Episode 70 - Entrepreneurs Who Create their Own Category with Trae Stephens of Founders Fund
Today’s episode takes us to Silicon Valley to connect with Trae Stephens. You may have seen Trae on CNBC, or you may know him as one of the Partners at Founders Fund. It was an honor to have Trae on to share about his experiences—everything from his time in politics working for Congressmen and in Embassies to now working alongside Peter Thiel. Trae also shares about his life as a Christ-Follower and how it shapes his view of the investing world.
In particular, Trae outlines what it means for an entrepreneur to be an outlier. He describes the difference between business ideas that fit into a certain pre-existing category and those that break every mold out there. He also shares cautionary advice about what not to do as an entrepreneur. His perspective as a venture capitalist is helpful to listen to for both investors and entrepreneurs alike.
But this podcast doesn’t stop there. As you know, we’re always approaching the conversation of entrepreneurship and investing from a faith-driven perspective. Trae is no exception. In this podcast, he talks about the different areas of theology and philosophy that inform his worldview. Specifically, he goes into detail about the innate tendency of all human beings to imitate something or someone. Here, he reminds us specifically of Ephesians 5:1, “Be imitators of God…”
When Trae talks about his relationship with God, you’ll hear both his personal faith journey—what it means to imitate Christ as a venture capitalist and how Silicon Valley opens the door for him to share his faith—and what he thinks about the global Christian movement. He invites listeners to consider what it would look like to be co-creators alongside God, with references to how God and Adam interacted in the Garden of Eden.
Our team had a blast catching up with Trae, as it felt like he covered dozens of topics with the fluency of an expert. His intellect and skill are on full display in this interview, but so is his spirit and heart behind what it means to be a faith driven entrepreneur and what faith driven investors can do to create value, not only for themselves, but for the world.
We hope you enjoy this episode and pray that it encourages you on your journey!
Useful Links:
Rene Girard Explains Mimetic Desires
Trae Stephens Interview with Fortune
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
*Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.
Henry [00:02:25] Guys, it's actually awesome to be back on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. And this is a special segment which we're not only talking to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast faith driven investor as well. And we've got on the podcast with us a friend of ours, Trae Stevens from the Founders Fund. And a lot of people don't know of the Founders Fund. And yet it's one of the most inventive venture capital funds really in the world. And they have been an investor, along with Trae's leadership and heir BMB and Space-X and PELLANT here in Facebook, in Lyft and a whole bunch other really cool companies, including one that I know really well called Twilio. And one of the things that I love about founders fun, where there's also another partner in the fund named Peter keall. Many of you may have read a great book called 0 1 is that they have a little bit of a different thought about investing in a little bit different of a thought about entrepreneurship as an extension of that. Now, a lot of the listeners, this podcast aren't running companies like a Palantine or something as a completely new category like Google or Facebook. And yet there are creative parts of our job when we're thinking about the services we create and the products we create and the way that we manage and lead our employees, that we want to be inventive. We want to be new and novel and not just imitating what we see in other companies. And yet there's some good instruction that comes from that, too. But I don't know anybody. Definitely not. And my friend said that does a better job of thinking about being on guard for just creating something that is mimetic. And Trae will tell us a little bit about what that means here in a second. But I don't know anybody who's better at being very thoughtful about how do we create a new seeking after our father's heart, God's heart, than Trae Stevens. So, Trae, it's awesome to have you on the program. Been looking for this for a long time. Thank you for joining us.
Trae [00:04:20] Great, Henry. Thanks for having me.
Henry [00:04:23] Trae, give us a flyover. Just tell us a little bit about where God is. Has you. What's your background? Who are you? Where do you come from? Bring us up through to founders. Fun place.
Trae [00:04:35] Great. Sure. I am originally from a rural community about 25 miles north of Cincinnati, Ohio. Grew up as the grandchild of the pastor of my church.
