00:05:36 · Trae Stephens
[00:05:36] S0: Well, I think I I think there's, like, a a corollary to venture capital here that's probably worth mentioning and quick passing. Please. Please. Yeah. Which is that people believe that there's some, like, KPIs or something that VCs are looking for. And that, you know, when you ask, like, what... How do you know that, like, this founder is gonna be a great founder? How do you know that this company idea is going to be a great company idea? And I think people are really desperate for the insight. And the reality is it's actually really obvious most of the time. And if you're just being honest, within five minutes, you can usually tell, like, Okay, this person is insane. Like, I obviously want to have like a ten year relationship going on with this person. And 95 of the time, you know, you meet with a company, and you're like, oh my gosh, this is not it. Like, I'm not I'm not gonna do this. Now there's like the mean way of handling that where people are like, I'm gonna pass in the meeting. And I try not to do that because I I I think people have passion and you wanna like be respectful to that and be helpful if you can. But I think it's the same thing in in recruiting for hiring. You know, in the government, the... A typical meeting is basically like 20 people come into a room. You have like the 10 people sitting at the rolling chairs around the table, and then you have the 10 people sitting along the back benches in the chairs that don't roll, if you've been in a room like this. And the people in the chairs that don't roll are junior and usually incredibly ambitious with ideas and opinions. And the people in the rolling chairs are focused on not breaking any rules. They're the ones that are saying like, let's go around and introduce ourselves. And it's like, my name is John. I've been here ten years. Here are the projects that I've worked on. Thank you for convening this conversation. It's really important that we have this this discussion. Here's the agenda. At the end of the meeting, I want to like requisition a white paper. And then you move on to the next person, they do the same thing. Hour long meeting, forty minutes in, the rolling chair people are still introducing each other. And the last twenty minutes, it's just like this mad rush to like, Okay, now what are like, is the white paper that we need to write?
00:07:47 · Trae Stephens
And that was infuriating for 23 year old Trae. I couldn't do. I couldn't do that. And so going into Palantir, I was I'd be chatting with someone, they'd be like, Okay, you have to see this. And they would go over. They'd open up their IDE. They would show me something. They would make a change. They would launch it in the product. They would show me, like, how this thing worked in the product and how we were thinking about changing it. And it was just that for an entire day. And I'm like, oh my gosh, these people, like, they do things. Like, they're literally just doing the things that they're talking about. And then having this conversation with Doctor. Karp, who's... Was clearly insane. Like, I love him, but he... I mean, he's a he's a wacky dude. He's a wacky dude. I was just like, you know, totally blown away by this idea that there are these band of renegades, sort of like the rebel alliance in Star Wars, that they're just fully committed to breaking the bureaucracy. And I... After spending two and a half years working in the government, I believed nothing more than that the bureaucracy needed to be broken.
00:08:49 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:08:49] S1: Yeah. Very interesting... Actually, I didn't realize that you were at Palantir in 2007. I have an interesting story, which is that in that time period, Facebook was scattered through a bunch of different offices in Downtown Palo Alto. And we would keep on, like, getting new office space and then kinda growing out of it. But then I got introduced to this guy from Palantir, Aki. And so Aki's strategy was basically like, I don't need to look for office space. I'm just gonna find somebody from Facebook. And as they keep on vacating office space, I will keep on kicking it. And so Aki and I would meet every three months. He's like, hey. Do you have any office space for me? I'm like, yeah. This is the one we're gonna be leaving soon. And he would just end up taking. He's a great guy.
00:09:28 · Trae Stephens, Aditya Agarwal
[00:09:28] S0: Well, you know, the the beautiful thing about that story actually is that Aki was the CTO Yeah. At the time. Yeah. And I think that the reason this is relevant in the context of hiring is that when you're building a startup, you have this idea, I think, that you should hire people for the specific skills or whatever. And the reality is no one at Palantir ended up doing the thing that they were hired to do. Like, did a lot of things. Like, did he write code? Yeah. Sure. Everyone was writing code. You know, I started writing code at Palantir too. And then in the first three weeks, I was dinking around with like an extra... A training exercise onboarding during onboarding. It's funny how, like, these people have come around to do crazy stuff. So Bob McGrew was the head of engineering. [00:10:09] S1: Yeah. Bob was here just a few months ago. [00:10:11] S0: Yeah. Bob is the... He was the head of research at OpenAI, and then he recently just started a company called Arda that's doing manufacturing automation. [00:10:19] S1: Think I they just kind of did a huge public thing today.
00:10:19 · Aditya Agarwal, Trae Stephens
[00:10:19] S1: Think I they just kind of did a huge public thing today. [00:10:22] S0: Yeah. They yesterday. They just launched publicly The actually on Monday. But yeah, this week. But Bob, who I never met before, walked up behind me. And he was like, hi, I'm Bob. Who are you? And I was like, Trae. And he's like, never touch my code base ever again. Your code is garbage. And I just kind of laughed. And within a week, I was running sales, which is exactly what I should have been doing, actually. Because a top 5% engineer working in the intelligence community is like a bottom 5% engineer working on a software company in Silicon Valley. So I think it's like that... Having that flexibility and awareness of how skills align was like a driving force at Palantir that worked for us really well.
00:11:11 · Aditya Agarwal, Trae Stephens
[00:11:11] S1: Yeah. One thing based on kind of the slight tangent that you took earlier that I wanna mention, I think this is really important advice for founders in this room, which is the longer your diligence process drags on with a venture capital firm, the less likely they are to invest. Right? I think that oftentimes founders think that it is an indication of a lot of interest when people take the fifth or the sixth meeting. It's actually a case of, like, they are struggling to find a reason to kind of invest because they generally know in the beginning. They generally know pretty quickly whether they love it or not. So, anyways, coming back to to your story, Trae here. Okay. So you were at Palantir for six years? Six years. Six years. That's right. And then you make your way over to Founders Fund. What made you transition kind of, like, from being an operator to kind of an investor? You did just kind of, like, hey. You wanted to work with Peter Thiel. Like, what was... Was there some underlying motivation or kind of thought process there? Or was it again, like, listen, went in, loved the team, loved the mission, and I kinda knew it within ten or fifteen minutes? [00:12:11] S0: Not at all. So, yeah, I was kind of laughing internally when you opened this up by saying that I had this very successful trajectory of good decisions. That was not the case at all. I was at Palantir, as I said, like kind of running the sales side of the business really for most of the time that I was there. It was really hard. Like, I I can't even begin to explain how hard it was.