This $3B Founder Is The Next Elon Musk

You're like the whole milk version of an Elon Musk. You know what I mean? You're the Midwest version of an Elon Musk. But what the hell did you know about building a fucking airplane? You know what I mean? Did you know anything about that? No, I did not. I knew nothing. I just like, I really wanted to do it. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my law in it like no days off.

All right, everyone. We have a really interesting guest. His name is Brett Adcock. I've talked about him on the pod a bunch of times. But let me explain why this guy's interesting. So he started a.

recruiting website that he sold for $100 million, which in most everyone's case, that's a massive home run. You're incredibly successful, which he is. But then he parlayed that and invested pretty much 100% of his money into another company called Archer, which basically makes like unmanned helicopters. And then that went public at like a $1.5 billion valuation.

And he started another company called Figure, which is making humanoids. They're basically robots that can work warehouses and do human labor. The reason I wanted Brett to come on is because I just wanted to think and learn about how someone who's so unique, how they think and how they make decisions. And so Brett's really subtle. He's a low key guy. He's not crazy high energy. He's not one of these guys who we have on who is a personality or they have a big personality on YouTube or Twitter or anything like that.

He's subtle man the guys humble and he's quiet and I find that to be incredibly fascinating my opinion in 10 years Brett is gonna be in the running of however We think of like these like Howard Hughes Elon Musk types of crazy folks who build these amazing world changing things Brett's gonna be that I mean he's already up there But I think he's gonna be like that and no one knows who he is now or at least Compared to some of those other folks. So what I want you to do is listen to this episode particularly like the last 15 minutes when we talk about his latest company

It's really fascinating. And I want you to tweet at me. My handle's the Sam Parr, P-A-R-R, so the word the, and then Sam and then Parr tweet at me and let me know what you think about this guy and what makes people like him special because I'm really fascinating with these types of personalities and I'm fascinating with how people can learn so much information so quickly. It's just really fascinating to me. So let me know. Give it a listen. His name's Brett Adcock. Let's start the show.

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All right, dude, let's just get right into it. The reason you're interesting to me is because you're incredibly successful. I imagine you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but you.

You go all in on stuff. So you told me with this new company figure, you financed it for the first year and you put up most all of your money into it. I was like, I was like, what, what, what's your asset allocation for your personal portfolio? And you're like, well, I own Archer stock, which I took public. I own a house. And then I put some huge amount of money, which if you want, you could say into the, my company figure and I'm going all in on them and I, and I just go hard. I go all in. Is that right?

Yeah, this has really been how to necessity my career. When I started battery, I couldn't get anybody to invest in the business for the first like almost like three years. So I basically put all my savings into the company took no salary for three or four years. How much savings did you have year 25?

I think I had like close to $200,000 I put into the business. And then, you know, I didn't take any salary for three years. I meant like, had to pay for my own healthcare, food, rent. I was living in Manhattan. It was really expensive. And 2015 things got so bad that I had to borrow, I think it was $50,000 to pay for rent and survive.

I had credit card debt. I was probably in the red negative $100,000 prior to the acquisition of a battery. Well, what did battery exit for? 110 million. So that was a windfall, right? Yeah, that was great. I raised a little over $10 million over seven years.

So had a large, you know, percentage ownership of the company. So yeah, overnight success from going from, you know, seven years of agony and debt to like having capital for the first time in a significant way. And then did you, I don't know if you're telling me these stories like when you're, if you're goofing around or not, but you're, you said that you put most all of your money into Archer, right?

Yeah. So I started Archer in 2018, so I called Archer Aviation, and we build electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. So these are basically aircraft somewhat similar to a helicopter, but they're purely electric. And the goal is to use the aircraft to move people around cities. So the traffic's just like such a terrible phenomenon.

Nobody's really worked on traffic for 100 years. So we were basically out there. I was out there trying to solve the traffic problem and kind of help help the sustainability. The pitch coming out of the battery was just, it was bad. Like it was, hey, we need basically probably about a billion dollars, maybe more to get the market or we don't make it.

were designing this new type of transportation system in the air. So instead of driving to the airport, you would fly. And it needs to be fully electric that nobody in history had ever certified electric aircraft before. And I was coming off a software, you know, 10 years, 15 years in software. So that pitch did not really resonate too well in 2018.

