Uncapped #35 | Trae Stephens from Founders Fund

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 --- 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 --- More on Trae: https://foundersfund.com/ https://x.com/traestephens More on Jack: https://www.altcap.com/ https://x.com/jaltma --- https://linktr.ee/uncappedpod Email: [email protected]

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I always tell defense tech companies this, it's like, this is not the field of dreams. If you build it, they do not come. That's not how it works. Like, if you build a perpetual motion machine and the point of the perpetual motion machine is like powering forward operating bases, you go to the Department of War and you say, I have built you a perpetual motion machine and I will sell it to you for a million dollars. They would, okay, we're going to bid this out to market and we're going to have Lockheed Martin a $100 billion contract to rebuild from white paper, your perpetual motion machine. That's how it works.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Trey, I'm really happy to be doing this with you. Thanks for making time for it.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Great to be here.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  I want to start with, you wrote a blog post a couple of years ago, I think, good hard quests or good, choose good quests. That really stuck with me. And I think in many ways, we're in a moment in time right now where people are sort of grappling with like what that means in the world of AI. And I think both because of like the technology itself, which like creates all these like weird, what does it mean to be human? What part of the experience actually matters? It like creates like a lot of odd questions. Then you also get these like gold rush dynamics where like money's flowing and you can start a company quickly and there's like a lot of get rich quick ideas. And so I think for a lot of reasons, this blog post is like super relevant right now. And I would just be curious to hear how you think about this concept of like choosing good quests, like when we're in the middle of something like AI.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I think the, the distorting characteristics of AI have less to do with the ability to do interesting hard things and it has much more to do with how easy it is to do uninteresting, unhard things. You know, there's the constant conversation that comes up about like the first company to a billion dollar valuation with one employee. It is possible to do that. But what that means is that all of these people that are coming out of college or that have aspirations to be founders, you know, they're doing like whiteboard founding. They're walking up to a whiteboard, they're writing down 100 different ideas. Many of them are just like using the, you know, LLM APIs to do some highly specific task or something like

• 2:03Speaker 00

  that. And then as they enter the market, there's, you know, dozens of competitors and it's kind of like a battle. To the death in like a really highly consensus category. And that's kind of what I would say is the opposite of a good quest. Like going into something because you can trying to generate wealth as your primary motivation. Not super interesting. It's sort of akin to like a celebrity starting a tequila company where they're just monetizing their own personal brand.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  One of the sort of frames I've heard just talking to founders about how they think about this is that we're like in a moment where there are a lot of ideas that both seem good and are good. As a result of kind of like, there's a big new technology. And so you have a lot of these like blue ocean areas, which are like, you know, kind of rare to have that. And so then you have all these people thinking, well, yeah, like it's kind of consensus, but no one's done it yet. Cause like the why now just happened. And so I see people grappling with that and they're like, it's not exactly bad for anybody. It's like a thing that ought to exist, but to your point, there's like 19 of them going at the same time. It's a weird sort of dynamic.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you know, maybe some of these things are worth building and people are going to make a bunch of money on it. And that's not bad in and of itself. The, the question is like an opportunity cost question in my mind. It's like for our most talented people, you know, if you think of like every person in the tech ecosystem as like a Dungeons and Dragons character. And they have like a skill set and they have ratings for different characteristics. If we take all of our level 100 players and we put them on AI slot companies. What does that mean for all of the things that aren't being done at the same time? I would really like our level 100 wizards to be fabricating semiconductors or, you know, something that's going to move the needle for humanity. And so it has sort of this distracting distortion effect rather than necessarily being bad.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  This kind of happened during like crypto booms, you know, like when people just sort of like get lost and sort of like, oh my God, there's so much money being made here that it's very, it's very tempting. And you get a lot of people that go there.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then over time, that kind of worked itself out in crypto, I would say. But it's less clear that that's what would happen in the AI moment.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  There's also a genre with AI where it's less this area of like, it's a straightforward thing with 20 companies working on the same problem. But there's these types of AI companies that I think like, get close to people's sense of like, where are the moral boundaries? Like, what does it mean to be human? And, you know, like, I think there's these things that people have a lot of very negative, visceral reactions to. You know, I recently saw like, you know, a post about a company that sort of brings sort of like, you know, deceased loved ones to sort of life in some kind of form. And on one hand, you're like, I guess that kind of makes sense. That could be comforting for people. On another hand, like, there was a lot of kind of, you know, sort of like a visceral disgust reaction that people were having that it sort of like crossed the line for people. How do you think about these things that sort of like, that feel bad on first glance,

• 4:54Speaker 01

  but are sort of exploring the edges? Like, are those quests that are good that look bad? Or how do you know?

• 5:00Speaker 00

  The key question with companies like this, which there's like literally a Black Mirror episode that exists about this topic of bringing back deceased loved ones. I lost my dad in 2013 to Alzheimer's and, you know, I would love to talk to my dad. That would be awesome. Like, every time I buy a car, it's like, who do I talk to? I end up talking to like, my co-founders at Anduril about it. But I would love to talk to my dad. That would be super cool. But I think the challenge behind these things is like, what happens to interpersonal relationships? And this has started long before AI. If you look at online dating as an example of this, long before AI, we realized as a society that like, the way that we pair off is going to look super different. Like, in, you know, decades past, it was done locally, in like, a local minima.

