The Unconventional Rise of Trae Stephens: From Uninvited Georgetown Applicant to $14B Defense Tech Founder

Trae Stephens’ life story reads like the opening act of a best-selling spy thriller. Fueled by the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, a teenage Stephens made a promise to himself: he would build a career dedicated to defending the United States. He applied to universities with programs tailored to prepare him for that mission, but no school bit on a kid from a working-poor small town in Ohio.

Undeterred, he showed up unannounced in Washington, D.C., walked straight into Georgetown University’s admissions office, and talked his way into the School of Foreign Service, where he studied Arabic alongside other coursework. After graduation, he joined a U.S. intelligence agency (he still cannot disclose which one), working as a computational linguist to conduct desk-based counterterrorism work. It did not take long, though, for him to grow frustrated by bureaucratic red tape and the agency’s woefully outdated tech infrastructure.

But Stephens’ path diverges from the typical gun-toting, martial arts-trained secret agent trope. During his tenure at the unnamed agency, he connected with leaders from Palantir, the Silicon Valley startup built to win government contracts through advanced deep data mining. Stephens joined the team, and a few years in, Founders Fund—Palantir’s backing venture capital firm—offered him a spot on its investment team. That put him right at the center of Silicon Valley’s emerging push to build and sell military and data science technology to the U.S. government, where he reports directly to Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s most prominent conservative figure.

When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Thiel—an early open supporter of Trump—gained access to the incoming administration, and Stephens ended up leading the Defense Department’s Trump transition team. That experience set the stage for him to co-found Anduril, a defense contractor broadly seen as a sister firm to Palantir, which integrates artificial intelligence and mixed reality into national defense technology. His key co-founder was VR pioneer Palmer Luckey.

Anduril first made its name building “smart battlefield” systems, before expanding into weaponry, including autonomous fighter jets and combat-ready submarine drones. Most recently, Stephens launched a far less lethal side venture: a hardware startup called Sol, which sells a $350 wearable e-reader.

If Trump wins a second term in 2024, Stephens could be headed back to a senior role in D.C. But regardless of the election outcome, Stephens has carved out a one-of-a-kind niche: a tech venture capitalist and founder with real intelligence community credentials, a devout conservative Christian who speaks openly about his values without dismissing others. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss Silicon Valley’s newly warm relationship with the U.S. military, the ethical boundaries of AI in weapons, Stephens’ striking personal parallels to Trump’s vice presidential nominee JD Vance, and why he built a survival bunker on his property.

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Steven Levy: Anduril is barely seven years old, it already has 3,000 employees, a $14 billion valuation, and has secured billions of dollars in defense contracts. That growth trajectory is extremely unusual for the sector. Did you anticipate growing this fast?

Trae Stephens: Things are moving far faster than we ever projected. At Founders Fund, we’d gotten used to the timeline of companies like SpaceX and Palantir, where it takes years to notch early wins. That’s just par for the course when working with the U.S. government. But at Anduril, we moved into a congressionally budgeted program in just three years — that’s the fastest that’s happened since the Korean War. We’re way ahead of our original plan.

Why do you think that is?

We didn’t have to relearn all the hard lessons the hard way. When I worked in sales at Palantir, we made a lot of missteps.

Can you give an example?

There are so many. A common myth in the space is that you should focus 100% on your product, build it, and customers will come, just like the Field of Dreams trope. So you pitch directly to end users in the field, and don’t pay much mind to the congressional appropriators, agency leadership, and mid-level bureaucrats who actually approve spending. At Palantir, it took us far longer than it should have to learn we needed to engage every single one of these stakeholder groups. It even took us forever to hire lobbyists. At Anduril, we did that in our first week.

There’s also this funny wrong idea that you should subcontract through the big established defense primes — Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, all of those firms — because they’ll help you get access to their contracts. That almost never works. Another myth is that you need an advisory board full of retired generals and former government officials to guide you through the process. The truth is, most of them have never actually navigated this modern startup path either.**

When Anduril launched, working on defense tech was a turnoff for many Silicon Valley engineers. Is that stigma still a problem today?

The era of cheap, easy startup funding is over, and global geopolitical realities have sunk in for most people. When people look at what’s happening in Ukraine, in Israel, or the rising threat of conflict over Taiwan, many are saying, “I want to spend my career working on things that actually make a difference for humanity.” That doesn’t always mean defense, but defense does tackle some of the hardest, most meaningful tech problems out there. And you’re starting to see investors get more comfortable taking risks that would have been unthinkable back in 2017.

You still face pushback from left-leaning groups and engineers, right?

It’s not the broader left — it’s a tiny fringe minority. In 2024, it’s much harder to mount a reasoned, thoughtful opposition to defense tech than it was in 2017, and that’s made it much easier for us to share our mission and recruit and keep great engineers.

Anduril just closed a $1.5 billion funding round to build a 5-million-square-foot “hyperscale” factory that will produce thousands of relatively low-cost autonomous weapons. Is this actually necessary?