You're like, we made a joke in the last pod where I'm like, if you drink a glass of milk with dinner, you're my type of guy. People were making fun of me from being from Midwest. You're like the whole milk version of an Elon Musk, you know what I mean? You're the Midwest version of an Elon Musk. But what the hell did you know about?

I mean, software is easy in a sense. It's just code, right? No one's going to die if you screw it up, or in most cases, no one's going to die. And if I talk to a guy who's doing computer engineering or computer science, I'm like, what the hell do you know about building a fucking airplane? You know what I mean? Did you know anything about that? No, I did not. I knew nothing. I just really wanted to do it. That doesn't make sense to me.

Yeah. What do you do? That doesn't make sense to me. Like if I wanted to go learn about how an airplane is built, I guess I would like, or a unmanned drone. I don't know what you want to call it. I would go, I guess I would, well, first of all, you have to have a high IQ to begin with, but I don't. But I would like, what would I do? I guess I would call people who know what they're talking about and ask them what books do you read? And then I would go and read the books and take lessons. And maybe I would go to like a college courses. I don't, like it just seems like an impossible thing to learn. And you learned it in how many years.

So, yeah, so here's what I did.

One is I spent a tremendous amount of time after a battery, figuring out what I wanted to work on next. I kind of fell into the recruiting marketplace space with a battery. And I really wanted to be very thoughtful about what I wanted to work on. So I basically spent a large amount of time figuring out, okay, what is the right opportunity I want to spend my time on? And it was Archer. I was very clear to me, I wanted to do Archer Aviation and build it. So the first thing I did is I basically built a spreadsheet and I called everybody in the, I could, I could think of in the world.

So I think I made, I think that spreadsheets, about 300 people I connected with, whether they're NASA or professors or working in industry at RotorCraft or airplanes or turbofan development, whatever it would look like. And I just immersed myself and I wanted to know every technical book that was on the market, I wanted to understand how to build an electric aircraft, like what are the components and

What are the physics governed by in the space? And I probably spent almost six months in a room just making phone calls, like cold calling everybody in the world. What's that call look like? Hey, Mr. Conway, my name's Brett. Yeah. Talk to me about helicopters.

It's crazy, man. People will pick up the phone for you. You just got to pick up the phone and call, and people will talk to you. People want to help. What was the most breathtaking call you had or meaningful call you had? I did a meeting, so in addition to calling everybody in the world,

The parallel track was I was going back to school. So I went back and learned how to do mechanical and aerospace engineering. And leading up to that, I went to an event in 2018. I think it was 2018. It's like early 2018 at this point. It was at this Hyatt, basically Hyatt Hotel in Atlanta, was hosting this electric aircraft design course.

So there was a lot of aerodynamics folks and folks in the industry that really wanted to understand the physics around electric aircraft. I went down there and I basically sat for two days being lectured on how to build an aircraft, electric aircraft from scratch, how to think about the propulsion, aerodynamics, batteries, and it was just like all my heroes today, electric aviation. And one of the guys there was in his PhD at the University of Florida and said,

I got me too. I'm doing my PhD in electric aviation, and I want to build a detailed aircraft. And I go to the University of Florida, and I said, wow, I went to, I went to undergrad at University of Florida as well. He's like, you need to come by ASAP and see our lab. We're, I'm trying to build electric aircraft and, you know, smaller scale. And we could help you.

So I did this course. I got on a plane. I went down to Gainesville and I met the head of the group there. And he's basically the head of all mechanical aerospace engineering in the University of Florida. And he had this like basically 12 person lab building things like hobby grade, like electric aircraft drones. And I said, I want to take this lab over and I want to just build electric aircraft. And this lab happened to be off of Archer Road. So I called the Business Archer Aviation.

What percentage of the veterinary windfall did you put into this education portion as well as our starting archer? Oh, like all of it. Yeah. All of it. But what does that actually mean? Like, how are you living? Well, I was living off the cash. So I had just from, from veterinary, just like paying my bills. I took no salary at archer for two years. I don't know. Something like that. Like zero. Um, like covert insurance type thing. And, um,

You know, I made like, I went from like having nothing to like having tens of millions of dollars after tax. So it was, you know, it was a lot of money. I just didn't need, I didn't need almost any of it. So I wanted to work on this new thing and nobody would like, I couldn't even get meetings. At one point, I got introduced like the guy that runs like general catalyst Joel.