• 5:45Speaker 00

  It was like, you know, you met people at school, or you met people at church, or you met people professionally in a workplace. And you were able to measure, you know, the fidelity of a match across a number of characteristics. Like, this person is funny. This person is charming. This person is romantic. This person is talented, ambitious, smart. And now, if you look at the way that the sorting is happening, it's done on the shallowest possible measures. It's like, If men over six foot two get 80% of the matches.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  I'm sure that there's a lot of really talented, charming, well matched, matchable people that are less than six foot two, but they don't get any of the right swipes. And so we've created this entire like social demographic of incels that historically, if you look back over the course of human civilization, have been the powder keg for implosions of societies. You don't want to have a bunch of young, 20 something, single men that are underemployed running around in your economy. It doesn't, doesn't bode well. And you add AI on top of that now, where you have like people that can talk with their deceased loved ones, but also they can talk with AI companions.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  And they find that they have this very low risk, very, you know, low probability of disagreement companion that basically acknowledges and affirms whatever they want them to acknowledge and affirm. Well, that becomes much easier.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  Than the complicated dynamics of a real human relationship. And then what does that do to the way that our society, you know, sustains a birth rate at a very basic level? But beyond that, like what happens when you have unmatched people at numbers that society has never seen before? Like what impact does that have?

• 7:27Speaker 01

  It's sort of interesting when you think about this, like, you know, I like your framing of like Dungeons and Dragons, because it's like, it makes us all feel like we're on one team. And it's like, how do you want to deploy resources? How would you think about like, there's a one category of like company idea that's like, let's bring back deceased loved ones where you're like, oh, that's weird. I don't know what to make of that, but it's new and it's weird. And like, there's that. And then there's like, maybe a category that like, more or less, everybody would agree is bad. And you know, like, there's things that you could probably profit off of that just like are not unclear like that, but are like definitively bad. Do you have any way that you think about sort of like, what ought to be explored, even if it feels uncomfortable?

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I mean, I traditionally have thought about this as like on a two by two matrix where you have like feels bad, feels good on one axis, and then is good, is bad on the other. Like, everyone kind of agrees in the diagonal of feels good, is good. It's like do gooder stuff, ed tech, health tech, whatever. That's like super obvious. And then the Feels bad is bad, like things that are illegal, like murder, theft, cheating, whatever. Yeah, we can all kind of agree on that. It's the other diagonal that's interesting.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  And the feels bad is good, I would argue is kind of where Andorol lives. It's this duty and responsibility, like things that you have to do, not because you want to glorify those things, but because they're really important for a functioning society. That's like everything from disciplining children to law and order inside of a society or defense of a nation or something like that. Then you have that other category, the quadrant of feels good is bad. And this is like sort of the edgy stuff that you're talking about, like gambling, pornography, sort of what I would call like hedonism. And there's always arguments you can make about a libertarian society, like we should allow people, you know, free expression. We should allow drug use to some, to some extent.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  But then you can also look at the negative impacts on a society of these things and have to make hard decisions about how you're going to build policies around whether or not these things should exist because they, a lot of them are highly addictive. And like that, those can be really good businesses.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  And is policy basically the only answer to that quadrant? People are going to build companies that they can build that are profitable within the rules and the vices are always going to make money.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  100%. Yeah. I mean, you could look at the most extreme example of this is like if fentanyl was legal in the United States, there would be a massive company that just like sold very low cost fentanyl.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  For sure. It'd be a huge company.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  It would be a huge company. So yeah, policy is probably the only way that you can really address those problems.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, you know, it's interesting, like some of the things that look like gambling, you know, you don't know whether things are in the really bad quadrant or actually they're in this sort of like new exploratory quadrant. Like prediction markets, like I was talking to Vlad, you know, on Uncapped recently, and he's like making good points about how the prediction markets actually also allow you to like bet on specific things that are narrow. They like allow for like, you know, market sort of like true price discovery to happen on bets.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Not to mention also underwriting.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  There's a lot that you can benefit from, big time, some of those.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so some of these newer things that like are teetering on the edge, it's like you do want some of that stuff to get explored too.

• 10:31Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, the nature of policy development is always like, you know, the thing develops in real time and then you build policy to constrain and control the negative societal impacts. And this is why, you know, The way that AI companies engage with Capitol Hill, it's not like, you know, Capitol Hill is going to be the smartest people on AI and they're going to walk in and they're going to lay all the groundwork for how it's going to be built. It's not going to work like that. There, I think there are two people in all of Congress that have computer science degrees and they all got those degrees long before AI was like a thing that they would have been studying. Most of these are like lifelong career civil servants, have no idea how technology works. Realistically, what's going to happen is AI is going to bill, bill, bill.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Boundaries will be crossed that we realize as a society have negative implications. And then in a well functioning democracy, you build guardrails for those things. Now, the well functioning democracy thing, we could have a whole conversation about, but that is ideally how it should work.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, well, you're working with, you're working with DC a lot at this point through Andro. I mean, I guess in prison, what you're saying is the right way for regulation to go is like, let the technology develop to some degree and then start regulating once you're observing things, right? How's that played out for like Andro? Like, what is that sort of experience like? Because obviously there's a ton of regulation going on there. What is the way like a new prime should like ought to get built?

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, luckily, like defense policy is the most bipartisan of really any category, which is funny because in Silicon Valley, most people wouldn't think of it that way. They'd be like, wow, this is really edgy stuff. But then the National Defense Authorization Act passes with a super majority. Like, it's like the only bill that passes.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  I do always think that like, people think it's partisan, but like, at the end of the day, like, people are reasonable in government and everybody wants a safe country.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Which is one thing I very much appreciate.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's, there's not a whole lot of partisan debate on these topics. But that also means that they're usually way out ahead of regulations. Like, a lot of the existing law on the books around autonomy and artificial intelligence actually started in the defense community. There have been commissions on studying the how AI is going to be leveraged in active warfare. You know, we've had autonomous systems for decades. There's a turret system called SeaWiz, a close in support for naval vessels, that is basically like a, you know, a machine gun that shoots inbound threats to, to vessels, to ships.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  And there's no human controlling this aiming at the aerial targets or anything. It's just it identifies a threat. You say engage the threat and then C Wiz takes over and we'll shoot down the missile or the aircraft or whatever it is. So like autonomy has existed for a long time. The law behind how that stuff is is supposed to be utilized has existed, you know, inside of the defense community throughout that entire period. So I think, you know, Andrew has the benefit of kind of being on the edge of that and helping our lawmakers make decisions about how we're going to leverage these new technologies. But not in a way that's like defensive. There's not a conversation that we're having. There's like a really toxic debate going on about these things because a lot of that law has been bubbling for a while.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  You were talking about how like, you know, Andrew in many ways is in the like seems bad is good quadrant, but you know, obviously government didn't feel that way about it. Like government seems good is good. Maybe in like Silicon Valley, it was, you know, in the other quadrant. Like, what was your experience? I think this is like maybe flipped now, but like five, six years ago, maybe like the tone was different. And so like, were you sort of like having to convince a lot of people in Silicon Valley that like, actually this is a good thing?