In the late Cold War and after, the U.S. shifted to a military posture focused on small numbers of extremely expensive, cutting-edge weapons systems. Think fifth-generation fighter jets, aircraft carriers, and missiles that cost millions of dollars every time you fire one. That model worked when we had an overwhelming military lead and were deterring large-scale conflict. That’s not the world we live in anymore. In Ukraine, we’re draining entire weapons stockpiles far faster than we can replenish them. We need a supply chain that lets us ramp up production of affordable core systems, so that if we ever end up in a large-scale conflict, we can get weapons to the front line quickly without draining our existing inventories.

If the U.S. churns out thousands of your autonomous fighter jets, won’t that make diplomacy less likely? Won’t we be more quick to use them and end up in more conflicts?

That runs counter to the core principles of just war theory, which lays out when war can be considered morally justified. We need to maintain enough of a military advantage that other countries aren’t tempted to use force against us or our allies. A strong U.S. military makes potential aggressors think twice about starting conflict in the first place.

When I wrote about Anduril in 2018, the company explicitly said it would never build lethal weapons. Now you’re producing fighter jets, underwater drones, and other deadly weapons. Why the shift?

We adapted to the realities we saw, both within the U.S. military and across the globe. We want to deliver the most capable defense technology in the most ethical way possible. The alternative isn’t that this technology doesn’t get built — someone else will build it anyway. We believe we can do it better and more ethically than anyone else.

Did you have major internal soul-searching before crossing that line into lethal weapons?

We have constant internal conversations about what we build, and whether every project aligns ethically with our mission. But I don’t see much point in us drawing our own arbitrary line when the U.S. government — elected by the public — already sets that line. They’ve given clear guidance on what the military needs. We follow the lead of our democratically elected government, addressing their priorities and supporting their mission.

What do you see as the appropriate role for autonomous AI in warfare?

Luckily, the U.S. Department of Defense has done more work on this question than almost any other organization on the planet, outside of the big generative AI foundational model companies. There are clear rules of engagement that require a human to stay in the decision-making loop. The goal is to take humans out of the dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs, make decision-making more efficient, while always keeping a human accountable for final calls. That’s the core of all existing U.S. policy on this, and that will stay the case no matter how autonomous technology develops over the next five to 10 years.

There’s a concern that in the middle of a conflict, when a target pops up in an instant, leaders won’t wait for human input — especially with autonomous weapons like your fighter jets. What do you say to that?

The autonomous program we’re working on for the Fury aircraft, used by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, is called CCA, or Collaborative Combat Aircraft. There is always a human pilot in a manned aircraft controlling and commanding the autonomous fighter jets, and making the final call on what targets they engage.

What about the loitering drones you build that circle in the air waiting for a target before attacking?

Loiter munitions, as they’re classified, are aircraft that search for targets and then engage them kinetically, like a kamikaze. Even with these, a human is always in the loop and accountable for the final decision to strike.

War is chaotic. Is there a real risk these principles get thrown out the window once fighting starts?

Humans fight wars, and humans are flawed. We make mistakes. Even back when armies lined up and shot each other with muskets, there was a process to hold people accountable for breaking the rules of war. That won’t change. Do I think there will never be a case where an autonomous system is used for something that looks like a gross violation of ethical rules? Of course there might be — because humans are still in charge. But do I believe it’s more ethical to fight a dangerous, messy conflict with robots that are more precise, more discriminating, and less likely to lead to unnecessary escalation? Absolutely. Choosing not to build this technology just means we keep putting more human soldiers in harm’s way.

You’ve surely read Eisenhower’s farewell address warning about the dangers of a self-serving military-industrial complex. Does that warning shape how Anduril operates?

That’s one of the greatest speeches ever written — I read it at least once a year. Eisenhower was warning about a military-industrial complex where the government and big contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics are almost indistinguishable. There’s a revolving door between senior roles in government and these firms, and they become concentrated power centers through that interconnectedness. Anduril has pushed for a far more commercial approach that doesn’t rely on that tightly linked incentive structure. We build things as cheaply as possible, use off-the-shelf commercial technology, and we take on most of the risk ourselves. That avoids a lot of the tension Eisenhower warned about.

You led the Trump Defense Department transition, and Founders Fund has long been aligned with the former president. Are you supporting Trump in 2024?

I think Trump, like every candidate, has flaws, and I’ve never been especially enthusiastic about his candidacy. For me, it comes down to a framework I think of as four quadrants: feels-good-and-is-good, feels-bad-and-is-bad, feels-bad-but-is-good, and feels-good-but-is-bad. We all agree we want the first and don’t want the second. The other two are messy. The feels-good-but-is-bad quadrant is a lot like hedonism —

Are you putting Kamala Harris in that feels-good-but-is-bad quadrant?