[00:04:47] So I have spent my entire life kind of having what my grandfather called a drug problem. I was dragged to church every Sunday morning since I was a since I was a kid. Good. And it was a senior in high school when 9/11 happened and kind of shifted my career expectations from pursuing journalism to going into the national security field. So after they read in high school, I went on to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where I did a degree and Middle Eastern studies and counter-terrorism left university in two thousand and five and went into a career in the intelligence community where I was doing counterterrorism and computational linguistics. Work lasted about three years inside of that bureaucracy and eventually ended up leaving to join this tiny little startup based in Palo Alto, California, called Palantir when it just had a few dozen people. That company ended up working a lot better than I think any of us expected. And it grew to have several thousand people and have a private valuation, over 20 billion dollars. And after spending six years there, running a chunk of the revenue and sales business, I was asked by the chairman of the board at Palantir, a guy named Peter Teale, who in reality referenced the intro to this I got to come join him at is venture capital fund. Help understand where I've been for the last five years now.
Henry [00:06:14] Excellent. And you're married to Michelle.
Trae [00:06:17] I met. Have a lovely wife who is in the midst of wrapping up her p._h._d. Which is very exciting. I and two kids I have a five year old named that and a three year old named Solomon.
Henry [00:06:29] Awesome. OK. So you probably are. We had a counterterrorism expert on the show before, William.
William [00:06:35] Not the best of my knowledge, but I watch a lot of counterterrorism television. I don't know if I'm an expert, but I feel like I know a lot.
Henry [00:06:43] OK. All right.
Trae [00:06:43] I assure you, that's far more exciting than anything I was doing on a daily basis.
Henry [00:06:48] Good computational linguistics. Sounds pretty cool.
William [00:06:52] I'll get Kiefer Sutherland on sometime, but I don't see.
Henry [00:06:56] Another part of your background. This brought you up to today. That also made me really fired up about having you on. Is that you lead a faith and work bible study in San Francisco, right?
Trae [00:07:05] That's right. My church community here in San Francisco is epic, which is in Soma. For those of the uninitiated, that means south of market neighborhood. And my wife and I, I've been going there almost the whole time that we've been here. And the pastor asked us if we would be willing to pull together a group. At the time, we thought a small group of investors, entrepreneurs. Other people involved in the tech community to talk about the implications of our faith in the workplace, which is not something that is super common for people to sit down and talk about here in San Francisco. Yeah, we started that about three, three and a half years ago. Now we've gone through six different sessions or recover different topics each 13 week session. And our group has grown from, I think around a dozen people to our last session had over 70. So it's now more like a house church than a small group. But it's been a lot of fun.
Henry [00:07:58] When you say epic, epic is not just an adjective, which I use a lot, but epic in this case is also a noun. It's called epic church.
Trae [00:08:04] Yes, exactly. And I think that was the original intent of the founding pastor Ben whole-grain was more of like the Homer type epic, the story, the narrative version of the word.
Henry [00:08:15] So tell us a little bit about that. And then also, one of the things that I get really kicked down about is the concept of an entrepreneur leaning into the creation mandate. Tell us about the most recent study that you did based on the work of Rene Girard and what that taught you as you taught others about the tendencies we have as humans and what that might mean for us as entrepreneurs.
Trae [00:08:42] Sure. So there's really at Stanford, he passed away a few years ago, but a philosopher theologian named Rene Dheeraj and Girard's lifework was studying a theory that he had that he called the theory. And the basic concept of mimetic theory is that all of human desire can really be described by imitation and the conflict that arises from that imitation. So this is kind of in every aspect of life. It's why do we want the things that we want? Why do you want that new car that you want? Why do you want that new pair of shoes that you want? Gerard would argue that all of those desires are not defined by anything that you intrinsically desire within your heart, but actually from your desire to imitate models and those models and celebrities. They might be your peer group. They might be your colleagues at work. They could really be anyone. And Gerard, as a theologian, as well as a philosopher, believes that the person of Jesus Christ was important not only insofar as the act of atonement on the cross, but also by being fully man and fully God. He gave us a model that we could follow here on Earth. That was pure and not corrupt. So every time, you know, you get into these traps of memetic cycles that lead to violence, Jesus's call is no common. Imitate me. And if you imitate me, it will eradicate conflict, not only in your life, but in the world at large. At the end of this,.
