Trae (Trey) Stephens

I was there for six years.

Six years?

Yep.

Why did you leave?

Most of the time that I was there, I was working with Sham Sankar, who you know, trying to figure out how to make the business development engine work.

The kind of unfortunate reality is that I showed up and I was the least talented person technically, but the least awkward socially.

And so what do you do?

Well, I got put in charge of sales.

And so, Shyam and I were kind of tasked with figuring this out.

Really everything I know about this space I learned from Dr. Karp, the CEO, and Shyam as we were kind of trying to figure it out together.

It took us years to break through the ceiling of how do you sell really complicated software to the US government?

And at the end of that, call it five and a half year period, I was feeling pretty burned out.

But over the time that I had been there, I got to be friends with Peter Thiel, who is the founder of PayPal, the co-founder of Palantir.

And Peter just out of the blue asked me if I would come join him at Founders Fund.

So not having any interest in venture capital or frankly knowing anything about finance, I kind of jumped ship and joined Peter in San Francisco.

Yeah, I mean, the reality is, is like the idea behind Palantir was that there shouldn't be a trade-off.

between doing your job well and like protecting privacy and civil liberties.

That's like the entire founding story of the company is that for anyone with a brain that has an engineering background, you don't believe you have to make that choice.

That's a false choice.

We can do both of these things.