• 14:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you probably remember Google pulled out of a federal contract called Project Maven. And there was thousands of people signed a letter criticizing their employer for supporting this. And it was kind of a cultural moment where it was really not okay to be working with the Defense Department. Yeah, there, there's some like partisan reasons for this. You know, at the time Trump was president, I think people were mostly upset about Trump being president rather than any particular like specific policy that was being employed. But Andrew never really encountered any of those headwinds in Washington. All of those headwinds were like recruiting conversations. Like, why is this important? Are we able to articulate how what we're doing is like an advancement of just war

• 14:48Speaker 00

  theory, not a destruction of just war theory? And we've been very open since the beginning and engaging in that conversation proactively.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  So it was like an interesting thing. Like sometimes I'll like see a clip of some like, you know, somebody in the military, like active duty, like talking about like how They know that like a lot of the people they're protecting like hate what they're doing, but like they're like, my job is to protect anyway. It's like a weird thing where you're like, you know, that that like tension of people who sort of like love what they get out of the military, but don't like it. It's a, that's like a weird thing to grapple with.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  I think this is like the, the longstanding nature of the, you know, the professional soldier is this idea that in the United States, uh, you know, they're protecting your first amendment right to not like what they're doing. And it turns out that you can only be a pacifist inside of a, a geopolitical system where the government has monopoly on power, on the use of violence.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Like you can't be a pacifist in a like real politique sense.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  If the government doesn't have a monopoly on violence.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  It doesn't work.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  I find this like this perspective, like it's purely frustrating, but now I'm thinking a lot of like, is there, is there like a reframe I should have that it's actually like, like, do we want a certain percentage of the population to like dislike the military in the war? Does that do anything valuable?

• 16:06Speaker 00

  I think it's great. I mean, I think it's really important to test hypotheses, to test ethics, to test, um, our politicians, to make sure that they're thinking about hard issues, ethical issues. You know, anytime there's some debate about how the department of war like executed some policy strategy, whether it's towards like, you know, Venezuelan drug boats or taking out known terrorists in foreign countries with, you know, predators and AIM nine Xs and things like that. I want that debate to happen because that's how we get to good policy. If that was absent and everybody was just like, let's throw on our cowboy hats and swing our lassos in the air and go take on the world, that's how you get to team America, world police.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  And I don't think that's what any of us really want at our, at our deep down.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Definitely not.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  I, I love the debate. I think it's really important.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  What does Andrew need to do like from where it is now to like getting to, you know, the scale that you want to be to? It seems like from, you know, at least the outside, you've, you have de-risked and proven so much, but I'm sure there's still like a lot in front of you to like get up to the size and scale that like, you know, you could be operating at. It's like, what's now?

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's all about production. That's like the end of the day is that we've gone from building dozens of things to hundreds of things, to thousands of things, and now we need to make tens of thousands of things. And the only way that you can do that is by developing a muscle around manufacturing that most venture-backed startups don't have. That's not how we think about building things. And so if you look at the way that like a contract manufacturer, like Flextronics works, where you know, a company comes to them and says, we have a design, we have some sense of design for manufacturing, how this is going to be built, and then Flextronics figures out how to do that at massive scale, how to reduce costs, they work directly with the engineers at the company to design for manufacturing. That's kind of what we need to do at this point.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  We need to get to the point where we are building at scale, and that means that we're making design decisions when we build things that are enabling scaling up to tens of thousands of units. So last year, we announced that we're building out a facility in Ohio that we're calling Arsenal One, which is a, over the next few years, will be a 5 million square foot manufacturing campus. The first, about 800,000 square feet will come online in the first quarter of 2026. And you know, we're building out that team and starting to kind of take very seriously the challenges that are going to be a big part of scaling from where we are now to that point.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  It seems like Tesla and SpaceX are like a couple of the only companies that have like really done this at scale. I mean, we should talk about SpaceX a little bit because obviously you guys are close, but can you like explain why it is so hard? Like, what are the capabilities that are like extremely hard to acquire to like produce cars at scale or military equipment at scale, rockets at scale? Like, can you like, you know, articulate why it's so hard to do 20,000 instead of 200?

• 19:00Speaker 00

  There are people that could do it better than I can, but I'll do my best. I mean, the Tesla example is a good one. Like, the skill set that was required to build the first Roadster. Like you can spend basically an infinite amount of money. You know, you can be highly exquisite in your approach to every problem that you're trying to solve. Very different than we're going to make a million cars. And like, if we're going to make a million cars, what is the most efficient way to weld door panels? What's the most efficient way to acquire the materials that we need to manufacture batteries?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, you know, it's like when you say like a million cars, you're like, okay, like, how many is that a day? And then you're like, geez.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  It's crazy. Like, the scale is just absolutely crazy.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  It's just a different mentality that you need internally to do that. SpaceX is a little different because it's still highly exquisite aerospace kind of stuff. But even in that case, you see that Elon and team has, they've verticalized the supply chain. So they're like making things in-house.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  There's still a lot of volume of really complicated stuff.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  Exactly. And so they figured out like, we can't actually go to suppliers for a lot of these parts because the cost up to the business, the risk to the business of that part failing is catastrophic. And so they end up having to verticalize a lot of this. In the general case, it's like, you know, if we're building missiles, like right now, like a Patriot missile is two and a quarter million dollars. It's a lot of money for one missile. What if you were to build a Patriot equivalent or better missile for one tenth the cost? A lot of the changes that you would make are literally manufacturing decisions. It's like, are, how are you molding the exterior of it? How are you making solid rocket motors? What is the, like, what materials are being used in the seekers?