Henry [00:10:15] It said very interesting. So we are to imitate. We're designed to imitate. And we're told what to imitate or to imitate Jesus in his work and his home and his holy as I'm holy. Where does that desire we have to imitate go wrong? Where does it go off the rails? And where do you see that go off the rails for entrepreneurs?
Trae [00:10:36] Yeah, that's actually a really good point, Henry, that juror never argued that we should stop imitating. In fact, he would argue that it's impossible. We as humans have no ability to stop imitating. And that's why the person of Jesus was important, is that we had to have a model that we should actually imitate. So then the question as you asked, how does that apply to entrepreneurs are people that are building businesses? I like to kind of frame this in the terms of eschatology versus proctology. And I know that I'm going to need to define those words because I had to look them up when they were first brought up to me as well.
William [00:11:10] If you can spell them as well. They'd be great.
Trae [00:11:14] Well. Proteau logical. It's not exactly like it sounds pẽr o t o l o g ICAO. Pertti Logical is the theology relating to the beginning and eschatological e yes. C h a t o l logical. I don't know where I am and where to get a bag either way.
[00:11:35] That is the theology related to the end times. So proctology is backwards, eschatology is forwards. You know, I was raised in a really conservative Southern Baptist tradition and our eschatology is what I would describe as dispensation. All it's this idea that like the end times are coming, there's going to be the apocalypse. Everything is going to be destroyed. You know, this is where you get things like the Left Behind series and things like that, which is kind of a doomsday apocalypse version of the future. And that's incredibly popular. And the more fundamentalist branches of Protestant theology today. And is what I grew up with. And the kind of crazy thing about dispensation of eschatology is that it kind of traps you in this stagnation where you believe that nothing that I do on Earth could possibly have any long term impact because it's all just going to be burned away at the end. And therefore, the best thing that I can do is protect myself. It's like absorbed into my community, only listen to Christian music, only have Christian friends and don't really worry about developing broader ambitions outside of that tight knit group. This, by the way, is not like there are clearly exceptions. I'm not saying that everyone falls into this trap, but this is the tendency when your personal world, from that divine scatological perspective on the other side, you have the proto logical perspectives to life, which is all about history and competition massively emerges from history. You get things like the environmentalists movement where they say like development of mankind is basically this constant erosion of the beauty that we originally had and that there there's this impulse to return to creation. So, you know, it's not developing better forms of energy consumption. It's consuming less energy. You know, this is where you get to reduce, reuse, recycle movement, which is basically like the problem isn't bad technology. The problem is that people consume too much. And those views tend to get massively hung up in competitive behaviors because competition only exists in scarce environments. By definition, you can't compete over an not scarce resource. You can only compete over scarce resources. And that has a tendency to lead to really bad memetic impulses. So the alternative to this is a transformation, eschatology. And I think this is the most clearly scriptural and historical from the perspective of Christianity. And the idea there is that God has called us it by us being created in his image. He has called us into creation. And so what is one of the key defining characteristics of God is that he's a creator. And so we're created in his image. What are we created to be? We are created to be creators. We are co-creators with God in this life. And you see this play out in the Garden of Eden, where God doesn't come down to Adam and say, here's a dog, here's a cow. He comes down. He says, Adam, you are the ruler of this domain name the animals till the fields grow plants. You know, he gave Adam a mandate to create in the garden. And that has played out at various points in scripture throughout Christian history. And this is the thing that I think most people are kind of missing in their theological understanding of the end times today is particularly those with backgrounds like mine is that they miss that mainstream Christianity for centuries has believed that we are building today the building blocks for a New Jerusalem. So like, do we believe that things like the printing press that made it possible to print Bibles and a variety of different languages that are distributed around the world to spread the gospel? Do we believe that that is transformative? Do we believe that that is participating in God's creation in a way that is going to transform the lives of people that might even be used by God as part of the New Jerusalem? My belief is that the answer to that is. Almost certainly, yes.
