as an idea is only possible inside of a governing system with a monopoly on violence. Like, you can't be a pacifist without a government monopoly on violence. That's just like not possible for humanity. And so I'm glad that people get to have these positions, these kind of anti-national security positions, where they can sink down into their comfy couch with their hot chocolate and talk about pacifism, because it means that someone out there is willing to risk their lives to protect their ability to be pacifists. So I'm all for it.

• 22:16Molly O'Shea?

  Do you have any cultural commentary on what's going on in America right now? Peter Thiel put out that letter to Mark Zuckerberg in 2020 on the rise of pro-socialism. And we're seeing that in New York City with Mom Donnie. How do you think that bleeds into like where culture is going? I know that you're like, you're a little bit more outspoken on this, whether it relates to religion or the rise of like social media and like AI girlfriends and that kind of thing. But like, where do you see all this playing out with that?

• 22:45Speaker 00

  I think culture is really hard to predict. I mean, we've seen big shifts even in the last 10 years that I don't think I would have expected. You know, there's a lot of surveys that show that, for the first time in modern civilization, you have more women or more men in the most recent generation, in Gen Z, going to church than women. It's like that has never happened before. 10 years ago, if you had asked me like, "Do you think Gen Z will have a rising church attendance and it will be more men than women?", I would have gotten that answer totally wrong. So I'm not sure that I would be able to predict this stuff necessarily. But I think, you know, you've probably seen the meme like, you know, "Hard times create serious men, serious men create easy..." I think that's kind of the moment we're in, as people realize that...

• 23:30Speaker 00

  Man, being serious is very important. And there's more important stuff out there than monkey JPEGs and, you know, AI slop. And I think it's an opportunity for people to step into a good quest. And so I'm hopeful at least that we're in a moment of a transition from slop to good questing.

• 23:48Molly O'Shea?

  And Anduril's amazing marketing definitely helps with that.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  It does, yeah. I mean, when we started the company, the idea was, how do you build like a, you know, an apple for defense rather than the traditional model? So if you were to ask a normal American citizen, like, who makes the F-16? They would probably know. They would be able to envision in their head what an F-16 looks like. They would have no idea who built it. It's just like, not a, not part of cultural knowledge. Our goal at Anduril is we want everything that we build, everything that you see, to invoke Anduril. Not just the product or the thing that it does, but who made it? And the reason that that's important is that it needs to serve as a halcyon call to people, that you can build effective things, low-cost things, attributable things, you know,

• 24:38Speaker 00

  innovative things that are moving the needle for humanity, and they can be beautiful, and they can remind you of human, the, you know, the grasping of human potential. And we've been really lucky that we've brought on an incredible team around this. Shannon Pryor, who heads up our comms, PR department. Jin Buchi, who runs our design. Jeff Miller, who runs marketing. I mean, these are world-class people who didn't come from defense, importantly. They came from, you know, automotive design and Snap. Jeff worked at Snap. Shannon worked at Hulu. I mean, it's like, we're pulling people from consumer businesses to build a consumer profile for a defense company. And that's really never been done before.

• 25:18Speaker 03

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• 25:40Molly O'Shea?

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• 26:23Molly O'Shea?

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• 27:03Molly O'Shea?

  So, given the fact that you split both sides, how do you manage your time between Anduril and Founders Fund?

• 27:09Speaker 00

  I don't. I have an awesome team around me. My EA, Elena, has been with me for over 10 years, and she's an absolute rock star. I have a Chief of Staff, Ellie Untermeyer, who literally goes wherever I go. So if I'm in San Francisco at Founders Fund, she sits right next to me and makes sure I'm on task. When I come down here to Anduril headquarters, she sits right next to me and makes sure I'm on task. So it's just kind of whatever task is at hand at that moment. It's just a lot of context switching between the two. And the Founders Fund team has always been really cool about this. I mean, we have no build program. There's no incubation policy or anything like that at Founders Fund, but... You know, Peter started Palantir, I started Anduril,

• 27:54Speaker 00

  Scott Nolan started General Matter, Delian Espero-Hoff started Varda. And it's just kind of part of the culture. We're totally fine with the splitting of time and concentrating our efforts into things that we're the most passionate about. So I honestly just feel really lucky that I have a team at Founders Fund that is super supportive of this crazy model.

• 28:11Molly O'Shea?

  I know you're super bullish on Armada and that's going to be the next big company. What are your favorite companies right now that you've recently invested in? What are you most excited about?

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the Founders Fund's strategy is to be highly concentrated into a small number of companies. And so aside from the ones that I just talked about, which are the ones that our team built themselves, I'm very excited about what Varda is doing, very excited about General Matter, which is a nuclear fuels company.

• 28:35Molly O'Shea?

  We did a great interview with Scott on General Matter and went out to Paducah for the groundbreaking.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's super cool. I was out there for the dinner the night before. I had never been to Paducah before, which is weird given that I'm just from like two hours up the road. Also excited about Armada. I think edge compute for AI is going to be really important in this next decade. Cognition, the AI coding company, is a large position for us. There's a company called Forge that's doing AI workbooks. I don't know if you've met Marky Wagner, the founder there before, but I'm super excited about that. I don't know, I mean, I could run through like the entire Founders Fund portfolio. I think there's a lot of cool opportunities out there. The important thing is the kind of the word that I would give to young founders or aspiring founders is, don't be an aspiring founder.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  Like, standing in front of a whiteboard and writing about, writing down a bunch of AI slop ideas is not a good way to start a company. Like, you need to like have an idea that's novel, that's original, and it should keep you up at night. And that's the only reason you should ever start a company. And I think Founders Fund is kind of uniquely focused on that, and that shows in returns. Much better returns when you have highly passionate founders working on something that they were like almost called to in a vocational sense.

• 29:52Molly O'Shea?

  From your time at Founders Fund, what's the biggest lesson you've learned from Peter Thiel?

• 29:56Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean, the most annoying lesson I've learned from Peter Thiel is that he's always right. And it's really, really, really annoying. You know, I can't tell you how many times he's said something and the whole team just like kind of rolls their eyes. And then five years later, you know, Donald Trump is president. And you're like, oh, man, Peter does not miss. This goes back to your point. And, you know, he was talking about what happened with Mom Donnie five years ago. I mean, that's crazy. So I think the number one lesson I've learned is that when he talks, you need to take it very seriously because he's probably on to something. Concentration and venture is a really important one. This is like the idea that you don't want to have a thousand investments

• 30:39Speaker 00

  in a billion dollar fund. You want to have like a massive amount of concentration in the top few positions in that fund. And that's something that has been really useful to us from a returns perspective. And then more related to Andrew, it's the zero to one. Everything he talks about in his book about avoiding competition. It really does not make sense or would not have made sense for Andrew in 2017 to go and compete in these highly, you know, crowded marketplaces. We went and targeted an area where there were no venture backed players at all. And that gave us an incredible head start and helped us really build the business that we've built today.

• 31:15Molly O'Shea?

  Wonderful, Trey. Thank you so much.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Thank you. It's good to be here.

• 31:18Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.