Brett Adcock — founder of Figure, Archer, and Vettery — sits down with Sam to reveal a new stealth project called Cover: a radar-based weapons imaging system licensed from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab that can detect guns and knives through clothing at 50 meters. The conversation covers why school shootings are the mission even though schools are the worst market, how Figure was built for speed from day one, Brett’s learning framework, and his philosophy that winning is everything.
Speakers: Brett Adcock (founder, Figure / Archer / Vettery), Sam Parr (host)
Introduction: Brett Adcock and the School Shooting Problem [00:00:00]
Sam: If you had to describe yourself as an entrepreneur, what would you say you are?
Brett: I just want to go build important things and win. That’s it.
Sam: We’re live with Brett Adcock. I wanted to start off with something crisp. You told me this story and this is something that’s fascinating about you — it’s about your ability to learn. I don’t want to butcher the story, but you said something like you were reading old research papers and found that in the ’70s NASA came up with this amazing thing, and you cold-called NASA and said, “Can you actually show me this device?” Is that story right?
Brett: Yeah, it’s pretty close. This is actually the first time I’ve talked about this publicly.
So for context — I’ve been following what’s happening at K-12 schools in the US as it relates to school shootings. If you look at the charts of how many shootings are actually happening at schools, how many deaths are happening — it’s like basically a school shooting once per day now in the US in K-12.
Sam: Is that true? That’s insane.
Brett: It’s true. I think it was over 200 people last year who were either shot or wounded or killed in the US at K-12. A third of those are in elementary schools. And the chart — if you look at it — is exponential. We 5x’d in 2018, almost year over year, then took another 3x move. We’ve basically 10x’d the number of school shootings over the last seven years or so. And it’s just getting worse.
The Real Problem: Hidden Handguns [00:02:30]
Brett: What I found is that most school shootings are not what we’re seeing on TV — where someone’s bringing in an assault weapon, planned it out, driving a truck onto campus. That happens a few times a year. 98-99% of all the other shootings are from a kid bringing a handgun to school every day. They get in a fight at some point, it escalates, and it becomes a shooting. It’s almost like an accessory — like bringing a friend. They have a handgun in their backpack.
From our analysis, several hundred thousand guns are being brought into schools in K-12 every year in the US and not found. And then a small fraction of those end up in the statistics we see — kids who get bullied or get in a fight and shoot somebody on campus.
One of my hobbies is reading research papers. The way I think you solve this is you need to be able to see the guns. Gun control is something I’m interested in and passionate about, but I don’t think it’s going to fix all school shootings forever. Last year there were 70-some stabbings in K-12 schools. So even if you halted guns, there are still knifings happening. We need to see the weapons.
The NASA Jet Propulsion Lab Discovery [00:05:00]
Brett: I came across a research paper from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab where they were doing work trying to detect bomb vests and weapons underneath garments and jackets — for Afghanistan and Iraq. They developed some really interesting weapons imaging technology. So I flew to JPL in Pasadena and talked to the guy who ran it.
Sam: Did you just cold call him?
Brett: Oh yeah, cold called for sure.
Sam: What did you say?
Brett: I said, “Hey, I read your paper, can we have a conversation?” Most people will get on the phone with you at this point. If you’re passionate about work they did for years and years that they’re no longer doing — somebody’s going to take that call. I don’t think that’s a hard thing to do.
So I flew in. The high level is that they developed a high-frequency radar — similar to your Wi-Fi or phone, in the electromagnetic spectrum, like radio waves, but really high frequency and really souped up. They were able to start penetrating clothing and reconstruct images of what’s happening inside bags and underneath clothing.
If you read the research papers, it’s like airport security, but you can do it 50 meters away, at camera frame rate. You could point this at the entrance of a school and see every gun, knife, and bomb. It doesn’t need to be metallic — it could be plastic, any material.
Sam: Is it radio waves? Is that dangerous?
Brett: If you had ionizing electromagnetic waves like X-ray, yes. These are non-ionizing rays — almost like your cell phone and Wi-Fi.
Seeing the Machine [00:07:30]
Brett: They worked on it for years and wrapped up around 2013 or so. When I got there, we were talking and chatting and I didn’t even think to ask to see the machine. At the end of the conversation he said, “Do you want to come see it?”
We walked down four flights of stairs to the basement. He takes the cover off — it’s dusty, huge, like a compact computer at the bottom, all the electronics very dated. He turns it on and demos it for me. We had a mannequin with a gun underneath a shirt. He shows me the image, and it was unbelievable — like a camera picture of the gun. And because it’s radio frequency, you also get a 3D reconstruction, almost like a point cloud of the object.