You’ll see where I’m going with this. On the other side, you have the feels-bad-but-is-good quadrant. Law enforcement and defense fit right in here. Historically, Republicans’ flaw is that they talk about these issues in an unnecessarily cruel way. But with Republicans, we’re far more likely to get a government that does the right thing, even when it’s unpopular and doesn’t feel good. That’s the core reason I consider myself center-right: on the left, far too much decision-making is driven by emotion rather than principle.

So that’s a yes — you’re voting for Trump and the Republican ticket this year?

I’m generally center-right, and I don’t see any reason to pretend otherwise at this point.

Would you serve in a second Trump administration?

The timing isn’t right right now — I’m deeply committed to Anduril’s mission. That said, I do think it’s important for people from private industry to step up and work on public service projects, and I hope I’ll get the chance to go back and serve the government and the American people at some point.

Another confirmation. You ran in the same VC circles as JD Vance. What’s your relationship with him?

JD is an incredibly thoughtful person. We have really similar biographies: our hometowns are right next to each other in Ohio’s Warren County. We share a similar family history: our families moved from Appalachia into Ohio’s steel region, then the steel mills left. I don’t think you ever agree 100% with any political candidate, but broadly speaking, I think it’s so important that smart people from the private sector are willing to serve the country in public office, and I’m glad JD is doing that.

Not everyone is happy about it — he’s taken a lot of heat for his views and his perceived flip-flops.

The state of political discourse in America is pathetic. Almost all of the stuff people are attacking JD for are just memes and made-up stories. People throw around lazy comments about him being weird. This is terrible for our country. I want real debate about policy, and I don’t think we’re able to do that anymore. I’m deeply concerned for the future of American democracy.

A lot of observers argue that most of the name-calling these days comes from the right. What do you say?

It happens on both sides. There is no real political discourse left anymore, just emotional rabble-rousing on both sides.

OK, let’s shift to Founders Fund. As a top partner, are you still involved in portfolio companies like Palantir?

Yes, day to day, I work across our entire portfolio of companies. One thing I love about Founders Fund is that we’re a debate-driven organization. We encourage people to disagree with each other, and we believe disagreement and open dialog lead to better decisions.

You also co-founded a consumer tech company called Sol, which makes a reading device you wear like glasses. How did that come about?

I was talking to Palmer [Luckey] about the future of AR and VR, and he said we’ve hit a physical limit right now for really high brightness, resolution, and long battery life — those things just aren’t possible yet for full AR headsets. I told him I just wanted something I could wear like sunglasses when I’m lying on the beach or in bed, that lets me read without holding a book or a Kindle. He laughed and said, “Oh, you can actually make that.” So I worked with a close friend to build a wearable e-reader. It’s still very early, we’re still running marketing tests, but you can already buy one on our website right now.

How many books have you read on your own device so far?

Probably 20 or 25.

Founders Fund has close ties to Elon Musk, and holds big stakes in his companies: SpaceX, Neuralink, even the Boring Company. Has anything happened recently that shaken your confidence in him?

No. The one unbreakable rule in venture capital is never bet against Elon Musk. He’s entitled to his own personal beliefs, and SpaceX, Neuralink, and the Boring Company are all performing extremely well.

To many people, your Founders Fund boss Peter Thiel is painted as Silicon Valley’s equivalent of a James Bond villain. What do people get wrong about him?

There’s this weird myth that he’s some kind of conservative godfather who calls all the shots, and that’s not true at all from what I’ve seen. He doesn’t surround himself with yes-men — he surrounds himself with people who challenge him intellectually and push him to make better decisions.

You’re very open about your Christian faith. Do you think Silicon Valley is intolerant of evangelical Christianity?

Generally speaking, people in tech are very smart and intellectually curious. When they find out that someone they respect intellectually is a Christian, they usually want to learn more and understand. A few weeks ago, I gave a talk about tech and Christianity in downtown San Francisco, and the room was completely packed.

Do you think Jesus would have approved of venture capitalists?

I don’t think Jesus cares about what class of person you are. He cares about you as an individual.

I meant what venture capitalists do for work.

My favorite story in the Gospels is the rich young ruler who came to Jesus and asked, “What do I need to do to get eternal life, to get salvation?” Jesus told him, “Sell all your possessions, give the money to the poor, and follow me.” Jesus was saying this man was good, but he worshipped money, and he needed to turn away from that idol to get God’s wisdom and blessing. A lot of what venture capitalists do aligns directly with creating abundance and improving humanity’s lot. But there’s also a lot of ego and greed in the space. If people want to live a joyful, abundant life, they need to turn away from those things and embrace a better path.

Does that ethic show up at Founders Fund?

**We care deeply about getting the right team together. Peter is committed to the idea of creating abundance for people. That’s the whole idea behind Founders Fund’s famous manifesto: we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. Peter gives a ton of money to fund biotech research, the longevity movement, all kinds of projects like that. We believe individual people move the needle — actual people, not companies, not systems, not organizations. That’s why we’re called Founders Fund: everything