And, um, he called my pitch disrespectful. What do you say? He was like, it was like mid, it was like great when COVID hit and, uh, I got a big introduction from him, uh, from like one of my investors, Mark, Lori, Henry Smith, Joel is like, this is the best guy. You got, you got to talk to him. And I got to call Joel and he's just like, I got to stop you right here, man.

This is the most disrespectful pitch I've ever seen. We have people dying because of COVID. The hospitals are filled up and you're asking me for money. Like for like, for this like flying car idea, like, what are you talking about? It's just not possible. Like, why would you be doing this?

And I said, like, I'm running out of money. Personally, like I need somebody to fund this or we're also like, no, I know, I know COVID's bad, but the business is going to die. And this is what you do. You fund companies. Like this is why I'm calling you. Like this is, um, and yeah, I was probably going to stay the worst phone call I've ever taken.

So I sold my company three years ago and I had the same thing where I didn't, I was, I was just barely getting by and then overnight things changed. And I was like, I'm going to spend six or 12 months just like seeking planning. I'm going to figure out what, cause I don't know if you took time off, but I took like three months of like kind of normal 20 or 40 hour work weeks and low stress. And I was like, all right, cool. That's what I needed. I felt recharged. I need to get back to it.

Except when I went back to it, I was like, have you heard of Ikigai? It's like this Japanese concept where there's like four rings that overlap. And one of the rings is like, what does the world want to pay for? The other ring is, what does the world want? The other one is, what do I enjoy doing? And then what am I great at?

And like, ideally, you find something right in the middle. Because if you find something that you're great at, that you have skills at, but the world doesn't want to pay for it, that's just like an expensive hobby. If you find something the world wants and they're willing to pay for it and you're good at it, but you hate it, that's just like a crappy job. So like, you want to find something right in the middle. So I was like, what am I skilled at? And basically, I thought of it like,

I'm just going to use my skills and what I enjoy and I'm just going to try and do something slightly better. And I think that's a pretty rational way to go about doing things. Like most people are, they're like, I don't want to do too hard, too outside of my realm.

What interests me about you is like, you're kind of an alien. Like you were like, all right, this software thing, this battery thing, it worked. I don't know if it worked as good or as you wanted it to or not. I don't know the full story, but you just like took a total 180 and you're like screw the 15 years of internet experience that I'm doing. I'm going to do aviation hardware. I'm going to do a totally different thing.

What do you think is, is unique about you that makes it so you don't actually want to like go the easy route? Cause I know it, I think you like built, did you build like the email marketing software? Like that's pretty like, it's a very narrow niche and you did something not even within it, within that niche, not even related to it. And you took the totally different route. What do you think is inside of you that makes you do that? Cause I find that fascinating. I think at the end of the day, I just want to,

I want to wake up. It's like an amazing future. That's exciting and inspiring. Are you motivated by money? Not really. No. I think if I wanted to make a lot of money, I'd probably in the wrong field, you know, I think like the, like there's like a risk reward balance and startups. Like I think if, if it was just about money, I think I'd be basically probably back in software. So I think going into doing this project I'm working on now or just probably the, probably the surest path to losing everything.

When you're starting figure, like, you know, you read about Elon Musk and he's like, well, I put everything in. And he's like, I was sleeping on couches. And it's like, well, the couch was like Sergey Brin. You know, it was like his couch, which probably isn't like a normal couch. You know, it's probably the couch in the living room of the guest house. And you just don't want to go use the king size bed. But like when you're starting figure, are you ever worried about running out of money and losing everything that you've earned?

I basically almost went personally bankrupt last year, a figure. Yeah, tell me that.

Yeah, so when I left Archer, I had basically, you know, all my asset, all my money tied up into Archer, like just had like- And you can't sell that as an officer, right? Yeah, so like- Or as like insider- Yeah, we were like, you know, I made it pretty clear when I started the business and even when I went public that, like me as the, like I as a founder and CEO, I'm not selling stock. We're pre-revenue. I told the board this, I told all of our investors this. I even put a million dollars in the spec.

as we went public at $10. And so personally, I was like, I'll put another million dollars in your $3 million valuation, just show you guys. That's all I got. And when I left Archer in April of 2022, I had 12-month stock lockup. This is public. There's an SEC document for this.

