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Kind: captions Language: en 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 [ ] airplane you know what I mean what did you did you know anything about that no I did not I um knew nothing I was just like I really wanted to do it [Music] 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 a hundred million dollars which in most everyone’s case that’s a massive home run you’re incredibly successful of what she 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 took 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 uh 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 he’s a Loki guy he’s not crazy high energy um he’s not one of these guys who we have on who is a a personality where they have a big personality on on YouTube or Twitter or anything like that he’s subtle man the guy’s humble and he’s quiet and I find that to be incredibly fascinating my opinion in 10 years Brett is going to 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 going to be like that and no one knows who he is now or at least uh 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 sampar p-a-r-r so the the word the and then Sam and then par tweet at me and let me know what you think about this guy and what makes people like him special because I’m really fascinated 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 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 out of necessity um my career when I started battery I couldn’t get anybody to invest in the business for the first like almost like three years uh so I basically put all my savings into the company took no salary for three or four years how much savings did you have you’re 25. I think I had like close to 200 000 I put into the business um and then you know I didn’t take any salary for three years I meant like um had to pay for my own health care or food rent I was living in Manhattan it’s really expensive and 2015 things got so bad that I had to borrow I think it was fifty thousand dollars to pay for rent and survive I had like credit card debt I was yeah I was probably in the red like negative a hundred thousand dollars prior to the acquisition of energy well what did battery exit for um 110 million so that was a that was a windfall right yeah that was great I raised like a little over 10 million dollars over like seven years so I had a large you know percentage ownership of the company so but 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 said that you put most all of your money into Archer right yeah when I so I started archer in 2018 so I called Arch radiation and uh we build um electric vertical takeoff and Landing aircraft so these are basically aircraft somewhat similar to a helicopter but they’re purely electric and they’re they’re 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 and the pitch coming out of battery was just it was bad like it was um hey we need um basically probably about a billion dollars maybe more to get the market or we or we don’t make it we’re 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 an electric aircraft before and I was coming off a software you know 10 years 15 years in software so that that pitch did not really resonate too well in 2018. you’re like uh 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 like people were making fun of me from being from Midwest you’re like you’re like the whole milk version of an Elon Musk you know what I mean you’re the Midwest version of the of a neon musk but what the hell did you know about I mean software is easy in a sense like you know like it’s just code right like No One’s Gonna Die if you if you screw it up or in most cases No One’s Gonna Die and if I talk to a guy who’s doing like Computer Engineering or computer science I’m like what the hell do you know about building a [ ] airplane you know what I mean what did you did you know anything about that no I did not I I knew nothing I was just like I 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 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 which I don’t but I would like what I 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’ll go to like a college a few college courses I don’t know 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 I um one is I spent a tremendous amount of time after a veteri figuring out what I wanted to work on next I kind of fell into the recruiting Marketplace space with veteri and I really wanted to be very thoughtful um 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 it 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 uh so I think I made um I think that spreadsheet is about 300 people I connected with whether they’re at NASA or professors or working in Industry at rotorcraft or airplanes or turbofan development whatever it would look like and I just immerse myself and I want to know every technical book that was on on the market I wanted to understand how to build electric aircraft like what are the components and what are the physics governed by in the space and uh 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 uh Mr Conway my name’s Brett yeah um yeah can you talk to me about helicopters it’s it’s crazy man like people people will pick up the phone for you like it’s just like you just gotta pick up the phone and call and people will talk to you people wanna people wanna help what was the most uh like breathtaking call you had or meaningful call you had I did a I did a meeting so I I in addition to calling everybody in the world the parallel track was I was going back to school so I went back and like learned how to do uh like mechanical and aerospace engineering and you know 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 like like basically Hyatt Hotel in Atlanta was hosting this like electric um aircraft design course so it was a lot of aerodynamics folks and uh 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 uh being lectured on how to build an aircraft electric aircraft from scratch how to think about the propulsion aerodynamics uh batteries and um it was 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 me too I’m doing my PhD electric Aviation and I want to build an EV tile 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 where 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 the head of the group there and um he’s basically the the