Trae (Trey) Stephens

And so if you think about the most successful founders of our generation, people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, these are sort of weird people.

You know, they're maybe somewhere on the autism spectrum.

And that kind of acts as their superpower because they're not actually concerned about what other people think about them.

And that ends up being a tremendous unlock.

So we're really looking for people like that, where you meet them and instantly you're like, okay, this person is not just trying to be like a cool kid from their business school class.

There's something else to it.

interesting interesting what are some of the most successful founders that you've invested in who are they i mean founders fund has an incredible track record we were you know the first investor in facebook in spacex um in uh airbnb in uh stripe andrel palantir uh we've been kind of

at the very beginning of most of the last 20 years of technology, which has been really cool to be along for the ride for.

This is, I mean, the history of the PayPal mafia is truly incredible.

Like if you think about this one company ended up kind of seeding either as investor or founder, most of the companies that we think of today as being kind of definitional of the tech success story in America.

And it just all started with, you know, one group of people starting one company.

How did you guys meet?

We were the first institutional investor in Oculus.

So he had started this virtual reality company, ended up getting acquired by Meta for a couple billion dollars.

And I think he was just on this path that he just thought, I'm going to be the VR guy.

That's what I'm going to do for the rest of my life.

But I also knew just from hanging out with him that he was really interested in national security.

In fact, when he was right after Meta was acquired, he moved or got a house in Woodside, which is really close to Facebook's headquarters.

And he drained his swimming pool and he was building a ramjet in his swimming pool in Woodside.

And so he and I had talked about that a couple of times.