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Do we have the ability to acquire enough of those materials that we can manufacture at scale at lower cost? And so there's obviously engineering design decisions, but a lot of that is also can you manufacture at a price that, that is attractive?

• 20:57Speaker 01

  It's interesting. Like you see like a lot, you know, just hearing you talk about it. It's like, you see a lot of, you know, which is amazing, new companies that are like working on like a particular weapon or product or something in like the defense space. And then like, I wonder like, how much of the battle is that versus government relationships? Production capabilities, like capital access, like, you know, relative to like in a software company where like building a great software product is. Like, let's say it's like 70% of the battle. Like, I wonder what the equivalent is.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I always tell defense tech companies this. It's like, this is not the field of dreams. If you build it, they do not come. That's not how it works. Like, if you build a perpetual motion machine, and the point of the perpetual motion machine is like powering forward operating bases, you go to the Department of War and you say, I have built you a perpetual motion machine, and I will sell it to you for a million dollars. They would, okay, we're going to bid this out to market, and we're going to have Lockheed Martin a $100 billion contract to rebuild from white paper your perpetual motion machine. That's how it works. The challenge is really, do you understand well enough how the government works that you can navigate a strategy so that they're

• 22:05Speaker 00

  going to buy from a non-traditional player? And that's like, it's, you flip it. It's like not 70% product. It's like 30% product. The product matters. You have to build something that works and that serves the warfighter's needs and is better than the alternative, all of that. You know, you also have to know what you're doing on the business side of the equation.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  One last question, because we were just talking about like SpaceX, like, you know, there was Space Force announced, and years ago, people kind of made fun. It seems to me like space warfare is actually like, super important. Is there like a sense that you have that like, as time goes on, more and more of the way war is going to happen between countries will happen, like, maybe without people on land, will a lot of it be in space? Like, what's the future of, like, the way that like, powers are going to struggle?

• 22:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, space is going to be really important, without a doubt, but all of it, like, every domain is going to have its own version of low-cost autonomy. The era of putting 5,000 people on a $15 billion aircraft carrier and using that for force projection is over. Like, you know, you can fire a, you know, single-digit millions hypersonic carrier killer missile, and take that asset out. It's like, you really, that's not the way that you're going to do that.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, our aircraft care is still important.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  I mean, not in great power complex. Maybe they're important from like, a logistics perspective, but because of this like, cost calculus, it's

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Crazy, because not that long ago, they were like, these just machines of dominance, right?

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Well, I think in In the types of conflicts we were engaging in, in, you know, the era of counterterrorism or something, very different, like the, the non-state actors, terrorist organizations, they're not going to be taking out aircraft carriers by and large. That is, it's, it's just like a different kind of risk calculus.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  So what will it be now? Like, will, will we have like a lot left? Like, human, the human to human combat is going to go down, I assume?

• 23:52Speaker 00

  Well, human to human combat has been going down for a while. I mean, you look at the, the exception to that, of course, is like in a conflict, like between Ukraine and Russia, you still have a lot of casualties, like a lot of casualties. I don't think people, most people fully recognize just how many casualties there have been in that conflict. But the way that the United States Armed Forces has been engaging internationally is very heavily driven by special forces, which I think is going to be the case for a long time. You're going to have highly trained, highly skilled operators that do super risky missions and things like that. But most of the other engagement is very likely going to be autonomy. It's like low cost undersea, low cost surface vessels, low cost ground vehicles, low cost aerial vehicles, and doing that in a way that takes the human out of

• 24:36Speaker 00

  the dirt, dolest, dirtiest, most dangerous jobs. And it empowers our ability to execute a strategy in a way that reduces potential for casualties and loss of human life.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  So I just was thinking as we're talking, I'm like, you know, talking to a Androll founder, but like, we're also like, we're here at Founders Fund, like you're an investor too. And so you really are doing both, you know, both things at once, but like really doing both things at once. And, you know, many people at Founders Fund do it that way. What's like the ethos for you, maybe for Founders Fund in general, but I guess just for you, like, what is this sort of like founder investor, like, do you think about it? Does it matter? Are you just doing what feels, you know, most important at any given time? Like, what's the, what is the mindset behind the way that you work like this?

