Voice
Trae Stephens
Partner & Co-founder · Founders Fund, Anduril · site
Partner at Founders Fund. Co-founder and executive chairman of Anduril. Co-author (with Markie Wagner) of "Choose Good Quests," the essay that named the "hard / good" quadrant of quests humanity structurally underfunds.
Key writings
Positions on problems
“A good quest makes the future better than our world today. A bad quest doesn’t improve the world much at all, or makes it worse.”
Energy abundance, specifically fusion, geothermal, and next-gen fission, is a canonical hard/good quest that markets structurally underfund.
Bio-manufacturing and biosecurity are named hard-quest categories in the Founders Fund thesis and deserve high-agency builders.
Low-labor, low-cost construction and new transportation modes are listed explicitly as underfunded good quests.
Human lifespan extension is on the canonical list of "good quests that require massively leveled heroes."