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Uncapped #35 | Trae Stephens from Founders Fund

Overview

Shownote

Highlights

Transcript

Chapters

Pins

Uncapped #35 | Trae Stephens from Founders Fund

Uncapped with Jack Altman

2025/12/03
Uncapped with Jack Altman

Uncapped with Jack Altman

2025/12/03
OverviewShownoteHighlightsTranscriptChaptersPins

Shownote

Trae Stephens is a Partner at Founders Fund. He is also Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril, a defense tech company focused on autonomous systems, and Co-founder of Sol, a next generation wearable e-reader. Previously, Trae was an early employee a...

Highlights

In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and advanced technology, the conversation around innovation, ethics, and national defense has never been more critical. This discussion dives into the complex interplay between cutting-edge tech development and the moral responsibilities that come with it, particularly in high-stakes domains like defense and autonomy.
00:35
Many young aspiring founders are doing 'whiteboard founding' with LLM APIs, creating highly competitive consensus categories
07:35
Anduril is in the 'feels bad but is good' quadrant because it serves critical national defense functions.
14:03
Google withdrew from Project Maven due to internal employee backlash over military collaboration.
16:54
Building a 5-million-square-foot manufacturing campus in Ohio
21:07
In defense tech, the product might only account for 30%, unlike 70% in software.
22:30
The era of using large, expensive assets like aircraft carriers for force projection is over due to cost and risk.
27:07
Elon Musk has deep in-depth knowledge of metallurgical materials for SpaceX rockets
33:52
The fund only invests in founder-CEOs and makes pure bets on their vision, even without a working product.
37:34
Kamikaze rounds, where a fund invests heavily at a high valuation, can harm a company's long-term health.
42:51
Fight for pro-rata when a company asks you not to invest.
43:55
The best investments happen before a category exists.
49:57
The just war tradition offers a moral compass for defense innovation.

Chapters

Intro
00:00
Choosing good quests in the AI era
00:35
Ethics behind solving certain problems
07:35
Working with regulators
11:29
What’s left to prove at Anduril
16:54
Anduril, SpaceX, and Tesla at scale
18:32
The future of warfare
22:30
Juggling Anduril and Founders Fund
24:48
A system that rewards going deep
29:07
What’s made Founders Fund great
31:21
The king-making strategy in VC
37:30
Concentrating in the winners
40:26
Where there’s alpha in the market
43:55
Theological revival in traditional faith
47:22

Transcript

Trae Stephens: I always tell defense tech companies this, it's like, this is not the field of dreams. If you build it, they do not come. That's not how it works. Like, if you build a perpetual motion machine, and the point of the perpetual motion machine i...