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, it really is the latter, just kind of doing whatever feels the most important at that, at that moment. I didn't start Androll because I was like, man, I really want to be a slashy, like an actor model from Zoolander. I really want to do investor operator. That was not, that was not my thought process. I didn't even think that was an option. I had been looking for, you know, what we did, we're large investors in Palantir and SpaceX. The question is, is there another one that we should be looking for? I had been kind of poking around, didn't find anything and went back to the team. And I said, what I really think we need is a software defined but hardware enabled. Defense Prime, rather than just like a software company like Palantir. And I was like, oh, it's going to be really hard. SpaceX and Palantir are both founded by billionaires. I'm not really sure how this company is going to exist.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  But if it does exist, we will know about it because it's going to have to be pretty high profile. And to my surprise, the team was like, well, who better to do it? You should just go and build the team to do that.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  So it was kind of accidental. But then like from a day to day perspective, my chief of staff is awesome. She's been with me for the last two years here. We just kind of divide and conquer and she sets the priorities for, you know, here are the Androl things that really have to happen today. Here are the founders fund things that really have to happen today. And we context switch a lot.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  One of the things that I would find probably interesting in your shoes is the relationships with Palantir, SpaceX, you know, Androl, like they're so deep that, you know, you're also like out, you know, you might be meeting a seed or series A or B company or whatever. And you've also got these relationships where you can and do just continue investing in these companies that you are helping build, you know, very well, you have crazy close relationships. It's like, how do you internally think about comparing deploying more capital in these things where you're spending tons of time? You know, everything versus like you meet a new company, the regular VC way.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  I've still love the kind of curiosity that venture capital brings to the table. Like I love learning about new things. There's energy that I get from the VC side of things that is super fun. You know, one of the things that I noticed, I've been in venture now for just about 12 years. One of the first things I noticed when I joined Founders Fund is that VCs make for incredible dinner table conversations. Because we know like six inches of depth across the widest possible breadth of of sectors. But I also found that to be like sort of boring over time. And Androl has been an amazing antidote to that. So it's like, I can go a mile deep and then I can come out and and do the six inches of depth thing again.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  There's actually a funny thing with these podcasts where I will, you know, the like a, an accomplished CEO is just succeeded wildly. That has a smaller TAM audience than a VC who can just talk about a bunch of things, which I sort of get like as a listener or just as like a dinner guest. I understand that, but I think the really interesting meat usually is deep somewhere.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  Totally. Yeah. I mean, I mean, this is the most remarkable thing about a person like Elon is that

• 28:13Speaker 01

  He's deep in so many.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  He's deep in so many places. Yeah. And the closer that I've, I'm not Elon and I'll never be Elon, but the closer I've gotten to that is I've gotten deep in like multiple things. I've really respected and appreciated even more.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  How insanely hard this is. Like I was, uh, I was with him, um, a few months back as we were transitioning between two meetings that we were going to. He was like on a conference call with SpaceX talking about like the literal metallurgical materials that were going to be used for this specific part of the rocket. And I was like, how is it possible that you're that involved at that level?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  And it's not like the learning support from like, it's not like Tesla needs those materials. So it's like, you learned it for one purpose.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  For one purpose. Yeah. I don't feel like I'm even remotely close to that, but there is, there's something intellectually much more meaty.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  For me, on the operations side, for sure.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Is that something that is like cultural to founders funds? And so I feel like, you know, there's a lot of other companies that get like built by partners here. Is there something about the attraction to people that have depth in them that like, is that necessary at founders fund?

• 29:21Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I, I think that the, the name of the fund can be interpreted in two ways. You know, why, why are we called founders fund? The, the most straightforward way that most people think is what you just said, which is that we, we're like founders, like most of us, or at least many of us have started companies before. We kind of have an operational engagement with the world that a lot of other more finance oriented VCs don't have. The real answer to the question is that we're a fund for founders, which means that if we believe that we could run a company better than a founder, like we want a board seat, we want to help you, we want to give all the strategic guidance.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Like we would probably just start the companies ourselves, but we're investing in these companies because we believe that the founder. Is the right person to run that specific business.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  And so it kind of works in both ways. But I do think because of that second piece, because we are not trying to get super operationally hands on with our portfolio, it means that we have

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Time.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Time and space.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  And, and the permission from the fund to go and explore the things that we think are most interesting. So you end up with, you know, Scott Nolan, starting a nuclear fuels company, General Matter, and Deliana Esperohoff, starting Varda, hypersonics, and, you know, in space manufacturing company. Peter started Palantir, I started Androl. There's no intentional incubation strategy. It's literally just the output, the, the exhaust

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  of a system that rewards and incentivizes people on going deep.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  You must have companies that are asking for things though, from the team, of course. Like even without board seats, I'm sure people are still

• 30:51Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. We are very good at being reactively

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  supportive.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Right. Someone calls to pick up right away, I'm sure.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  Totally, totally. We're, we're the first people to go out, make introductions, help with business strategy, help with pricing, whatever it is, we're, we're very

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  engaged at that level. But, you know, we don't want board seats.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  Like, we don't have 20 board seats, like a lot of VCs. I think I have like four board seats right now.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Which is so different.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Taking aside the incubations, although that's obviously part of it, or those building companies, being a founder, the investing itself has just been like extremely good. And I'd be curious if you could try to pick apart or point to some of the things that have mattered for that. Maybe I'll start by prompting like what I have sort of observed that seems particularly good. One is like the ability to concentrate over and over again in aggressive ways within a fund, across a fund. That seems very important. There's obviously calling trends early and like not hopping into things that are already hot, but like doing things before they're hot. There seems to be something about like the way the partnership operates and like the type of dynamics that you have with one another

• 31:58Speaker 01

  and how ideas get debated. But I'm curious, like you're obviously living it. Like what would you point to as the things that have made founders fund as high performance as it has been?

• 32:06Speaker 00

  If you divided this into access, evaluation.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  Of companies.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  And like follow on.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  There's probably an answer in each of those categories. On the access front, it's like, I've been here 12 years. The fund has been around for 20 years. Most of the access edge that we have happened before my time. You know, it's like the PayPal mafia coming together, Peter's brand.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  There's like a long history of people leaving storied VC funds to start their own firms and stuff like that. Like, I have literally zero interest in doing that. I am just riding the wave of Peter Thiel's genius. That's awesome. It's a great strategy. So that's like that edge. The middle one on evaluation, I think that like, you know, this is also sort of a Peter culture thing, which is open debate. There are no sacred cows. Hierarchy doesn't exist. It's like, you know, whether it's me, Peter, Napoleon, which are like the GP, or the newest person into the fund. We want everyone to be fighting and advocating for what they believe we should be investing in. And because of that, you get this really vibrant culture of debate.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  You know, it's not like a single hegemonic figure coming in and, you know, beating down the junior people and telling them how to do things.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  A friend of mine who used to work here was saying that like, somebody asked him if like, the fact that people like debate hard was like, one of the tough things in partner meeting. And he's like, no, that was like, amazing was like, there was enough trust and respect between people to like, fight it out for real.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Which I think doesn't exist at like, a lot of places.

