Trae (Trey) Stephens

That was not

a part of my plan.

I actually thought I was going to be a journalist when I was in high school.

Senior year comes around, September 11th happens, and I had this kind of watershed moment where I was always patriotic, but I never thought of it as something that I wanted to do as a vocation.

And everything just changed on that day, and I decided that I wanted to go into service for the country.

and went down the closest path I could find to working in intelligence.

you know, saw a demo of Palantir in my first job in the intelligence community, got into kind of a battle internally about using Palantir, got denied, and then jumped ship really early on and joined Palantir before we had any revenue, really any users.

And the rest is history, and I've been in tech since.

Can we go back to your time in intelligence?

Absolutely, yeah.

What kind of stuff were you doing?

I was working on counterterrorism, primarily on computational linguistics around Arabic name matching.

So in college, I was a Middle Eastern studies major, so learned Arabic, studied abroad in Egypt.

And the intersection of people who could write code and could speak Arabic was very, very small.

I'll bet.

The most common name in the English language is John.

It's like 3% of English-speaking men are named John, first or middle name.

Obviously, in Arabic, over 30% of men are Muhammad.

And it's spelled a million different ways.

I mean, you could, in a transliterated sense, M-O-H-A-M-E-D, M-U-H-A-M-M-A-D.