Rusty [00:15:36] Mm hmm. It's fascinating. I actually recognize all the things that you're talking about, about the teaching of the times. You and I probably grew up about 90 minutes away from each other and we both have that Southern Baptist thing. So we really couldn't, at least in my upbringing, couldn't see past the rapture. Right. You know, it's the rapture. And then that's the end point. So I think it's great that you're sharing the thoughts of a different view. But I wanna go back to the memetics and particularly something you said about competition and how it imitation creates competition from your vantage point as a venture capitalist. And I think a lot of people don't understand, particularly entrepreneurs, young ones, that not only are you looking for deals, but you also compete for deals. Right. When you see something that you you go, wow, this is a great company, you're likely not to be the first B-C to recognize that and therefore you become competitive. So how do you take your framework and think about all the different categories that you're looking at or companies that you're looking at and say, how do I play competition? How do I apply memetics? And then how does that make me different in my ability to invest?
Trae [00:16:52] Sure. You know, this is a tough one because I think that viewed completely on the Rawle exterior, the question would seem to suggest that there's a large component of venture capital that's very heavily weighted towards how good you are making investment decisions. And I think that that is a piece of being a venture capitalist.
[00:17:13] But there's all these other pieces that are probably equally or maybe even more important, like getting access to deals, having founders actually believe that they want to take money from you, whether that's like a question of terms or brand or operational execution assistance. There's all these different categories that impact that. And so I think the how you make a decision is a part of that equation, but it's not all of it. The reason that I say this is that Founders Fund is and are unique position in that we have a really strong brand and founders tend to come to us. So we go through a lot of inbound deal flow and have the ability to filter through those on our own timelines. That is not the case for every venture fund. In fact, if you as a listener are sitting out there and thinking like, well, I could learn these lessons that we're talking about in this column that I can start my own venture fund and be massively successful.
[00:18:08] My general perspective would be that the odds are certainly not in your favor. And even if you knew with perfect precedents which companies were going to be good, in which companies were going to be bad, it would still very likely be super hard view to get into a lot of those companies.
[00:18:24] And you would end up kind of being on the outside looking in. So I don't want in any way to suggest that I'm going to give you some secrets that are going to blow open the doors of opportunity. But I do think that the mimetic lesson is a good one for a foreign investor. And part of that, it goes back to rescue. The way you set up the question by saying, like when you're looking at categories, I would say that from the founders some perspective, we don't look at categories and we don't look at categories because by the time something is a category, it's already two competitive categories don't exist unless there are multiple companies in the category. And so generally speaking, we're looking for outliers. We're looking for things that aren't easily categorized and things that are not being created to be slight variations or incremental improvements on things that currently exist. We're looking for things that are different now that they kind of sit outside of those.
Rusty [00:19:18] And that definitely does make you unique. So then how do you apply the invitation part of that? So a lot of the best founders that I know obviously are trying to create something totally different, totally new and take a different direction. But they're also influenced by imitation as well, because for how long did we hear over of everything? Right. Were they over this where the over of dog walking, where the mover of whatever? How would you tell an entrepreneur to be contrarian and distance themselves from imitating even though that they they probably can't totally do that?
Trae [00:19:56] Sure, they certainly can't totally do it. You know, there's going to be all these drawers and all of the aspects of their business, whether it's like their hiring practices or the way they manage people or whatever, they're going to be using models to build those patterns. You can't fully avoid it. I think like for us, it's less about mentoring individual founders and better behaviors, and it's more about kind of a macro level imitative impulse that we look for in the founder themselves. And so this is like, you know, we would tend to avoid investing in what we call whiteboard founders. So it's like these are the people that are like, I'm going to start a business. And then they stand in front of a whiteboard and they write down all of the ideas that they have with their friends. And then they kind of like talk through each one and then they pick the one that they want to do. And then they're like, all right, this is the business we're going to do because it's the best on a relative basis of all the ones that we wrote on the board. Those businesses do not tend to have really high success rates because they're not built around an interest in solving a specific problem unless that specific problem is figuring out what company you're going to start, because all you want to do is start a company. That desire to start a business is, generally speaking, deeply imitative. And that's the type of macro level thing that we would try to avoid today.