head of all mechanical aerospace engineering 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 um electric aircraft um and uh this lab happened to be off of Archer Road so I called the business Archer Aviation what percentage of the veteri windfall did you put into this education portion as well as our starting Archer I 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 cache so I I had just from from veteri just like paid my bills I took no salary at Archer for two years I don’t know something like that like this is a zero um like cover Insurance type thing and 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 new thing and no nobody would like I couldn’t even get meetings at one point I got introduced like a 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 right when covet hit and uh I got a big introduction from him uh from like one of my investors Mark Laurie introduced me to Joel he’s 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 gotta stop you right here man this is the most disrespectful pitch I’ve ever seen we have people dying because of covid I think 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 us or we’re also like you know I know I know covet’s bad but the business is gonna 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 would say probably gonna 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 like I didn’t I was I was just barely getting by and then overnight things changed and I was like I’m gonna spend six or twelve months just like seeking planning I’m gonna figure out what because I don’t 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 icky guy it’s like this like for it’s like this Japanese like uh concept where there’s like four rings that overlap and one of the Rings is like uh 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 and you’re good at 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 I thought of it like I’m just gonna use my skills and what do I enjoy and I’m just gonna try and do something slightly better and I think that’s a pretty rational way to go about doing things like most people are uh 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 like we’re like all right this software thing this veteran thing it worked I don’t know if it worked as good or as 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 because I know at veteri 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 because I find that fascinating I think at the end of the day I just wanna want to wake up it’s like a amazing future that’s exciting inspiring are you motivated by money not really no um I think if I wanted to make a lot of money I’m probably in the wrong field you know I think like the like there’s like a risk reward balance in startups like I think if if it was just about money I think I’d be basically probably back in software still uh I think going and doing these projects I’m working on now or just probably the probably the surest path to losing everything when you’re starting figure um 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-sized 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 um personally bankrupt last year the figure what 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 you can’t sell that as an officer right yeah so like Insider yeah we were like you know I I made it pretty uh clear when I started the business and even when I went public that like uh me as the like 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 in the spec uh pipe as we went public at 10 bucks and so um personally I was like I’ll put another million dollars in here a three billion dollar evaluation to show you guys that’s all I got and um and when I left I left archer in April of 2022 I had 12-month stock lockup this is public like there’s an SEC document for this and so I couldn’t I couldn’t 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 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 function figure and the stock went from like when I left the stock was at five or six bucks it wouldn’t take a dollar eighty end of last year earlier this year and I I was just like I don’t know if I can get to I don’t know if I can get the 12 month Mark which was uh 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 lockup which which I’m you know I have a bunch of stocks though here I’m not selling right now but like um 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 that like was that you know 40 or something like that we’re building we’re spending like millions of Hardware bigger 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 Shell stock transferred to bank account uh 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 uh getting the cash into the bank account and putting money in the figure 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 categorizing 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 of stocks going down like 75 percent 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 you know most most important thing you’re doing right now it’s you know talk about I’m like I’m running out of money I might not make it what did they say what was their feedback I I think they were I thought I think they thought I was a maniac I think everyone thinks you’re a maniac yeah I mean like 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 your hand you handle stress differently like I I’ve toured your factory and you were like smiling and like jumping around like you uh like it seems like you’re like Jolly almost I don’t know you’re showing me this [ ] I remember going to your factory or your office and 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 you 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 I know that you go all in on things I didn’t realize how close you were to running out of 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 months yeah I think it’s even worse like we I had a second mortgage on my house to get through it no way what did she say yeah so I also in the category of like you know people thinking I’m a maniac my wife’s just she’s been with me for 15 years now through all of this like we lived in you know thousand dollar a month apartment in New York we had to downsize two to get through the veteri stuff to you know to to now Archer and figure she’s great like she’s she’s a warrior she like Believes In Me and she has total faith in what we’re doing