• 33:34Speaker 00

  One of the, one of the most shocking things to me when I first joined, I had worked with Peter for a while when I was at Palantir. I was at Palantir for six years before I came here. But I kind of had this expectation that Peter would be this sort of immovable intellectual force.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  And actually, that's not.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  You can convince them all stuff.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  You can convince them all stuff all the time. You have to construct a good argument and that's how you're going to gain respect with him is by winning an argument. But I was shocked at how he would take a position. We would, you know, litigate the position. And if he felt like there was a better argument being made, he would say, yeah, I think I agree with XYZ person that made that argument instead. And so that, that is very core to, to who we are as a fund. And I think that's served us well.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  And so that's unpicking.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  That's unpicking, the evaluation.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Is there anything else besides just like? You know, so like there's the debating, but then there's the contents of what's being debated. Like, are there any ways of thinking or mindsets that are in there? Cause it's like you want to like, you want, you know, good ideas are winning, obviously. It's like, what's in that?

• 34:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's, there's a bunch of different ideological pieces to this. Many of them are described in Peter's book Zero to One. We really don't like consensus categories. Anywhere where you find a bunch of competition, we try to stay away from. I think chapter six of Peter's book is literally titled Competition is for Losers. We don't love competitive market spaces.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Just to click on that, like if there's a space, let's say there's like a AI customer support. There's something where like, ah, this is both good and competitive. Like, you're not gonna not invest just because there's competition. So how, like, what would the conversation be like if you're looking at something in code or support? Or one of these places that are both competitive, but obviously valuable?

• 35:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we're huge investors in cognition, for example. This was literally the tenor of the debate internally when we looked at writing that first check into cognition. It's like, do we believe that the founder, that like atomic element of the company is so good? That we have to get over our philosophical, nearly dogmatic hesitance to go into these competitive consensus markets? And in that case, the answer was yes, but in many cases, the answer is no. Like, you have to have an absolute killer to feel really good about making that bet. But then it's really not a company bet, it's a founder bet.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  And so you're not betting in the category, you're, you're investing in the person at that stage. You know, we also only invest in founder CEOs. So like, once a company has a professional CEO, we're out. We're just not gonna do it. We also are much more willing to take tech risk than a lot of other funds. We're happy to write sizable checks into companies that are a ways out from having a product in market. And, you know, there's a kind of the famous moniker of founders fund from, you know, over a decade ago is we wanted flying cars. And instead we got 140 characters. And so we're very

• 36:19Speaker 01

  And that's just a pure founder bet, too.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're just, you're trying to figure out, is this the type of person that's going to be able to manifest this reality?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  How much do you talk about like markets in these early-stage investments? Or is it always about the founder?

• 36:33Speaker 00

  Early-stage, it's about the founder. Obviously, later-stage, you have a lot more data and that stuff comes in. But early-stage, like, something is probably binary. It's like, it's either going to work because the founder wills it into existence, or it's not. And it's, it's probably going to be because the team wasn't able to pull it off. Not because there's a fundamental TAM constraint or anything like that.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  What are the other like big tenets or principles that like often are getting, you know, hearkened back to in these debates?

• 37:00Speaker 00

  I mean, a lot of it is sort of philosophical about like, do we believe that this needs to exist in the world? And do we believe that us coming in with capital is going to help the founder bring this thing into existence? And, you know, some of our best bets have been predicated on exactly that. Whether that's SpaceX or Anduril, like, these are really complicated companies to pull off. And it takes kind of that like hope and vision type of investment out of the earliest stages.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Do you buy in at all on like high-brand VC kingmaking as a thing? And I'm sort of asking this from the perspective of, I think, a lot of other brands that are sort of in your same echelon, smartly sometimes use like what I would see as kind of like, not, I don't want to say, this sounds negative. I was going to say kingmaking tactics, which sounds negative. I don't mean it that way. But like where I see a decision where I'm like, I think what they're doing is calculating that if by doing this round, this company is going to do well. And I'm like, I'm guessing that was the conversation that's happening. And I think it is sometimes true. But I'm curious if that's ever how you think about it? Or are you just like, we don't buy into that? Because like, I don't see Founder Sun flexing its brand and stature in these sort of dynamics the way that I think you could.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  And I wonder if that's because there's like a distaste for it, or if it's because you think it doesn't work.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Going back to the point about consensus competitive businesses is that because we don't do a whole lot of those, we're in less of a position to do the kingmaking than a firm would be that's going directly at like crowded enterprise SaaS categories or something. So that's Kind of half the answer to the question. The other half of the answer is we have debates about this all the time internally. You know, I published a blog post a couple of months ago about kamikaze rounds, which is basically what I would call like king making where like a venture fund comes in and they're like, you know, I want to invest this huge check 100, 200, 500 million dollars into the company. And obviously in order for that to be like minimally dilutive, that means that you're going to have to accept a valuation that's way higher than the current status for the business.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  And founders can very easily be convinced to take huge checks at high valuations. But that's like, you know, an anchor around your neck that oftentimes destroys companies. And there's countless examples of these. And it's always funny, like publicly talking about kamikaze rounds, people will ask for names and it's like the community is so small. It's like, do I really want to burn relationships by naming names? But everyone knows who I'm talking about when I say that this happens. There's this sort of view that it's the VC's fault, that like the VC is mispricing and the company has no responsibility. But like as a founder, you're accountable for ensuring the long-term viability of your business. And capital raising is part of that strategy that you have to roll out.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  And so, you know, there's, there's a kind of a conversation that you have to have with companies as they're going through this process. Like, yes, you could take more money at a higher price. You could also take less money at a lower price. And that might actually be the better decision for you as a company. This is famously trolled in the HBO show Silicon Valley where this guy's company failed. And the protagonist was talking to him over drinks at a bar and he was like, you know, you could have raised less. And he was like, no one told me I could have raised less. So I think king making in some cases, especially in highly competitive markets, might actually work. But there's tremendous downside risk as well.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then what about on the concentrating part?