William [00:21:15] That's everything. I want to take it down one layer deeper potentially to you and personally how you think about being an investor and what God's college to do. And as you think about the new heavens, the new earth, and not going to ask you to predict what jobs God's gonna have for you up there. But I am interested in so memetics and work transformation. All these things. How does it impact you personally, how you do your job every day, and how you potentially see other investors who are driven by their faith doing their job? More on yours? You know, what do you think about what you think God's motivating you to do with the role he's put you in right now?
Trae [00:21:52] Great question. I think that there's a few aspects of this. The first is that it is hard to argue that you can't make a lot of money in venture capital just investing in Vice's. In fact, there is some news that came out recently that one of the top tier funds I won't name names. It wasn't us, but one of the top tier funds partners said something along the lines of at this fund, we like to invest in the seven deadly sins. And that was like the way that they kind of teed up their investment strategy. I think if you did that exclusively, you actually could make a lot of money because it turns out that humanity is sinful. And if you find some way to tap into the core psychology of one of those categories of sin. Man, if it works, it could really work. But me personally, I can't wrap my head around doing something like that. And so I think that there are probably even more companies that are really interesting that are not tapping in to seven deadly sins behaviors, but are creating abundance. And this goes back to the earlier question around competition versus creation. So in a competitive environment, you have to compete over scarce resources in a creative environment. It's really about creating abundance. And abundance is the enemy of competition. That's the enemy of scarcity. And so I spend a lot of time at founders on looking at companies and evaluating companies, trying to figure out where we can create abundance and really any category. So, you know, I've invested in companies that are doing supply chain and logistics and making the movement of freight more democratized to more people at a lower cost. That is creative in my mind. That creates abundance. And, you know, I've also been looking at defense and national security, which seems kind of at odds with this idea of God's plan for the world. But because humanity is central, I think that one of the key ways to create abundance and economic opportunity for people around the world is to ensure that there is a deterrence capability that prevents work from happening to begin with. And so in my mind, getting a really good defense infrastructure in place is important to ensuring opportunity and abundance. So that's kind of the framework that I try to operate within.
Rusty [00:24:05] What advice would you give to that entrepreneur who doesn't want to be the white born entrepreneur, but they want to be an entrepreneur, but they just don't know how to get going? What what advice would you give them?
Trae [00:24:17] I think it depends on the starting point. If it's that they don't know what to do to get going, but they have an idea of what they want to do. Then I would have very different advice than if they wanted to be an entrepreneur, but didn't know what they wanted to do and didn't know it's there.
Rusty [00:24:31] Yeah. Let's go there first. Somebody who just feels this desire to hey, I want to be an entrepreneur, but do I go get my idea first? I mean, I know it's pretty basic to you, but it's not basic to everybody. So give me a little roadmap.
Trae [00:24:43] Yeah. I mean, if I didn't feel like I just couldn't go another day without working on a specific problem, I would not start a business. It turns out that it's really hard to start a business. Really, really hard, and I think this goes for every business, whether it's like a Laundromat or Space-X. Both of these businesses are just incredibly hard. There's a lot of moving pieces.
[00:25:05] You have a great deal of responsibility. Very likely you're going to hire other human beings that you're going to have to pay and you're going to be responsible for their livelihood. If you're not just burning with the hunger to solve a very specific problem, go and work for someone else until you are in until you do feel that way. I do not think it's a good idea to just start a business because you want to start a business.
Rusty [00:25:29] And so let's go one step further than I think William's got a question, wants to wrap us up. But I see a problem to be solved. But that's all I know. The problem to be solved. What would just be one piece of advice about the first couple of steps to make after that?
