Trae (Trey) Stephens

They just talked about local sports teams most of the day.

um and so it was a it was a crazy transition from believing that um you know i i was gonna walk into this incredible tech forward environment and uh it turns out that it like i would do these you know coffee break searches and stuff like that wasn't at all what i expected is that what inspired you to get into defense tech eventually

Yeah, it's really the Palantir story.

Like, you know, finding out that there was, it wasn't that there weren't people that cared about this.

It was that they didn't have a seat at the table.

You know, like, you know, the standard way for getting software tooling historically, or at least post Cold War, has been, you know, you put out

an RFP and all the defense primes, they all bid on it.

They present white papers.

They say how many heads it would take for them to write the code.

And then they get hired on a cost plus basis where they're reimbursed for the hourly labor with some 7% to 12% margin attached to the top of it.

And then they get their

you know, special badges and they walk in every day and they sit at their desks and, you know, they have no incentive to move fast because they get a margin on top of every hour that they work.

And it would be crazy to believe that we're employing our best and brightest in these roles, especially like going into the 2000s, you know, our best and brightest, they can make a lot more money

working at Google, bringing their dog to work, getting free food.

Why are they going to go sit in the concrete basement in the DC area getting crapped on by bureaucrats and just punch card checking in, checking out for work?

And that just seemed like the whole incentive structure was broken.

And so I didn't do it because I was like, man, I really want to be a tech entrepreneur.

I did it because I thought it was the right thing for the country.

At Anduril?

Well, I mean, we have this pitch deck, like a very bad Google Slides deck that we use to recruit our first 12 hires.