Trae (Trey) Stephens

And so kind of grew up playing in the creek and hanging out in the woods, building tree houses with my brother.

Also, I played basketball, ran cross country, played Ultimate Frisbee in high school.

That's the only thing that I carried over to my college experience from the athletics perspective.

And we were super active in our church.

My grandfather was the pastor of our church growing up.

So we were really active in the community there as well.

Yeah, I mean, I was a bit of a nerd, no doubt about it.

Public school was an interesting experience.

I didn't, as you said, I grew up in a blue collar family.

It's not like I was going to a fancy private school with a bunch of hard charging, aspirational people.

And at times that was sort of frustrating because you can kind of get stuck in the rut of feeling like everyone's just goofing off and you're just trying to get through school.

But

I graduated top of my class, got great test scores, and then got rejected everywhere that I applied to college.

This is the lesson of some of what JD talked about in Hillbilly Elegy.

I was always interested in tech.

My mom's brothers were really into IT growing up.

And so my uncles hung out with my brother and I, and we built our first 486 computer together, like went to Micro Center Mall and picked up the motherboard.

Right on.

Yeah, we kind of built that.

Always was really interested in it, but had no interest in going into tech.