Sam: Was this before you were going to do Figure — like this was your number one or two idea?
Brett: This was a while ago. I’d been mostly curious about the space. And then what happened from 2018 to now is we’ve seen a 5x spike in school shootings. The chart of school shootings is looking like Nvidia’s stock price.
The One-Chart Business [00:09:30]
Sam: We talk on MFM about one-chart businesses — where you see some crazy chart and you’re like, “Oh, there’s an opportunity.” It’s like a tidal wave. If you just catch that wave and you aren’t even that good, the market’s pulling it out of you. So that was kind of your one chart?
Brett: Exactly. Someone came in to Figure at one point in 2023 — an investor who was looking at solutions for school shootings coincidentally. They were looking at a startup using CCTVs, basically the cameras already in a school, to find guns. The problem is all the guns are hidden. When someone brandishes a weapon or pulls it out, a second later they’re shooting. You can’t stop the shootings. You can just get more prepared about how to respond faster, maybe save some lives if the shooting lasts longer. You’re not stopping weapons from getting in.
I was telling him about my experience with JPL and he looked me dead in the face and said, “Listen, as somebody who has kids — how are you not trying to make this work?” And so at that time I said, I’ve got to figure out how to spend some time and money making this useful.
Cover: Launching the Stealth Startup [00:11:30]
Sam: So is that what you’re going to do? You’re launching this as a startup? Are you going to have someone else run it?
Brett: Yeah. We haven’t announced this yet, but we have about 12 people on the project. We licensed all the intellectual property from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. And we will have our first system up and imaging weapons in 30 days.
Sam: Are you going to run it?
Brett: We have a team from JPL running it right now. I don’t think that business can be as big as Figure, but it’s a monster business.
Sam: Let’s talk about this for a minute.
Brett: This is not just a school thing. This is stadiums, churches, hospitals — anywhere. My view is that over a long enough period of time, as longevity improves for humans, the severity of having an accident and dying is going to be higher and higher. Meaning — we’re not going to want to do riskier things as we can live longer. It’s why in the movies, if somebody’s immortal, they’re living in their home. They don’t leave. Because if you die, you’re dead forever.
Right now we have a finite period of time, so humans take a lot of risks. We drive cars, we ride motorcycles, we do all this stuff with pretty high risk. But if you were going to live forever, you wouldn’t be doing that. I think over a long enough period of time, you won’t really move through the world without imaging systems like this for safety.
On Pitching Big vs. Small Ideas [00:14:00]
Sam: You’re really good at telling a story. You just went with the longevity angle — like, “We’re going to live much longer” — that’s just such a challenging way to think for a lot of people, myself included. But when I hear that pitch I think, “Yeah, of course, that makes wonderful sense.” And it makes me think: going big and having these grand visions is almost easier than doing something smaller. You know what I mean?
Brett: It’s 100% easier. You can hire better people because they’re more ambitious and interested in working on harder things. The outcomes could be larger. You’re talking about building new industries that maybe have never been built before. Investors want high-risk, high-reward trades where they can make 50 to 100 times their money. Most VC investments fail, so they really need that hundred-bagger. Grand things offer that risk-reward opportunity.
I have this belief that harder things are easier. I think it really depends on the industry and market you’re going into, but relatively speaking, there’s some truth in that.
Sam: Yeah, because Vettery — you sold Vettery for $100 million. That’s a big outcome. That’s life-changing for virtually everyone. But it doesn’t have an inspirational angle to it necessarily.
Brett: I think, listen — outside of spending time with loved ones, we’re at work most of our lives. Most people don’t like where they work. If you’ve ever looked for a job, it’s like the worst process. Looking for a job is soul-crushing. What we tried to do at Vettery is: if we can get all the world’s employers together with all the candidates in the world, we can use AI to make matches at scale and find the best opportunity for each person. If you can solve that, you could put people in much better places for employment — jobs they really love.
Sam: I mean, you just totally elevated it. I would have pitched it as a job board, and you made it into something really inspirational. But even as good as you are at pitching Vettery, it pales in comparison to pitching this X-ray machine thing.
Naming the Company: Cover [00:17:00]
Sam: What’s the name going to be?
Brett: The name is Cover — C-V-R.
Sam: What’s your philosophy on names?