And so I couldn't sell a majority of all my stock was fully locked up until April of this year. So I had some percentage I could sell over some time series. I could sell a certain amount of stock limited by certain volumes of the market cap. So there wasn't just that much volumes a year ago. So I was selling some stock to fund figure and the stock went from like when I left the stock was at five or six bucks, it wasn't like $1.80.

end of last year earlier this year. And I was just like, I don't know if I can get to, I don't know if I can get to 12 month mark, which was that 12 month mark was April of 2023. That's like April, you know, April 18th, 2023 promised land. Like I can sell unlimited stock, no volume restriction, all stock lock up, which I'm, you know, I have a bunch of stocks though here. I'm not selling right now. But like, but that was the point where I needed to get to. And

I thought, you know, I was underwriting and seeing that stocks at three, four, five, six, seven dollars, like no problem. I'll be able to get there. And we were building a team, teams out like, you know, 40 or something like that. We're building, we're spending like millions of hardware. Yeah, we were like, we were within six months, we were at seven figure a month burn. I figure.

And I was just like, it was like, cell stock transferred to bank account, transfer it into the company pay payroll. It was like, how fast can we get that done? And it was like a full system of like trying to get the, like not hitting the limits every day on stock selling, getting the cash into the bank account and putting money into figure.

And, um, and I wasn't, you know, this was like, there was a recession we were in. The banks were going bankrupt. It wasn't like it was a pretty market for series A or capillaries. And it was the worst market since we've been in, since the financial crisis, uh, from a, from a fundraising perspective. I had a stock, like a stock's going down like 75%. And I was just like, I'm running out of cash. So I'm in my, same, I'm in my Hampton group.

And I'm like, everybody's like, what's your most important thing you're doing right now? It's even to talk about, I'm like, I'm running out of money. I'm like, might not make it. What do they say? What was their feedback? I think they were. I thought they, I think they thought it was a maniac.

I think everyone thinks you're a mannequin. I mean, I've talked to a lot of people who know you. That's what fascinates me about you. But what fascinates me about you is that you handle stress differently. I toured your factory and you were smiling and jumping around. It seems like you're jolly almost. I don't know. You're showing me this shit. I remember going to your factory or your office.

You're like, check this out. We got the knee working. And like you see like a knee or ankle. I don't know what it was. Like you see some something of the robot. And there was like 18 or 10 people just sitting around. And it felt like I was hanging out with like buddies in a garage, like just watching you guys finally figure out how to work like a remote control car or something like ridiculous.

And it seemed exciting though. Like I remember being there and I met like, I have to be part of this. And it was exciting. But I didn't, I know that you go all in on things. I didn't realize how close you were to running out of money. Like I don't understand how you deal with that. Like what's your wife saying when you're like, Hey, we might file for bankruptcy personally in the next couple of months. Yeah, I think it's even worse. Like we, I had a second mortgage on my house to go through it.

No way. What did she say? Yeah. So also in the category of like, you know, people thinking about my maniac, my wife's just, she's been with me for 15 years now through all of this. Like we lived in, you know, $1,000 a month apartment in New York. We had to downsize too to get through the battery stuff.

to, you know, to now Archer and figure she's great. Like she's a warrior. She like believes me and she has total faith in what we're doing. And I don't take these things lightly. Like I really, these are like planned exercises I need to go through.

And I've been through many near-death experiences. I mean, Archer, like, what I went through a figure was probably like a tip of the iceberg to what I went through at Archer last like five years. Archer was just a, you know, a go in public was just like a recipe to get sued. And we were going public to the SPAC process. We, you know, as soon as we priced the SPAC deal, the market turned on SPAC. It was just a real cursor.

So, yeah, I've been through many exercises like this before, and I think I can weather them pretty well now.

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I don't know anything about like business finances. I remember when we started our company, I didn't know the difference between cash flow and revenue, which was like a pretty big deal. You need to know that. I didn't know what that was until like three years into the company. And I was like, I thought cash flow and revenue were the same thing. I don't understand how to read a balance sheet. I don't know how to do any of that. So I'm taking classes right now to like figure that out. And I was Googling stuff. And I found this website, it's called

streetofwalls.com. So I went to streetofwalls and there's these amazing articles where you click start training and there's like, it looks like a book. So if you're on your computer, go to streetofwalls.com. So there's like introduction. There's like, what does an investment bank do? There's like, how do you do a discounted cash flow analysis? There's all this stuff and I scroll to the bottom and I always click the about page and there's a link that says file this site and author on Twitter.

