Founders Fund requires production usage before writing concentrated GovTech checks
Trae Stephens · Trae Stephens talks Flock Safety, Anduril, and American Dynamism. · Mar 15, 2025 · at 5:13
Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens discloses the firm's investment strategy and underwriting criteria for GovTech companies.
0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 17.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Now, what that means for founders fund, practically speaking, and gov tech is that we tend to want to write more concentrated checks. Once you see production usage of the technology working because it demonstrates that the founder has figured out how to get that those sales done in the products into any usage in the field.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Trae Stephens
Wealthy founders retiring into passive angel investing is a moral failure
“And they've taken, like, the route of Big Head in Silicon Valley, the HBO show, where they're just kind of, like, resting, investing, just kind of chilling out, making lifestyle decisions while writing angel checks. And that feels like a real moral failure of …”
OnlyFans, online gambling, and dating apps harm society despite feeling good
“Only fans you know, gambling, I think falls in the feels good is bad camp. This is like society has somehow managed to convince ourselves that there's some like freedom of expression or something like that that should be protected. And I agree, like freedom of…”
Authoritarian regimes hold a massive advantage by conscripting elite engineering talent
“They have a massive advantage against democratic governments because they can mandatorily conscript their most talented people into working on the society on society's greatest problems.”
Anduril targets tech-heavy, sales-poor defense startups for M&A acquisitions
“I won't say publicly on the Technology Bros podcast that we want cool technology companies to fail because they're bad at business development. But those do present interesting opportunities for us from an M&A perspective, for sure.”
Microsoft is much more willing to support US defense than other tech giants
“They, as you said, they have been much more willing than the other big tech companies to think of themselves as an American company, which is incredibly important and also be willing to work with the government on programs where, you know, there's potentially …”
Two years of mandatory civil service would reduce America's ideological tribalism
“To get our best and brightest kind of in the way that Israel does to do two years of civil service coming out of high school. I think that would do a couple of things. First, it would actually, like, give us the people that we need to execute on national prior…”