Trae (Trey) Stephens

There's all sorts of critiques that you can make that I would critique myself for in the role that I was in at Palantir as well.

Maybe we didn't do a good enough job telling the story.

Maybe we tried to be a little bit too secretive.

Maybe we could have been more out in showing people what it is that we were doing.

Obviously, there's limitations to that working with the intelligence community.

You know, if we hadn't done it, it's not like it wouldn't have happened.

It would have just been done by Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics or Booz Allen Hamilton or Deloitte much less well and with less thought put into the protection of privacy and civil liberties.

So, you know, a lot of this just comes down to storytelling, I think.

Yeah, you know, when Peter first asked me to do it, he asked if I could go and meet up with the leadership of the fund.

And I remember sitting down with Lauren Gross, who's the COO of Founders Fund, and, you know, we're having breakfast together, and she kind of looks at me and she's like...

why are you interested in venture capital?

And I'm like, oh no, you misunderstand.

I'm not.

I'm not interested in venture capital.

I'm doing this because Peter asked me to.

And I can't even imagine what the internal conversations were at Founders Fund coming out of this interview process where people were like, wait a second, this guy doesn't even want to work here.

Why are we interviewing someone that doesn't want a job?

And so, you know, it was kind of a weird, like nine months that I was talking to Founders Fund before- Nine months?

Nine months.

And finally, Peter was just like, no, we're doing this.