And I clicked the Twitter and it was you. You wrote, you made this website. And I was like texting, this was pretty funny. I was texting you ahead of time. I go, hey, I know you took a company public. I don't know anything about finances. How did you learn how to do it? And you're like, oh, I actually taught myself how to do it. And then I did most of the preparation work for the IPO. And I was like, that's amazing. And you didn't even tell me you had this site where it was like a whole site of your learning and education. What was this site? What is streetofalls.com?

Yeah, so when I went to college, I enrolled in industrial and system engineering and also finance. This is not something I also talk about a lot, but I basically did a few years in finance after school before doing the startup life. Why don't you talk about that? Was that embarrassing? The pitch isn't great. I think people just don't like hearing about finance folks, and I also didn't really enjoy it.

You know, I look at those years and say, man, I wish I was like spending more time doing technology development. And I was working full time, but building startups and stuff on the side. And I just look at that saying like, I think it was helpful in some ways, but like.

Probably net net would have been more important just for me to dive in and start building businesses full time. So I was at, in school, somebody gave me this book. It's called like the Fast Track to like investment banking, management consulting and trading. And I read it and it was like, people are going to finance like drive Ferraris. They just like do so well.

And I make 150,000 after school. And I was like, I was dead broke in college, like taking out loans to pay for school. And I was like, man, I'm going to go. This is how I'm going to, you know, make some money, start my career. And I went into like interview with Goldman Sachs and I just, I just whiffed. Like they asked me like, um,

some accretion dilution, you know, like M&A modeling and LBO questions or leverage bio questions. And I just, I didn't know anything. And they're like, you know, I think the guy was nice. She was like, listen, you just, you have to have a certain like bar of understanding of fine finances. He's like, this is such a disrespectful interview.

Yeah, this is playing with a second time. You're disrespecting people constantly. Yeah, exactly. And you're like wasting my time. And I was like, man, I'm not really learning how to do this stuff in college. So I'm just going to have to go learn it. And I was learning now, I just started writing notes and writing about it.

And when my brother actually went to finance, my brother was at a private equity company now. I was like, I'm just going to repackage all these notes. I'm going to put them online and also give them my brother. And like, where am I going to use them again? And that was the genesis for a shoot of walls. We've, I think I've gotten like 30 million views.

Uh, of that site for the last like, you know, 15 years, which has been, which has been great. Like a lot of folks have been like, this has been my primary reason I've gotten a job. And, um, but you know, as you can see, I've, I've haven't spent a nickel on it and over a decade.

Do you, how do they get traffic? I mean, according to similar web, it's still getting a hundred thousand or so people a month coming to it. It's all organic FCO. That's insane. I mean, that's kind of a lot, right? I mean, for for this would be an expensive term to rank for. Yeah, these are like, you know, there's thousands of pages of content there with good original content. And it's, you know, it's just ranking high on Google. You wrote all these. I wrote all those articles. Yeah. Were you going to turn this into a business?

Yeah, so at one point, I was making like $5,000 a month selling those interview guides, like one year out of college. It was great. I mean, it was like a 98% margin business. All right. Well, when you're in that position, what's stopping you from going full time on that? Because if I'm broke and I'm 24 and I'm making five grand a month, I'm like, this is the thing. Yeah, I didn't, I strongly believe, like I, I strongly believe I need to touch like the mass market and

To have like significant impact in technology, you need to have like either a lot of people using your product or various you that use it, they really like it a lot. And I just felt like the products, the services I was starting were just not important enough for my time. So on the pod, we, on this pod, we talk a lot about like ideas and like different opportunities in terms of a veteran, what opportunities did you see that you guys weren't able to pounce on that still exists?

One of the things we did is, you know, so I started the diary at the NYU incubator.

And one of the guys there handed me a book one day and it's like, it was the predictable revenue book, which is basically like an outbound lead generation marketing playbook. And you say, hey, you need to read this. It'd probably be pretty helpful for a battery. And those guys, it was actually tap commerce. So this guy sold for like over 100 million to Twitter. So it was Brian, the founder there.

And I ended up reading the book because like this is great. We need to like replicate this system fully end to end. So I started like working on writing this outbound lead generation process. And we ultimately gave it to basically a person that's here with me today. So Lee Rundasio gave it to her and said, hey, can you go figure out how to build this? So she brought on an engineer and we basically built this outbound lead generation software system that basically ended up powering all the battery.

So that was basically like, how do we put contact information of people and basically do this cadence of emails out to folks to do basically drum up leads? And you can do this for both customers. Where did you get the emails? We built an offshore team of like 300 people in the Philippines.