Brett: I really like names that are, at the most basic level, easy to say, spell, and pronounce. Most company names violate one of those three rules. I really want something that over time we can build a real iconic brand around. Branding, the icon, the way you think about everything — for me it’s like when you build a house, you pour a lot of concrete for a really good foundation. You do it in the early days and hopefully you do it right. I’ve definitely done it wrong before — we’ve had name changes. But these names are unique to my perspective of how I want my businesses to look and feel: Vettery, Archer, Figure, Cover. I just spend a decent amount of time thinking through that in the early days.
Sam: Are you adamant on the exact URL? Cover.com looks like an insurance company.
Brett: We own cover.AI. And I own figure.AI and I bought archer.GSD — so it was fly.archer.GSD. I would own the .AI domain in these cases when possible.
Funding Strategy and the Real Mission [00:19:00]
Sam: When you’re thinking about how big Cover’s going to be, what’s the pitch?
Brett: We’re not pitching investors right now. I’m just funding it myself. It’s more like a passion project, to be honest. The pitches are going to be unique because if we end up raising outside capital, I don’t know — there might be a path where we never raise capital here. The technology is also very difficult, so hopefully we make it work.
The biggest market is not schools. Schools is actually the worst market to go into — it’s a bad pitch. Schools have very low budgets. They don’t have systems like this right now. The money-making opportunity is relatively small compared to stadiums, concerts, hospitals, areas with big budgets. Most big stadiums you go through have some metal detector. TSA, homeland security — there are real security applications for this outside of schools that could pay a lot more.
Schools is the worst pitch for fundraising. But I really want to solve the K-12 school problem. I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for that. We’re going to schools to help solve this. I want to see if I can help prevent school shootings, and that’s the only reason I’m funding this project.
Ideas on the Shelf: Genetics, Supersonic, Synthetic Meat [00:21:30]
Sam: If I had to bet, you’re sort of like me where you have a document where you just jot down interesting ideas that you probably aren’t going to get to. If you had an additional 24 hours a day, what would you be spending it on?
Brett: A few things. I think there are areas in genetics I’m interested in and doing a lot of research on. I’m really interested in electric supersonic travel — I’m really excited about what supersonic flight could look like electric. My experience building aerial vehicles gives me a couple ideas about how to design an aircraft that could work through very divergent parts of the mission — very high altitudes and high speeds.
I also really like the industry of synthetic foods. There’s been a lot of controversy recently. Synthetic meat — is it impossible? The people who are literally growing meat in a lab — that’s not plant-based. You’re taking cultured cells and growing real meat in a lab.
Sam: Why does that interest you? Because you’re an animal lover? Because cows create a lot of pollution?
Brett: It just seems super unnecessary to raise animals and butcher them and eat them. If you could choose to eat a steak that was just as good as a steak you have today — real steak, real muscle tissue and fats — and it came from a lab instead of a cow, with all the same chemical properties, what would you say?
Sam: I think I’m a little bit an early adopter on weird things. That sounds awesome. I’m in.
Brett: You understand how that’s weird for the average person, right?
Sam: Dude, do you remember when we were kids and green ketchup came out? I remember eating green ketchup and I was like, this is the exact same thing — but because it looks different, I don’t even want to touch it.
Brett: TV and radio and lights and electricity were all weird at some point. Cars were weird. Everybody said, “Why would you have a car when you have a horse?” All of these were radical in the moment.
If we think about civilization a thousand years from now — if you think about 10,000 more years and we’re on Mars and the moon — you’re going to grow cows in bubbles on Mars and butcher them? That seems unrealistic. It just seems like it won’t scale.
Sam: I don’t think you understand how unique some of the things you think are. And I like to think that because of where I’m from — which oddly you are too — you don’t totally grasp that the way you think is quite unique and a little bit larger than the average person. What you’re saying makes sense, but there’s a lot of emotional baggage to overcome. I do agree though — I think that interests me as well and I would do it.
Entrepreneurial Identity [00:26:00]
Sam: If you had to describe yourself as an entrepreneur in one word — what word best describes your philosophy?
Brett: I don’t really reflect like that too often. I just want to go build important things and win. That’s it.
Sam: What percentage of your philosophy is based on winning versus the excitement of making stuff?
Brett: All of it’s winning. I don’t want to do something exciting in a lab that doesn’t have the ability to have commercial applications and build a big business that has implications for the masses. I’m not a research scientist — I don’t have passion for that.