and I don’t take these things lightly like a really these are like planned exercises I need to go through and I’ve been been through many near-death experiences I mean Archer like like what I went through a figure was probably like a tip of the iceberg to what I went through at Archer last like like five years like Archer was just uh you know a go in public was just like a recipe to get sued and we were going public to us the SPAC process we you know as soon as we price the SPAC deal the market turned on spacks it was it was just a roller coaster um so yeah I just I’ve been through many exercises like this before and I think I can weather them pretty well now 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 I’m um 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 Street of walls 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 uh 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 is 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 the site what is streetofwalls.com yeah so I so when I when I went to college I enrolled in uh like industrial and system Engineering also Finance this is like you know not something I also talk about a lot but like I basically did a few years in finance after school before like doing the startup life why don’t you talk about that was that embarrassing it just doesn’t the pitch doesn’t isn’t great like I think like people just don’t like hearing about Finance folks and I also didn’t really enjoy it like I think you know I look at those years of saying 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 like would have been more important just for me to dive in and start building businesses full time um so I was at you know in school somebody gave me this book it’s called like the fast track to like invest in banking management consulting and trading and I read it and it was like you know people are going to finance like Drive Ferraris they just like do so well and they make 150 000 after school and I was like I was dead broke in college like taking out loans to the paper school and I was like man I’m gonna just go this is how I’m gonna 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 uh like M A modeling and lbo questions or leverage buyout questions and I just I didn’t know anything and they’re like you know I think the guy was nice he was like listen you just you have to have a certain like bar of understanding of financial finances he’s like this is such a disrespectful interview yeah this is the second time you’re disrespecting people constantly yeah exactly and um it’s like you’re like wasting my time and I was like man like um I’m not really learning how to do this stuff in college so I’m just gonna have to go alert it and um you know I was learning that I just started like writing notes and writing about it and um when my brother actually went to finance my brother works at a private Equity company now I was like I’m just gonna repackage all these notes I’m gonna put them online and also give them my brother and um like like when I’m where am I going to use them again and that was the Genesis for a street of walls we’ve I think I’ve gotten like 30 million views uh of that site 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 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 SEO that’s insane I mean that’s kind of a lot right I mean for such a high uh 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 I saw at one point I was making like five thousand dollars a month selling those interview guides like like one year out of college it was great I mean it was like a 98 margin business okay 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 I didn’t I I strongly believe like I I strongly believe I need to touch like the mass market and um to have like significant impact in technology you need to have like a a either a lot of people using your product or very few that use it like really like it a lot and I just felt like the products the services I was starting were just um not important enough for my time so in the Pod we on this pod we talk a lot about like ideas and like different opportunities in terms of Veterinary what opportunities did you see that you guys weren’t able to pounce on that still exists one of the things we did is um you know so work so I started the battery at the NYU incubator um and um one of the guys there handed me a book one day and it’s like it was it was the predictable Revenue book uh which is basically like an outbound lead generation marketing Playbook he said hey you need to read this so it’d probably be pretty helpful for veteri um and uh those guys it was actually tap Commerce those guys sold for like over 100 million to Twitter uh so it was Brian Dondo there and um I ended up reading the book it’s like this is great we need to like replicate the system fully end to end so I started like working on um writing this uh outbound lead generation uh process and we ultimately gave it to um basically a person that’s here with me today so Lee randazzio gave it to her and said hey can you you go 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 a battery so that was basically like how do we put uh contact information of people and basically do this Cadence of emails out to folks to do like basically drum up leads and you can do this for both like customers where did you get the emails uh we had we built an offshore team of like 300 people in the Philippines and we did it all by scratch what does that mean going to LinkedIn or something and just build yeah you can um 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 uh there’s a lot on GitHub there’s a lot of you can get the emails through Facebook pretty easily there’s a basically a process where you can basically back into somebody’s personal email address there’s also like databases you can use a lot of folks shoes 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 um I think it was like an early 2013 2014 there was like the startup emerging um which is Outreach and we demoed it we’re like this is the same exact thing we just built internally you know Outreach now is like a four or five billion dollar company and we’re like watching Outreach scale up we have a product that this 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 outrage that was more customized for what we’re doing everything else but uh it was really funny to see us