This $3B Founder Is The Next Elon Musk (#499)

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? What did you— did you know anything about that?

No, I did not. I knew nothing. I was just like, I really wanted to do it.

All right, everyone, we have a really interesting guest. His name is Brett Adkins. Kak. 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, a massive home run. You're, 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 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 low-key guy. He, he's not crazy high energy. He's not one of these guys who we have on who is 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 going to be that. I mean, he's already up there. But I think he's gotta 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 @TheSamParr, P-A-R-R. So the, 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 fascinated with these types of personalities, and I'm fascinated 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 Brent 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. My career. When I started Bettery, I couldn't get anybody to invest in the business for the first, like, almost like 3 years. So I basically put all my savings into the company, took no salary for 3 or 4 years.

How much savings did you have? You're 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 3 years. That meant like I had to pay for my own healthcare, food, rent. I was living in Manhattan. It's really expensive. In 2015, things got so bad that I had to borrow, I think it was $50,000 to pay for rent and survive. I had like credit card debt. I was, yeah, I was probably in the red, like negative $100,000 prior to the acquisition of Bettery.

Well, what did Bettery exit for?

$110 million.

So that was a, that was a windfall, right?

Yeah, that was great. I raised like a little over $10 million over like 7 years. So had a large percentage ownership of the company. So, but yeah, overnight success from going from, you know, 7 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. Um, when I, so I started Archer in 2018, so called Archer Aviation 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. The pitch coming out of Vettery was just, it was bad. Like it was, hey, we need basically probably about a billion dollars, maybe more to get to market 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 of software, you know, 10 years, 15 years in software. So 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 for 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 an Elon 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 going to die if you, 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 like computer engineering or computer science, I'm like, what the hell do you know about building a fucking airplane? You know what I mean? What did you, did you know anything about that?

No, I did not. I, um, 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 a, 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 would 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'd go and read the books and take lessons. Maybe I would 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 Vettery figuring out what I wanted to work on next. I kind of fell into the recruiting marketplace space with Vettery and, um, 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. So I think I made, 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 immersed myself in, 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 6 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.

Can you talk to me about helicopters?

It's crazy, man. Like people will pick up the phone for you. Like, it's just like you just got to pick up the phone and call and people will talk to you. People want to, People want to 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, 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 mechanical and aerospace engineering. And, you know, leading up to that, I went to an event in 2018. I think it was 2018, like early 2018 at this point. It was at this Hyatt, like, like basically Hyatt Hotel in Atlanta was hosting this like electric aircraft design course. So it 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 2 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, me too, I'm doing my PhD in electric aviation and I want to build an EV-tolerant aircraft. And I go to the University of Florida and I said, wow, 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, 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 and aerospace engineering at the University of Florida. And he had this like basically 12-person lab building these 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 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 2 years. I don't know, something like that. Like zero, like Cobra 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 thing and nobody would like, I couldn't even get meetings. At one point I got introduced to the guy that runs General Catalyst, Joel, and he called my pitch disrespectful.

What did he say?

He was like, it was like mid, it was like right when COVID hit. And I got a big introduction from him, from like one of my investors, Mark Laurie introduced me to Joel. He's like, this is the best guy. You got to talk to him. And I got on a call with 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 It's like 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, you know, 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 would say probably to this day, the worst phone call I've ever taken.

So I sold my company 3 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 going to spend 6 or 12 months just like seeking, planning. I'm going to figure out what. 'Cause I don't, I don't know if you took time off, but I took like 3 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, like, phrase, it's like this Japanese, like, uh, concept where there's like 4 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. It's 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 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 veterinary 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 gonna 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 at Vetri, 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 a 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 want to, want to wake up with 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'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. I think going and doing these projects I'm working on now are 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, um, personally bankrupt last year with Figure.

What? Yeah. Tell me that.

Yeah. So when I left Archer, I had basically, you know, all my assets, all my money tied up into Archer, like just had like, and you can't sell that as an officer, right? Yeah.

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 $1 million in the SPAC pipe as we went public at $10. And so personally, I was like, I'll put another million dollars in here at $3 billion valuation. Just show you guys. It's all I got. And when 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, 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 $5 or $6. It went to 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 could sell unlimited stock, no volume restriction, all stock lockup, which I'm, you know, I have a bunch of stocks still 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 $3, $4, $5, $6, $7, like no problem. I'll be able to get there. And we were building a team, teams at like, was that, you know, 40 or something like that. We're building, we're spending like millions on hardware.

Bigger. Bigger was that, 40?

Yeah. We were like, we were within 6 months, we were at a 7-figure-a-month burn. 7-figure. And I was just like, it was like sell stock, transfer 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 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 capital raising. It was the worst market since we've been in since the financial crisis from a fundraising perspective. I had stocks going down like 75% and I was just like, I'm running out of cash. So I'm in my, Sam, 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 did they say? What was their feedback?

I think they were, I thought they, I think they thought I was a maniac.