Trae [00:25:43] Yeah, I think part of this is what Dave Evans and Bill Burnett at Stanford talked about in their book Designing Your Life that they call prototyping. And this idea is if you see a problem that you believe needs to be solved, you should set up a bunch of conversational interviews with people who know something more about that space than you do and just sit down, buy them a cup of coffee and talk, flesh out the problem, get an understanding of why things are the way they are today, what works, what doesn't work, whether or not the solution that you have in your mind would actually solve the problem. And sometimes you'll get people that tell you things that aren't helpful, like they'll say, you know, I can't imagine a world in which you would want to book an airline ticket online instead of a travel agent to do it for you. Sometimes people are going to be wrong in these conversational interviews, but you still want to get as much information as you can before you dove in so that you can make the most educated decisions. The way that Peter frames this, which I think is funny, is that he says it's impossible to plan perfectly for the future, but it's better to have a plan and to not have a plan.
Henry [00:26:46] That's good. When we launched Faith with an investor, we had an idea that there are four or five different principles, marks that we call them, that make up a faith or an investor very similar to the five marks that we have on our entrepreneurship side. And it's maybe a good time to revisit them. We've got these concepts. There is an opportunity for a leader transformed stewardship versus ownership excellence ministry word in ministry, indeed, on the faith of an investor side. Some of those carry over. So, for instance, stewardship versus ownership and just a concept of the fact that we've been entrusted by resources, by God to be able to make an impact in what he's doing in his world. And we also talk about excellence. How important is that? We do our work with great excellence because the rest of the world is watching. We also talk, by the way, about community and we talking about being faithful and also talking about discipleship as we get ready to wrap this interview with you. When you think about your work as a Christ follower in the fact that you're out in community talking to entrepreneurs and people who are leaning into the creation mandate, even if they don't know the creation mandate from Genesis. How do you see your faith come through? Are there opportunities to share your faith? What is that look like? You know, you're in a very secular world. Venture capital, private equity investing have thought of as being just secular because that's what people running a lot of money and people have bought into the secular spiritual divide, particularly when it deals with money. Of course, there's lots of passages in scripture that would seem to fly in the face of that. But how do you process that? What is it like for you to be a Christ follower and also an investor?
Trae [00:28:30] I would say that there's three different things and I'll start with the most micro and then work our way into the most macro and the most micro level.
[00:28:38] It's just showing love and being as kind as possible to entrepreneurs that are coming in to pitch. Founders signed in. It seems totally straightforward like that should be really obvious. Why would you not just be a kind person? But I don't think that's most founders experience with raising money from overseas. I think oftentimes it's really hard to tell what's going on. There's kind of like this black box that's operating that you're not familiar with, and sometimes you're not getting responses from the beasties at all. Like you don't know if they just passed and didn't send you an email or make a phone call. So, you know, at a very micro level, I try to just be as much of a steward of the responsibility that God has given me as possible to be transparent and to be communicative and to give advice and to give people honest feedback. And I think that sometimes there's honest feedback that can seem really harsh in the moment. But later, as an investor, I've reflected on the times that I haven't shared that honest feedback and I've almost felt like I robbed them of an opportunity to learn something that might have changed their odds of pulling off a fundraising round or hiring a candidate or something like that. And so I just try to be as honest and as loving as possible. C.S. Lewis and the Four Loves talks about imitating not only Christ at Calvary, but also imitating Christ in the everyday busyness of life. You know, you see Jesus time and time again throughout the scripture being transparent and radically honest in his interactions with people. And so I aspire to imitate him in that regard as well. So that's the most micro, I think, working our way up to slightly more macro things. One is that I just try to kind of talk through this idea of creation in abundance rather than competition and scarcity with people as part of my personal investment thesis. And so if a company comes in and the idea might be OK, the founders might be OK, but there's something that inspires scarcity driven business models, you know, openly tell them I think this might work. But I personally don't feel like this is a good opportunity for me to invest in because I care deeply about investing in abundance. And I want to be in a world where new companies, new things that are emerging are creating new economic opportunities for people and not driving greater competition and conflict. And that leads to the third and the most macro aspect of this, which is that I think when I first moved to San Francisco five years ago, I expected that I was going to find this deeply secular, hostile environment to Christianity, which in some ways is true. It is kind of openly hostile in some very bizarre ways.
