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."
AGI is named on the good-quest list. Hard-tech builders, not only researchers, need to be at the center of the safety conversation.