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b'My guest this week is Trae Stephens. Trae is a partner at Founders Fund and co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril. Trae\\u2019s philosophy can be boiled down to finding good quests, which has led him to investing in businesses that work closely with the government on societally important issues. Clearly, that extends to co-founding Anduril and I would highly recommend listening to my Business Breakdowns episode on Anduril if you haven\\u2019t already. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of lobbyists, why the high-tech defense firms of the past became stale, and how he hunts for disagreeableness in founders. Please enjoy my conversation with Trae Stephens.\\n\\xa0\\nFor the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.\\n\\xa0\\nListen to Founders Podcast\\nFounders Episode 136 - Estee Lauder\\nFounders Episode 288 - Ralph Lauren\\n\\xa0\\n-----\\n\\xa0\\nThis episode is brought to you by Tegus, the modern research platform for leading investors. Whether it\\u2019s quantitative analysis, company disclosures, management presentations, earnings calls - Tegus has tools for every step of your investment research. They even have over 4000 fully driveable financial models. Tegus\\u2019 maniacal focus on quality, as well as its depth, breadth and recency of content makes it the one-stop, end-to-end research platform for investors. Move faster, gather deep research to build conviction and surface high-quality, alpha-driving insights to find your differentiated edge with Tegus. As a listener, you can take the Tegus platform for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick.\\n\\xa0\\n-----\\n\\xa0\\nInvest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\nStay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.\\n\\xa0\\nFollow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus\\n\\xa0\\nShow Notes\\n[00:03:17] - [First question] - Why Trae thinks most high-margin businesses are bad for society\\n[00:04:28] - What would he change to impact energy technology most if he were in charge\\n[00:06:18] - His investing focus on dynamism and mission-driven tech companies\\n[00:09:42] - Analyzing why relatively few people strive to make society-level advancements\\n[00:11:35] - What he\\u2019s done as a parent to enable his kids to develop passions\\n[00:12:41] - The most noteworthy adventures in his career\\n[00:14:41] - Founding Anduril and what it taught him about the tech industry\\n[00:18:40] - The cutting-edge of defense technologies today\\n[00:21:29] - What Shyam Sankar of Palantir taught him about defense tech\\n[00:23:34] - Why some of the biggest defense tech companies have stopped innovating\\n[00:28:29] - What he and Anduril have learned about sales and scaling in the public sector\\n[00:35:22] - His take on Peter Thiel\\u2019s notion that competition should be avoided\\n[00:38:24] - The importance of being psychologically disagreeable when building a start-up\\n[00:39:54] - The origin story that stands out the most from companies he has interviewed\\n[00:41:12] - How he developed an investor mindset on his unorthodox path to the venture world\\n[00:43:57] - What he has learned from playing supporting roles and aligning with great leaders\\n[00:46:11] - Important but uncommon lessons about entrepreneurship\\n[00:48:21] - Venture investing lessons he\\u2019s learned from Lauren Gross\\n[00:50:00] - His first VR project and aspirations for the future of VR\\n[00:54:50] - The role of religion and spirituality in his business philosophies\\n[00:59:13] - Why he tries to capitalize on morality as opposed to sin\\n[01:03:57] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him'