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that's like the third category. So like first category is access. Second category is, you know, analysis, evaluation, and then that third category is the follow on.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  One quick question there. Out of all of your dollars, how many, like roughly speaking, what percentage are an initiation check versus like a full, like out of a hundred dollars that go out of the door? Like, how important is this third bucket?

• 40:48Speaker 00

  Well, we have a venture fund and a growth fund, which is going to be wildly different. Obviously, like the growth fund is writing massive checks right up front. And the venture fund, ideally, the top, call it five or six companies in each vintage and each venture fund should represent like middle-sized, double-digit millions of, or percentages, rather, of the fund. So like, I want like 40, 50% of the fund, if we can, concentrated into our top positions.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  So that bucket's huge. It's like as important as the first bucket.

• 41:17Speaker 00

  Totally. Yeah.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Okay. So how do you do that?

• 41:19Speaker 00

  There's like the proactive version of this and there's the non-proactive version. The proactive version of it is you have to constantly be asking yourself, what are the best companies we've invested in so far in this venture fund? And can we get out in front of another round, giving them more capital, figuring out some way to intentionally create concentration? That's like half of it. The other half of it is not, not concentrating. And that's just like, don't do a bunch of stupid, single-digit million-dollar deals.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. You're saying in the first place or in the follow-ons of them?

• 41:50Speaker 00

  Both. If you have a billion-dollar venture fund, like Founder's Fund, we've pretty consistently raised billion-dollar venture funds. And you spend, you know, 10, 20, 10, 15, 20% of the fund writing seed checks. Even a really well-performing seed fund of $100 million size, like maybe you return your fund 1X, but like, that's not really going to move the needle. You need to write larger checks. So that's kind of like the lesson. We really don't want to be writing a bunch of 100K, 250K checks, especially because we now have a signaling anchor around those companies that they're going to come back and they're going to really need us to participate in order to raise their Series A. But in addition to that, if we go out and we write five, $10 million checks into Series A

• 42:32Speaker 00

  companies like we should be doing at that first bet, when they come back and they're kind of... Mediocre performance, maybe some other VC came in with a really high price. Are you coming in and doing an auto prorata? I think that's like sort of the bias for the industry is like, we should just do our prorata if somebody else marks up the company. But there's this weird reverse correlation between like companies that need your signaling.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  I know.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  And companies that tell, ask you to not invest your prorata. It's like, if a company asks you to not invest prorata, you should be fighting for prorata. But if a company comes to you and says, I really need your-

• 43:07Speaker 01

  That's a good founder tip for people who want to get prorata.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And so I think part of the concentration thing is like, I just don't want to play those games. If it's not at the next investment opportunity, if it's not a deal that we would have done X, the initial investment, like we would have passed.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:25Speaker 00

  Well, then you should pass.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  Or you should minimize the check size to the company. So there's, you know, there's a bit of a trade off there.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  I mean, part of it also, I think the whole thing relies on having companies that can be concentrated in too.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  And like, there's good software companies that are never going to need $5 billion of capital and are never going to be worth $200 billion. And so some of this-

• 43:46Speaker 00

  And when that is the case, it means you need to write as large of a check as you can upfront, as early as you can.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Because you're like, I'm never going to buy ownership of.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  As you look around now, like late 2025, and you like see what's happening in the landscape around, and you've got like a lot of firms getting really, really big. You know, a lot of these things that we're talking about are things, you know, you've been saying for a lot of years, but now there's, you know, a lot of firms that I think are sort of starting to sort of memetically, you know, think in similar ways, et cetera. But, you know, you've got a lot of interesting stuff going on, like hard tech is working really well with a lot of your companies, obviously not broadly speaking, but there's enough of that. There's a lot of really good AI stuff. And so when you kind of like smush it all together, I'm just kind of curious like where you think there's like alpha in venture right now.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  I think venture is just really hard. The founder's son's strategy has been stay true to our, you know, our strategy. And if that means we go slow and we deploy- Less quickly than everyone else in the space, fine.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  Like, I'm not going to stress about that. There are going to be good deals in every vintage. Like, you know, even through the dot com crash, it's like, if you were a Google investor.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you did great.

• 44:55Speaker 00

  You're fine.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:56Speaker 00

  In the 08, 09 recession, if you're a Facebook investor, you're fine. Like, there's always going to be at a micro level, good deals. Just have to make sure you're in those deals and not get overly exuberant about chasing hype. And given the long-term strategy of Founder's Fund, we're kind of immunized against hype chasing.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  From the outside, I imagine Founder's Fund is like a no FOMO place. Whereas like, I think most venture firms are like FOMO central.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, we just, we don't do the momentum hype chasing.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  So are you guys never like, ah, we passed on that round and now Sequoia is doing, like, does that conversation just never happen here?

• 45:30Speaker 00

  Basically never.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  If somebody that you're pissed at them.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  I mean, there have been cases where it's like your anti-portfolio or whatever, like, I met with this company and I wish I had invested. But like, that actually happens very rarely. There's not a whole lot of cases where we feel a lot of regret about.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it like requires a whole lot of like different mindsets than in general. Like, I feel like, you know, just from talking to you, I can tell you also are not thinking in categories. Whereas like, most people are like, oh, that's a great category. Seems like you don't think that way at all.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  No, I don't think categories should exist. It's like, once a category exists, it's too late. If you're a social media investor and didn't invest in Facebook, probably lost money. If you're a space investor and you didn't invest in SpaceX, probably lost money. You know, you want to be in the first deal, not in the second, third, fourth one.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Can you build contrarianism or is all you can do shut off the mimesis?