I like thinking about how we’ve evolved as a species over the last several hundred years and how technology has been probably the biggest lever arm for our consciousness and understanding of the world. The only way to really do that is at mass scale. Electricity in a lab that wasn’t brought to all of civilization is marginally helpful. The orders-of-magnitude improvements we’ve had in humanity have come from releasing that to the world as a ubiquitous utility.
For me, winning is the most important thing. We have a certain finite time to do this kind of stuff — at some point we’ll be too old or incapable and it’s on to the next generation. So I think we have a certain amount of time to go win and do useful things, because it’s devastating to spend 20 or 30 years working on something that doesn’t work. That’s the worst case scenario for an entrepreneur. You’re devoting all your time away from friends and family into a business — and if it doesn’t win, it’s just a terrible story.
Sam: I think that when I talk to people who are just starting things, that’s often what I’ll say too. The biggest issue is spending 10 years on something and it’s just mediocre. It’s better for it to suck right away.
Brett: Agreed. I actually do a lot of calls with early entrepreneurs getting going, and I’m super intense about the idea and the direction and the “why” — and they’re just like, “Yeah yeah yeah, how do I hire my first engineer? How do I raise a SAFE note?” And I’m like, dude — if I could reverse time, I would spend a month on these questions. But most early guys just don’t want to hear it. They want to get moving.
I kind of fell into Vettery, but I built Archer and Figure with a lot of purpose and intent. That’s the one thing I would pass down to the newer generation of builders.
How to Evaluate an Idea [00:29:30]
Sam: What’s your checklist for whether something is worth your time?
Brett: You can’t just get one thing right. You can’t just get the idea right, or the commercial plan, or the fundraising. I think it’s really about building out your thinking on how you’re actually going to get this thing done — in the face of 95% of all companies that try this failing.
It’s not just about the idea and how you’re going to execute it. It’s: how are you going to balance moving fast versus moving slower? Product quality? What are you going to build as a tier-one priority versus later? Who are your first clients — enterprise or SMBs? How are you going to get distribution — organically, through social, inbound or outbound sales?
I have a little chart I always draw — north, south, east, west. You want to go north. You’re going to get this cone going north. You’re not going to be dead north the whole time, but you want to not be heading south for too long or you’ll die. Those are a function of all the characteristics I talked about — commercialization plan, how you’re going to make money, how you’re going to fund the business, the team you bring on, the culture you build, and the execution of the product. All of those have to be thoughtful and heading in the right direction.
At Figure right now — we’re going to BMW, to industrial settings, but we want to be in the home. If we could be in the home today we would be. We’re using industrial commercialization as a way to get ready and more prepared for putting a robot in every home in the world. Tesla did something similar — started more expensive, even though Elon wanted it to be the Model T, because higher-end gave them more profits to fund future stuff.
Sam: But then why has Fisker failed twice in a row while Tesla just keeps dominating? What’s your answer?
Brett: They didn’t get the product and some of the other stuff right the same way Tesla did. They didn’t get speed right, and the product quality, and the way they introduced themselves to the world — all of that wasn’t balanced well enough. And the company failed twice in a row.
Figure on 60 Minutes and the Culture of Speed [00:33:00]
Sam: You were on 60 Minutes the other day. You had a plate with an apple and a banana in front of the robot, and you said, “Hand me the apple,” and it reached and found the right fruit. It made a mistake once or twice but corrected itself — you said, “That’s the wrong one,” and it picked up the right one. What’s crazy to me is that Figure is two years old. I’ve seen how quickly you’ve been able to do this. When I talk to people, they say everything’s late with tech and hardware — but somehow Brett hasn’t been late. Figure has been lightning fast. What have you guys done to be so fast?
Brett: When I started Figure — and also when I started Archer — I built the company with this idea of how to move extremely fast before it was even incorporated. The whole company was built just for speed.
We have our company mission statement, then everything else flows from that — how we built the org chart, the values we hire and fire for, how we think about compensation, how we build schedules. We have 120 engineers and zero program managers. Zero. We have a certain philosophy around what to do and how to build hardware and software that makes us kind of the anti-Silicon Valley company in Silicon Valley, as it relates to this.
We really care about getting things built quicker and iterating faster. It’s been done over a very long period of time — decades — and building a company that can do that is extremely hard. There’s really no good precedent outside of Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla has well over 100,000 people and is moving at the speed of a small startup. Generally when you add headcount, companies just slow down. You don’t notice it. The board gives you signals to be safer. Everything slows to a halt.
