Trae Stephens – Venture Capital

Trae Stephens is a partner at Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm with a portfolio that includes Airbnb, SpaceX, and Palantir. Trae is also a co-founder of Anduril Industries, a rapidly growing US defense technology company with over 350 employees, and a valuation of $1.9 billion.

Trae opens up on growing up in rural Ohio with a grandfather who was the pastor of his church. He shares how he had the opportunity to travel to the Middle East on an overseas mission trip, what it was like to be the editor-in-chief of his high school newspaper, and how the events of 9/11 prompted him to pursue a different career path— one that may not have panned out without bold steps and prayerful intervention of getting on the waitlist at Georgetown University.

Upon graduating in 2005, Trae secured a data analytics role in the US Intelligence community, working on identifying and tracing intelligence to terrorists’ activities. But despite getting into what he wanted to do after high school, Trae could not bear the bureaucracy within government, and in 2008, started working at a big data start-up Palantir Technologies as one of its early employees. Palantir (NYSE: PLTR) now valued at more than $45 billion was co-founded by Peter Thiel.

While Trae was at Palantir, he came to know Peter Thiel, who was known to be the first investor in Facebook and one of the co-founders of PayPal. And through this connection, Trae was able to pivot into venture capital in 2014, and also merge his expertise of defense technology with investments. At Founders Fund, Trae saw the opportunity to start the next big unicorn in defense technology. In 2017, Trae partnered with Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus, to start Anduril Industries, a company building advanced technologies to solve some of the most important and complex national security challenges.

Read more on Trae’s perspective on ethical warfare: The Ethics of Defense Technology Development: An Investor’s Perspective 

While Trae has done exceptionally well in his career, he continues to share how his faith has shaped the way he thinks about his work and his successes so far. Listen to Trae’s incredible story on this podcast.

 

Special thanks for this episode: Trae and Michelle Stephens, Elena Cladianos, Jennifer Lazala