• 46:12Speaker 00

  It's not even necessarily shutting off mimesis. It's more like being aware of mimesis is the important thing. We always ask founders what the origin story for the business is. Like, that's like a really important indicator of memetic kind of rivalry. It's like someone, they should have a reason for why they started the business.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  What does that story look like when it's good?

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Well, at a minimum, it's a story. You'd be surprised. Maybe you wouldn't. You've done this as well. Usually there's not even a story. People are like, well, I was, my business school classmate, nah, we really wanted to found a company. And we did 100 interviews and this is the thing that we thought would be the fastest.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Those ever been?

• 46:49Speaker 00

  I mean, there's probably some examples in the course of history.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  I heard that Travis did whiteboard his way to Uber. I don't know if that's true or not. I think I heard that.

• 46:57Speaker 00

  And maybe this is a great.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Maybe there's one.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a great exception to the rule. But um, but I think generally speaking, the best companies have incredible stories.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  Just trying to figure that out is like kind of a quick and easy cheat code. For avoiding that.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  If you're meeting a founder, is that like the is that like the main thing you're trying to do?

• 47:14Speaker 00

  I mean, it's the first question I always ask. It's like, tell me about yourself and the origin story of the business. And then everything else flows from there.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe that's like a good segue into like the last thing I want to talk about, which is just like a little bit of like your own story and just like getting into like you as a person a little bit. One of the things I really appreciate is like that you've been talking about like your like religious faith for like a long time. And I think that's been something that like, I think probably a lot of people in tech, obviously by the numbers, a lot have. Not many people talk about it, or at least they haven't in the past. So like, why is it something that you've wanted to talk about?

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Well, I think like the kind of weird thing about this is that I haven't been super intentional about it. It just so happens to come up all the time and I'm not afraid to talk about it.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  And then it turns out that like a lot of people resonate with it because a lot of people.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then it comes up in conversation. There's been an interesting kind of shift that we've seen over the last 10 years, but really even since COVID. Where you're starting to see this sort of theological revival with people being much more interested in kind of traditional faith. I think part of that might just be like, you know, we went through this decade plus of like Burning Man spiritual kind of stuff, like Eastern mysticism. And a lot of people came out of that being like, man, I've done like 12 ayahuasca journeys and I still have a sense of emptiness.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  There's something about like the rootedness of like Judeo-Christian kind of beliefs that are really interesting to the current moment for one reason or another. And so I find that there are a lot of people that just come up to me and ask like, I heard that you're a Christian. Can you explain this to me? You know, a lot of people. Traditionally in Silicon Valley, think of Christians as sort of these backwards, anti-intellectuals or something. And then they find out that, you know, me or Peter or, you know, someone that they otherwise respect intellectually is a Christian. And they're like, okay, this doesn't make any sense. I'm just curious. Like, let's talk about it. And so it ends up coming up all the time, which is fine.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  It's actually, it's interesting you say that, because like, you know, you said you do a Christian, then for some reason, I'm like, I'm Jewish. For some reason, I feel like Judaism doesn't get that reaction from people of the like, oh, is this like some backwards thing? Even though like, there, there's a lot in, you know, it's both the Bible and everything like that. What is that? What do you think it is that has like, is that schism to do with the fact that like, are the beliefs in Christianity like a bit more concrete in a certain way than, you know, in Judaism, they're a bit more like floaty or something?

• 49:38Speaker 00

  Well, I think that there's probably much more of a cultural kind of part to Judaism that feels like less tethered to the theology, whereas like, that doesn't exist so much, especially like in, you know, coastal America, like maybe in the Midwest or the South, there's like more of a cultural Christian expectation. But, you know, if you're in tech in San Francisco, you have to actually believe in order to be outwardly talking about this stuff.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  I think that's probably one difference. Maybe another difference is that like, you know, we have less of an experience in the United States of Orthodox Judaism than maybe they do in Israel. But we have much more of an experience with Orthodox Christianity. And so we have more of like a cultural societal kind of debate about the topics that, that exist. I'm sure if there were as many Orthodox Jews in America as there are Orthodox Christians, you would have a similar level of debate about the, the topics.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  I wonder if like Christianity somehow like ties in with the way that you think about your work at Andro. Like, I would imagine that there's actually like quite a lot in terms of the way you'd think about like morality and what makes, you know, for like a just fight or not, and, you know, how to think about people's lives and the stack rank of ethics and things like that.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  Well, the entirety of just war tradition, which is like the the root of the Western law of war, like treaties, like all of this stuff is rooted in just war theory, which is a tradition started by St. Augustine. It was all Christian intellectual thought from the very beginning. We benefit a lot from the impact of Christianity on the development of the West. And so, yeah, I think that informs a lot of it. That said, there's also a lot of debate theologically about these things inside of Christian circles, you know, like St. Augustine, Martin Luther disagreed on a bunch of different stuff. And so I think the robustness of the tradition enables us to engage in, you know, really, you know,

• 51:41Speaker 00

  clarifying ways about how we reach the beliefs that we have about the importance of protecting people who can't protect themselves and how you think about, you know, avoiding civilian casualties, how you think about the quality of persons. This is all Christian thought totally.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  It's funny because it's like, you know, if you if you want to not grapple with some framework for morality and some sort of way to think about like defense, you might feel good sort of avoiding those topics, but then you end up in a place you don't want to be, I think.

• 52:09Speaker 00

  Unless you live in a society with a strong monopoly on violence where you don't have to think about these things because someone else has done it for you.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll end it there. Trey, thanks a bunch for doing this. I really enjoyed it.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  Great. Thanks, Jack. Appreciate it.