Anduril & Founders Fund’s Trae Stephens on Choosing Good Quests in the Age of AI | Ep. 35

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 is, like, powering forward operating bases, you go to the Department of War, and you say, "I have built you a perpetual motion machine, and I will sell it to you for a million dollars." They would, "Okay, we're gonna bid this out to market, and we're gonna give Lockheed Martin a one hundred billion dollar contract [chuckles] to rebuild, from white paper, your perpetual motion machine." That's how it works.

[upbeat music] Trae, I'm really happy to be doing this with you. Thanks for making time for it.

Great to be here.

I wanna start with, uh, you wrote a blog post a couple years ago, I think, Good Hard Quests or good-- Choose Good Quests.

Mm-hmm.

That really stuck with me, and I think in many ways, we're in a moment in time right now where people are sort of grappling with, like, what that means in the world of AI. And I think both because of, like, the technology itself, which, like, creates all these, like, weird, "What does it mean to be human? What part of the experience actually matters?" It, like, creates, like, a lot of odd questions. Then you also get these, like, gold rush dynamics, where, like, money's flowing, and you can start a company quickly, and there's, like, a lot of get-rich-quick ideas. And so I think for a lot of reasons, this blog post is, like, super relevant right now. And I'd just be curious to hear how you think about this concept of, like, choosing good quests, like, when we're in the middle of something like AI.

Yeah, you know, I think the, the distorting characteristics of AI have less to do with the ability to do interesting, hard things, and it has much more to do with how easy it is to do uninteresting, un-hard things. Um, you know, there's the, the constant conversation that comes up about, like, the first company to a billion-dollar valuation with one employee. It is possible to do that, but what that means is that all of these people that are coming out of college or, or that have aspirations to be founders, you know, they're doing like whiteboard founding.

Yeah.

They're walking up to a whiteboard. They're writing down a hundred different ideas. Many of them are just, like, using the, you know-

Yeah

... LLM APIs, uh, to do some highly specific task or something like that, and then as they enter the market, there's, you know, dozens of competitors, and it, it's kind of like a, a battle to the death in, like, a really highly consensus category. And that's kind of what I would say is the opposite of a good quest. Like, going into something because you can, trying to generate wealth as your primary motivation, not super interesting. It's sort of akin to, like, a celebrity starting a tequila company-