So you have to fight this from day one. The best way you can fight it is to design the whole org from the ground up to do this — or do what Elon did with Twitter: walk in, fire 80% of people, and restructure at the start to go faster and ship product.
It’s too laborious to say “we move fast” as a single thing. The whole company was built just to move fast.
What Slows People Down — and What Speeds Them Up [00:36:30]
Sam: What are you asking your applicants to see if they have that ability?
Brett: A lot of times people haven’t been in that kind of environment. When they get into a much faster-paced environment, it just becomes overwhelming and too stressful to handle. If you were a PhD student for 10 years, moving slow, and you come here — it’s a real culture shock. We’ve had it happen several times where people come in late, move slow, and it’s just frustrating for them. There’s probably a lot of anxiety there.
There are also people who believe the longer you take to build something, the safer and better it is. That’s for sure wrong. Because in the two-year period where someone’s slowly designing one robot, I’m going to have my third-gen robot out. I’ll have run it an order of magnitude longer. I’ll have found all the problems 10 times sooner. I’ll have had time to fix them recursively and make it better. The slower approach will just be a worse product.
Sam: How do you measure whether someone’s fast enough?
Brett: You look at how many iterations they’ve done and how much progress they made between those cycles. For a car — how many versions have you gotten out over the last decade and how much progress between each one? A rocket is similar. A robot — how many robot iterations are we doing, what version are we on? iPhone — how many versions over 15 years and how much progress between each one?
That will ultimately set the slope of the curve for speed, and that slope will correlate at a high level to how much risk there is of failure in the business long term.
Learning Framework: The Tree Model [00:39:30]
Sam: As we wrap up — you’ve mentioned genetically engineered food, planes, humanoid robots, these machines that detect guns. You have a wide range of knowledge, but unlike a lot of people who know a lot, you actually go deep. I’ve been to your home. I’ve seen textbooks on a variety of topics. You have a really unique way of learning. Do you have a framework for it?
Brett: Learning is always really challenging for me. I think everything like a tree. I have to first build this trunk of first-order understanding about a topic before I can ever comprehend and remember the limbs and the leaves. I have to have a fundamentally sound understanding of the trunk before I can go deeper.
Sam: Where do you turn to for that?
Brett: You just have to find it — Wikipedia, papers, Google searches, GPT-4. But the key skill is: can you clearly communicate this topic — whether it’s an engineering topic or not — to a 12-year-old sitting on a barstool? Most people can’t do that. Even people I work with — I have a hard time sometimes understanding the update on something. It’s a skill. You have to learn how to boil things down and really truly understand the basic characterization of what’s happening.
Some of the smartest people I know are also the most clear-worded about a topic.
Sam: That’s a really good insight. It probably comes from being an outsider who got into this stuff later, or from the fact that there are so many multi-disciplinary areas — software, hardware, electromagnetics — that you really need to communicate clearly across groups.
Brett: Even here at Figure — a software person who writes firmware and an electromagnetics person who builds a rotor-stator for an electric motor, those folks don’t understand each other’s disciplines generally. They need to communicate with each other and they can’t be using inside baseball terms. So this topic of communicating really well and understanding things really clearly is super important.
Influences and the Energy of Doing Hard Things [00:42:30]
Sam: You have a pretty strong outlook on life. Which people you’ve read about have had the biggest influence on your philosophy?
Brett: There have been really great entrepreneurs over time who’ve shown a path that this can all be done — Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. These guys are the best at what they do and have shown the world that really incredible things can be done on the back of persistence and focus.
Every time I watch a SpaceX launch or hold an Apple product in my hands — every company in the world started as a startup at some point. I think it’s very energizing to know that someone with enough willpower can go out and do really incredible things for the world. That gives me energy every day.
Even here at Figure — we haven’t done anything really noteworthy in two years yet. We have robots, and other people have built robots. We need to go out and prove that we can ship really high-quality product, which is going to take us several more years. But that’s a really exciting challenge. And everyone who has attempted this in human robotics commercially has failed. But that should be doable. There are people who have gone over this hump in other industries, with other very difficult things. That should be energizing for us at Figure and for other entrepreneurs out there trying to do hard things.
Closing [00:44:30]
Sam: I have this joke — I’m like, “Cornrows are cool, but not for me.” That’s kind of how I feel about the way you think. I don’t know if I can do what you do, but I am really excited and happy that people like you exist. Thank you for doing everything you’re doing. I feel great after talking to you.
Brett: Thanks for having me on.
Sam: All right, that’s the pod.