And we did it all by scratch. What does that mean? Go into LinkedIn or something? Yeah, like you can basically finding the right people based on job titles. And then there's a process where you can use to find emails pretty well. Like there's, you know, there's a lot on GitHub. There's a lot of you can get to email. See Facebook pretty easily. There's basically a process where you can basically back into somebody's personally email address. There's also like databases. You can use a lot of folks use. So we would get emails, plug them into this machine and go.

And we basically built this like huge engine that would power like millions of emails we were doing per month. And then I think it was like in early 2013, 2014, there was like the startup emerging, which is outreach.

And we demoed it. We're like, this is the same exact thing we just built internally. Outreach now is like a four or $5 billion company. And we're like watching outreach scale up. We have a product that is literally built internally ourselves that we're just using ourselves. At the time, we thought it was a little bit better. So we didn't use outreach. That was more customized for what we're doing, everything else.

It was really funny to see us, you know, me go out and build like a hundred million dollar company when internally we had a four billion dollar company sitting internally. So there was, there was a few of those that happened through the life of battery that were, it was just interesting to see. And, um, I think that goes back to my same theme, which is like, be very thoughtful. Like, so, so my, my time now is haunted by, am I working on the right things?

Do you think that was the wrong thing? I think Metery was the right thing for me at the right time, but it was definitely not the right thing to do. It was definitely the right call to get into Archer Next in the figure. And I use it as a learning lesson to say, what happened with Metery is I fell into it. I fell into it from street of walls. I fell into it because I built up this huge database of traffic from content. And then I used that to help build and boost drop the marketplace with Metery.

It wasn't as if I was in college when I started and said, I want to go do recruiting. This is where I'm going to spend the rest of my life in. I just fell into it. It happened to work out really well, and I think I wouldn't have been able to start Archer if it wasn't for the battery acquisition.

I think looking back, it was something I would have done again, but I use that as a lesson to say, I do have a choice. I want to spend my time on and everybody does. And it's the most press it asset you have because we don't have that much time left. All right. If you're listening to this pod, I already know something about you.

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What was the math that you saw or like the graph or whatever that made you want to start figure? Like what was there a signal where you're like, Oh man, this can be the biggest company in the world. Cause I think you sold it to me. You go, we will either going to screw up and go bankrupt or we'll have a very small exit or it's going to be a hundred billion dollar company or you said something like that where it was like, this is either going to be the biggest thing ever or total failure. But what did you see that gave you the idea that this could be the biggest thing?

So what we're doing to hear figure is we're building humanoid robots. These are robots. When we say humanoid, I mean, it looks like the human form. So it has legs, arms, hands. We're not trying to look like a human, but we're trying to do everything a human can do. And when you look at the world today, if you go out in the world and look at everything you're doing, it requires a human interface in the physical world.

So the equivalent to, I always make analogies, when you use the internet, using a keyboard and mouse, and you can interact with all the internet. You can use a keyboard that your fingers are like your little keyboard and mice. You can basically interact with all the digital world. The physical world blasts several hundred years we built to interact with the human body. So we have like door handles, we have tools, we have stairs. Everything around us was built for a human interface. And so,

When you look at what we're doing here is we're trying to build an automation solution to do physical labor. How do we get into the world and do human-like tasks? And when you look at the market for human-like tasks, it's half from GDP. So like, you know,

GDP is roughly 70, 80 trillion. Half of that goes to human labor to pay wages every single year in the world. And it's roughly half or so if you go to any country or any country in the world, it's roughly half of GDP. And what we've seen now is we've seen this, we've seen these emergent properties happen in the space we operate here that are allowing us to build and do this this decade.

We have hardware that is capable of being built to do human-like tasks. And then from a software perspective, separately, we have software today, and we have AI systems today that can basically understand, like semantically, what's going on in the world and do human-like applications from a software perspective.

So here at Figure, so at a high level, the biggest company, the next 10, 15 years in the world will be AI powered humanoids. That's for sure going to happen.

The question is like what groups are going to do that? Well, I think Elon Musk, let me find this quote. I have this quote here. I think he said Tesla has a robot. I think it's called Optimus. So Elon says it will probably cost less than $20,000 to build and it will be a bigger business than cars. So like it's going to be huge. And so you just looked at that math and you're like, I have to go all in on this. But what's the business model? Like you rent them out to people or you sell them to people. What do you do?