[00:31:26] And yet at the same time, I found that I've had more opportunities to share my faith here than in any other place that I've lived. And it's for a weird reason.
[00:31:34] So it turns out that the circle of people that I interact with, whether they're founders or other bases, tend to be really curious and passionate people.
[00:31:43] And they are constantly interacting with the people who are similarly curious and passionate about different things.
[00:31:49] And so you end up having these incredibly interesting conversations with people in every walk of life, whether you're like a coffee shop or at church on Sunday or, you know, in a meeting at work where, you know, if I wanted to learn everything imaginable about how quantum switching happens or how to knit a sock, I can find someone in my network that could wax poetic for hours about the intricacies of these topics. And I found that my Christianity inspires that same level of curiosity. And the people that know me, that aren't Christian, where, you know, somewhere back in their subconscious, they're thinking, man, Trae is like a a reasonable person and yet he's a Christian. That doesn't make any sense. I would like to understand more about how that's possible. And so I end up getting into all these conversations that start something like, how is it possible for you to be a rational, intelligent human being and still believe in the supernatural? And that door being opened through skepticism and curiosity has given me an opportunity to witness in ways that I just never at all expected.
Henry [00:32:58] That's awesome. That's really, really good. That makes complete sense. And then they find out that you're running a faith and work Bible study at a church in San Francisco and the defense technology company, which just completely blows their mind.
Trae [00:33:12] None of this makes any sense.
William [00:33:15] That's awesome, because we do come to a close. I'd love it if you could give us a 60 second overview of quantum switching. That's the very you know, we had it all. We've only got a couple of seconds left, but I feel you could probably run us through it.
Henry [00:33:29] We'll settle. Knitting of socks.
Trae [00:33:31] Yes. It turns out the founders London is one of the rare firms that has a chief scientist who is a quantum physicist, and so whenever there's a company that involves something that I don't understand at all, I just looked across the table at this guy name is Aaron and I just looked across the table and I make eye contact and kind of signal to him like, I hope you're getting this because I am not.
William [00:33:55] Everyone has spiritual gifts. That's great. Yeah. And I'll guess what. As we do close, I really do. One, just appreciate your time. It's always exciting and interesting to have a conversation where you try. And so I'm so excited that our audience gets that. And we always like to point back to God's word and kind of what he might be teaching you in the moment. And so we've talked about a host of things. But I just wonder, is there any part of God's word that maybe he's bringing alive to you maybe this week, maybe over the past few months in a new way, just that you're seeing something new and kind of what is he teaching you about right now that maybe we haven't discussed yet?
Trae [00:34:30] Well, you know, I'm constantly in the world reading through these things that are related to faith and work. So that's why I spend most my time as I prepare for the weekly sessions.
[00:34:40] You know, I think that on the topic of imitation, I was really surprised during the drug study where he had poured out all of these scriptures that maybe I had kind of known in the back of my head where things that existed like Ephesians 5 1 says therefore be imitators of God as beloved children. Take a direct call into this message that dramatising and this is just like one example. There's literally like dozens and dozens and dozens of them. And I think going back into the scripture and kind of better understanding the message of Christ outside of the context of death, burial and resurrection was truly life-giving. You know, I think I've grown up with this understanding that, like Jesus came to Earth to die for our sins so that we might spend eternal life with him. And the father was like, that was it. That's why he came. He came to die. And the contrary and perspective on this that I think is way more interesting and true is that, yes, he did come to die, but he came to live in obedience. And there is a reason why he came to live in obedience. And that's the lesson that is a big part of the lesson that God was trying to deliver to us.
William [00:35:49] I mean, I mean, really good. Much good.
Rusty [00:35:53] Really great.
Henry [00:35:53] Traes awesome me with you. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for sharing. This is going to be great encouragement, both the feature of not schnauz and also faith of investors. And I was a beneficiary of it. So thank you for the investment.
Trae [00:36:06] Thanks. I appreciate it.