you know me go out and build like a 100 million dollar company when internally we had a four billion dollar company sitting internally uh so there was there was a few of those that happened through the life of battery that were it was just interesting to see 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 I think battery 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 um I use it as a learning lesson to say what happened with better 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 like from from content and then I use that to help build and bootstrap the marketplace with it wasn’t as if I like I was in college when I kind of the stuff started and said um I want to go do recruiting this is where I’m going to spend the rest of my life in it just I just fell into it and um happened to work out really well and I think I wouldn’t have been able to start Archer if it wasn’t for the veterinary acquisition so you know I think I think looking back it was something I would have done again but I used that less I use that as a lesson to say I do have a choice on what to spend my time on and everybody does and it’s the most pressed asset you have because we don’t have that much time left all right I gotta tell you about one thing that’s one of the great joys of my life and I’m not a cars guy I’m not a watch guy but there’s one thing that gives me a lot of joy and that is having a virtual assistant uh you know here’s the scenario I’m running my companies and even though I’m supposed to be this uh CEO we all know I spend 20 30 of my time just doing random [ ] stuff that is not high value but it’s just tedious the stuff that has to get done but it’s not creativity doesn’t require me and it doesn’t add a bunch of value to the business it’s just stuff just stuff that has to get done and so that stuff is what a virtual assistant does like just this week alone you know I lose my wallet so she goes to the DMV website fills out a bunch of forms it gets me a new license or um you know every morning people have their morning coffee I have my morning metrics and my morning metrics are basically all the business metrics that I care about compiled she goes she finds them for all the different sources puts it in Excel sheet takes a screenshot text it to me so that when I wake up in the morning I don’t go on Twitter or check my email I’m looking at what are what are the metrics at and what do I need to do I’m focused on the right things so having a virtual assistant is a no-brainer whether it’s travel booking email inbox or just knocking stuff off your personal to-do list that would have just lingered there forever um I think it’s a no-brainer if you’re a business owner you should definitely do it um I think one of the best ways to find a assistant is Shepard so go to support shepherd.com you know I pay my assistant I think eight dollars an hour something like that that’s double what she was making in her previous job so it’s a win for her and for me it’s super affordable it’s something that you know you don’t need to have the biggest business ever be the biggest big shot in order to afford it so it’s amazing I now do this for my CEO and my cm02 like I just give them assistance without them even asking because I know it makes them more productive that’s it does that for me so of course it’s gonna do that for them too so go to sportsshopper.com check them out um get an assistant and tell them I sent you they’ll take good care of you if you do that so sportsrefer.com check it out I can’t find this client info have you heard of HubSpot HubSpot is a CRM platform so it shares its data across every application every team can stay aligned no out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases HubSpot grow better 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 because I think you saw that to me you go we will either go to screw up and go bankrupt or we’ll have a very small exit or it’s going to be a 100 billion dollar company or you said something like that where it was like this is either gonna 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 so what what we’re doing to here figure is we’re building humanoid robots these are robots when we see humanoid I mean it 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 like 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 an analogy is when you use the internet using a keyboard and mouse and you can interact all the internet you can use a keyboard your little your fingers are like your little little keyboard and mice um you can basically interact with all the digital world the physical world will last 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 human-like tasks it’s half from GDP so like you know GDP is roughly 70 80 trillion half of that is goes to human labor to pay wages every single year in the world and it’s roughly half or so for you know for if you go to any company or any country in the world it’s roughly half a GDP and what we’ve seen now is we’ve seen this like we seem like these emergent properties happen in in the kind of the space we operate here that are allowing us to build and do this this decade we have Hardware from like um that is 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 uh applications from a software perspective so here at figure what’s so so at a high level the biggest company the next 10 15 years in the world will be humanoid like AI powered humanoids that like 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 um Tesla has a robot I think it’s called Optimus so Elon says it’ll probably cost less than twenty thousand dollars to build and it will be a bigger business than cars so like it’s going to be huge um and so you 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 you rent them out to people or you sell them to people what do you do yeah you can do either I mean this there’s a there’s definitely a similar capex model that is very similar to how we like buy and buy cars today where you would want to you know buy the asset it would have a certain amount of depreciable lives um you’d have to like pay for services and maintenance and then there’s another model which is like operating model which is we’re calling it robots of service which is a leasing model so you basically be able to put robots into say you know uh warehousing or manufacturing related applications and you would charge basically