Yeah, you can do either. I mean, there's definitely a similar CapEx model that is very similar to how we buy cars today, where you would want to buy the asset. It would have a certain amount of depreciable lives. You'd have to pay for servicing the maintenance. And then there's another model, which is like operating model, which is, we're calling like robots and servers, which is a leasing model. So you basically be able to put robots into, say, you know,

warehousing or manufacturing related applications, and you would charge basically a monthly fee for that work. That would be a lower price per year that you would pay, but ongoing. We're pushing the robot as a service operating model. We think it's the way to get cost down and make it affordable to the masses.

Um, and but some of the initial conversations were happening with clients too is that they're, you know, interested in buying them because they've been buying robots for, you know, a decade. So I think we're open to kind of getting out the world. What we're seeing here is we're seeing the ability to get these robots over time with a high enough volumes, cheaper than like a mid price car. Um, and then if that robot can last,

four or five years before it's fully depreciated, the cost should be pretty affordable for the even for the home. We should be able to put robots in the home for, you know, several hundred dollars per month.

I was talking to my family members. I was like, man, it's the guy Brett. He builds a humanoid. It's like, they're like, what the fuck is that? I'm like, well, it's like, you know, how like Amazon workers do this stuff. It's going to do that. And then like inevitably the answer is like, Oh, so he's going to put everyone out of work. All right. That's cool. What's your rebuttal to that? Like, how do you think about that? Like, you know, you seem very like altruistic and you're like, you're like, I want to save the world. So what are these people? What are they going to do? And when are they going to lose their jobs?

So what we're seeing from like a labor perspective is that the amount of people in the workforce is starting to shrink. So we have like roughly 3.3 billion humans working in the world. A big chunk of that is the baby boomers and the retiring out of the market.

And then from the other side, we're basically having roughly a little over one child per household at this point. We're well under the replacement rate for humans, which needs to be about 2.2 bursts per household. So we're not putting more into the bottom of the funnel. We're not putting more in, and the bottom of the funnel we're retiring out. So we're basically shrinking the labor force.

So when we walk into the conditionalism is what you say. It's like you walk into one of these big, big companies and they're like, we're worried about you taking our people's jobs. Like how are we going to message this? Like what are they going to do? That is complete 180 from what we see with boots in the ground. If you actually do the work of walking into a company, that's big. And you ask them their number one problem, they'll say employee headcount and retention. So we walk into these warehouses, manufacturing, retail, whatever.

And we walk in and they're telling us that 15% of employees don't show up every day to work. They're saying they have 2% to 3% weekly attrition, 50% to 150% annual turnover.

The working conditions are harsh. It's really hot in the summers. It's cold in the winters. You have to walk miles per day. You have to pick like a lot of items per hour. It's a lot easier to drive an Uber in this condition than being in these facilities. So when we walk in these clients, they have a labor crisis going on and they need help ASAP and they can't figure out how to automate these more dexterous and human-like tasks.

And so, you know, our goal is to go in there and do like the dirty and hard work that they can't find humans to do today. And we think there's just probably, I've never seen a business like this where we walk in and they're like, we'll buy a million of them if you could do this. And so the demand is like, I think it almost unbounded. I don't even know how to handicap it. It's if you can build the technology, we need millions.

When we were hanging out, I was like, why don't you just do a software company? And you're like, software's harder. And I was like, what? Why? He goes, well, because I had to make people want battery. I had to convince them that this was a good idea. And then I had infinite options on what to build. And I had to hope that I was building the right thing. And then he said,

With hardware, I can find problems where there's already demand. I know if I'm able to build this, people will want it. And I know that there's a set of laws dictated by physics of which create the rules. And I just have to figure out within that very small set of rules, can I build this? And as of now, you're like, I think I can, but I haven't entirely figured it out. But it's a much simpler puzzle to figure out.

in order to like build this thing. And if I build it, the business is going to be the biggest thing ever because I know people want that. And I remember like when you said that it kind of changed my perspective on a lot of things. Did I say that right? Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. Like in software, you have a lot of these things that are like these emergent properties that happen in like say the marketplace or SAS characteristics that make it really hard to control. You have retention and you have competitive threats and you have like feature build. There's a lot of things you need to do to kind of keep

the wheels in the car and keep it running. And in hardware, if there is demand for the product, it really puts the focus on the technology development. So at Archer, we already know people are driving to the airport. There's like in LA, there's 60 million people driving around every day and 6 million of them are taking over an hour, going like 10, 15 miles.

So like, you know, you go to like passage units, LAX, if you could fly that in seven minutes, you want to drive that an hour and a half. Like, what do you want to do for your time? We know if you can fly that in seven minutes and it's safe and it's affordable, over time, a good amount of folks will take that service. So it really puts the burden on the technology development of like,

Can you go build something that is safe and affordable and like, you know, and gets good performance, like in the reliability side. So that was the, that's the archer case, similar figure. It's the case of, can you get robots that can actually do use for work and.

This is governed by physics. There are rules. There are equations. So like there is no like, I don't need to have to go out and invent a new physics equation or like aerodynamic equation to make that happen. I understand how an airfoil will behave in a fluid. I understand how battery cells discharge. Like we understand all those rules. So it really puts the burden on us to

Like think about like what's really important here and what's really important. If I had like being back the most important thing to myself 20 years ago, I would say Brett, what really matters or what doesn't matter is like marketing, PR, who you raised capital from, the tech crunch article, like none of that is meaningful. It'll make you feel good as a founder because it's usually extremely shitty for like so many years building companies.

What really matters is the technology development that you make, which means how often you're iterating, and then you can measure that by how much progress you're making between those iteration cycles. That's basically the game that we're playing a figure and we played an archer.

It feels like you're like playing with connects or something, you know what I mean? It felt like play when I was at your office. I remember people were chilling. I think I came on a Friday and people were just sitting around and they weren't drinking beer or anything, but it was like that same like vibe of like we're just sitting around like and they like giggled with like the knee moved, you know what I mean? It felt like you're like it was almost like a glorified Lego set a little bit. It felt pretty exciting.

Yeah, I think it feels like the, I would say it probably feels like the most cutting edge R&D lab you could walk into with a focus to move fast and ship product. How big, how big is figure going to be in 10 years? I think the space is, it's the world's largest hand.

It's, I think it's probably most similar to a lot like autonomous vehicles in terms of like the technology development, the risk to developing and deploying the technology. But I think it's easier to scale. We don't have the same safety hurdles that self-driving car would have to have to drive safely within on, you know, on city streets and not harmony, not harmony, but in those speeds. And so I think it's, I think it's bigger than a self-driving industry. And I think it's easier to scale it once it's working.

So I think if we can demonstrate our robots in commercial opportunities and we're learning, like we're in commercial work doing useful work and we're like training our neural nets with real world data and getting better, recursively getting better. I happen to think this business is probably valued bigger than Cruz and Waymo, which are like, these are 30 billion dollar free revenue companies. And I think we can do these over the next like 24 months. We'll have robots in commercial.

applications with some of the world's biggest brands. In five years, you think figures in the $40, $50 billion value range? I just think this is a really big industry, and we're sub five years from deploying robots into commercial opportunities that are making money. It'll be in very low volumes, but you'll be able to see the robots doing useful work, and you'll be able to see the robots getting better over time.

I have to think that'd be a really large market cap. Who knows what it'll look like. I think it'll be significant to where we stand now. And then hopefully within 10, 15, 20 years, we're like, we're seeing, we're seeing robots at scale and commercial opportunities really help fill about void with labor force that we talked about earlier.

I wish I would have invested more. I think I invested $25,000. I should have done more. Yeah. It's risky stuff. So I don't. Yeah. It'd be $25,000 makes you feel good. I don't want to lose too much of your money. So. Oh, I wish I would have done more. But dude, I appreciate you doing this. You inspired me. I think.

I think that like I'm, you and I are not the same. And I appreciate that people like you exist in the world. You are significantly bolder than I am, but I hope that the takeaway for people listening is like,

That shit wears off on you. So whenever I hang out with you, I feel bad about myself in a really great way. It's like when you hang out with a really fit athlete, you're like, oh man, I thought I was fit. I'm nothing. I could totally step it up. I can push this thing way harder. I could push myself way more than I thought I could. That's how I feel when I'm around you. You're a really special person, and I'm very thankful that I get to hear some of your wisdom.

one of the things on this pod and in my life, we try to find people early. And I have a feeling that we are very early in your journey and that you're going to be a very, very big deal, a bigger deal than you already are in the next five or 10 years. And I'm very thankful that we're able to like, you know, we bought your stock early. Yeah, thanks, Sam. That's the pod. All right. Now, show me the robot.

I feel like I can rule the world I know I could be what I want to I put my all in it like no days off On a road, let's travel never looking back