a monthly fee for that work and that would be a kind of a lower price per year that you would pay but ongoing and um so we you know here at figure we’re pushing the robotism service operating model we think it’s the way to get costs down to make it affordable to the masses um and but some of the initial conversations we’re having 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 of the world what um we’re seeing here is we’re seeing the ability to get these robots over time with the high enough volumes cheaper than like a mid-priced car um and then if that robot can last four or five years before it’s fully depreciated um the cost should be pretty affordable for the even 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 as they’re like are you talking to tomorrow I was like man it’s the guy Brett he builds a humanoid it’s like and they’re like what the hell you know what the [ ] is that I’m like well it’s like you know how like Amazon workers do this stuff it’s gonna do that and then like inevitably the answer is like oh so he’s gonna 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 do these people what are they gonna do and when are they going to lose their jobs so what we’re seeing from like a labor perspective is that the the amount of people in the workforce is starting to shrink so we have like roughly 3.3 billion humans working in uh in the world a big chunk of that is the Baby Boomers and they’re retiring out of the market and then from uh you know from the other side we’re basically having roughly a little over one um child per household at this point we’re well under the replacement rate for humans which needs to be like like about 2.2 uh bursts per household so we’re like we’re not putting more into the uh uh the top of the funnel we’re not putting any more in and the bottom funnel we’re retiring now so we’re basically shrinking the labor force so when we walk into um I think the conventionalism is what you say it’s like you walk into one of these like 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 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 in in 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 two to three percent 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 be in these facilities so when we walk into these clients they 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 um 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 problem 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 can do this and so the 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 is harder and I was like what why he goes well because I had to make people like want Veterinary like I had to convince them that this was a good idea and then like 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 could if 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 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 it changed my perspective on 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 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 the wheels in the car and keep it running and in Hardware if 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 are 60 million people driving around every day and six million of them are taking over an hour going like 10 15 miles so like you know you go to like Pasadena to LAX if you could fly that in seven minutes or 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 uh like you know and gets good performance like in the reliability side so that was the that’s the Archer case a similar figure it’s the case of can you get robots that can actually do useful work and this is governed by physics There Are Rules there are equations so like there is no like um 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 air foil will will behave in a fluid I understand how battery cells discharge like we 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 beam 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 raise 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 at 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 um and I 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 when 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 uh 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 [ ] product how big how big is figure going to be in 10 years I think the space is it’s the it’s the world’s largest ham it’s I think it’s probably most similar to 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 um hurdles that self-driving car would have to have to drive safely and on on you know on city streets and not Harmony not harm anybody at 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 we’re in commercial um 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 this business is probably valued bigger than cruise and waymo which are like these are 30 billion pre-revenue companies and I think we can do those over the next like 24 months we’ll have robots in applications with like some of the world’s biggest brands in five years you think figures in the in the um 40 50 billion dollar value range I just think like this is a really big industry and we’re we’re we’re so 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 I’d be a really large market cap who knows what what it’ll look like um I think it’ll be significant to where even 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 that void with the 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 it’s risky stuff so I don’t yeah it’d be uh 25 000 makes me feel good I don’t want to lose too much of your money so um I wish I would have done more but dude I appreciate you doing this you inspired me I think um 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 [ __ ] wears off on you so like whenever I hang out with you like I feel I feel bad about myself in a really great way like where I’m like you know it’s like when you hang out with like a really fit athlete you’re like oh man I thought I was fit I’m nothing I could totally step it up like I can push this thing way harder I can I can I could go way I could push myself way more than I thought I could that’s how that’s how I feel like when I’m around you you know you are you’re a really special person and I’m very thankful that I get to like hear some of your wisdom I think that um 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 ten 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