I think everyone thinks you're a maniac. 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 you handle stress differently. Like I've toured your factory and you were like smiling and like jumping around like you, uh, like it seemed like you were like jolly almost. I don't know. You're showing me this shit. I remember going to your factory or your office and you were 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're— 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 meant 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 had a second mortgage on my house to go 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, 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 to get through the veterinary stuff to, you know, to now Archer and Figure. She's great. Like 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, 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, like what I went through at Figure was probably like a tip of the iceberg to what I went through at Archer last, like, like 5 years. Like, Archer was just, you know, like going public was just like a recipe to get sued. And we were going public through the SPAC process. We, you know, as soon as we priced the SPAC deal, the market turned on SPACs. It was just a rollercoaster. So yeah, I just have 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, 3 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 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, follow this site and author on Twitter. And I clicked the Twitter and it was you. You wrote me, 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've been more important just for me to dive in and start building businesses full-time. So I was at, you know, in school, somebody gave me this book, it's called like The Fast Track to Investment Banking and Management Consulting and Trading. And I read it and it was like, you know, people that go into 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 pay for school. And I was like, man, I'm going to just go, this is how I'm going to, you know, make some money, start my career. And I went into an interview with Goldman Sachs and I just whiffed. Like they asked me like some accretion dilution, you know, like M&A modeling and LBO questions or leveraged 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 finance.

He's like, this is such a disrespectful interview.

Yeah.

This is like the second time you've been, you're disrespecting people constantly.

Yeah, exactly. And he's like, you're like wasting my time. And I was like, man, like, I'm not really learning how to do this stuff in college, so I'm just going to have to go learn it. And you know, I was learning that. I just started like writing notes and writing about it. And when my brother actually went to finance, my brother works 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 to my brother. And like, where am I going to use them again? And that was the genesis for Street of Walls. We've I think I've gotten like 30 million views of that site for the last like, you know, 15 years, which has been great. Like a lot of folks have been like, this has been my primary reason I've gotten a job. And, but you know, as you can see, I haven't spent a nickel on it in over a decade.

Do you, how do they get traffic? I mean, according to SimilarWeb, it's still getting 100,000 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 $5,000 a month selling those interview guides. Like, like, 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 $5,000 a month, I'm like, this is the thing.

Yeah, I didn't, I strongly believe, like, I strongly believe I need to touch like the mass market and to have like significant impact in technology, you need to have like a either a lot of people using your product or very few 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 Vettery. What opportunities did you see that you guys weren't able to pounce on that still exist?

One of the things we did is, you know, so I started Vetteri 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 he said, hey, you need to read this. So it'd probably be pretty helpful for Vetteri. And those guys, it was actually TapCommerce. Those guys sold for like over $100 million to Twitter. So it was Brian, the founder there. And I ended up reading the book. I was like, this is great. We need to replicate this system fully end to end. So I started 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 Randazzo 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 of Bettery. 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 like, to basically drum up leads. And you can do this for both like customers.

Where'd you get the emails?

We had an, 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 building an email list?

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 the emails through Facebook pretty easily. There's 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 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 this startup emerging, 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 $4 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. But it was really funny to see us, you know, me go out and build like a $100 million company when internally we had a $4 billion company sitting internally. So there was a few of those that happened through the life of Bettery that were, it was just interesting to see. And I think that goes back to my same theme, which is like be very thoughtful. Like, so my time now is haunted by Am I working on the right things?

Do you think that was the wrong thing?

I think Vetri 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 and to figure. And, um, I use it as a learning lesson to say what happened with Vetri 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 Vetri. It wasn't as if I was in college when I kind of, the stuff started and said, 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 happened to work out really well. And I think I wouldn't have been able to start Archer if it wasn't for the Vetri acquisition. So, you know, I think, I think looking back, it was something I would've done again, but I used that lesson. I used 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 precious asset you have because we don't have that much time left.

All right.

I got to tell you about one thing that's one of the great joys of my life. And I'm not a cars guy and 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. You know, here's the scenario. I'm running my companies, and even though I'm supposed to be this CEO, we all know I spend 20-30% of my time just doing random bullshit stuff that is not high value, but it's just tedious stuff that has to get done. but it's not creativity. It 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, 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 it for all the different sources, puts it in Excel sheet, takes a screenshot, texts 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've 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, I think one of the best places to find an assistant is Shepherd. So go to supportshepherd.com. You know, I pay my assistant I think $8 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, um, 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 COO and my CMO too. 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 supportshubbert.com, check 'em out. Um, get an assistant and tell 'em I sent you. They'll take good care of you if you do that. So Sportscheffer.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 sold that to me. You go, we will either gonna screw up and go bankrupt, or we'll have a very small exit, or it's going to be a $100 billion 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, so what, what we're doing here at Figure is we're building humanoid robots. These are robots. When we say humanoid, I mean it looks like the human form. So 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 with all the internet, you can use a keyboard and your little, your fingers are like your little keyboard device. You can basically interact with all the digital world, the physical world. The 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 of 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 for, you know, for if you go to any company or any country in the world, it's roughly half of GDP. And what we've seen now is we've seen this, like, we've seen like these emergent properties happen in in, in 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, 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's 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 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, 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 life. You'd have to like pay for servicing and maintenance. And then there's another model, which is like operating model, which is we're calling like robot as a service, which is a leasing model. So you'd 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. And that would be a kind of a lower price per year that you would pay, but ongoing. And so we, you know, here at figure 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. 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 in the world. What we're seeing here is we're seeing the ability to get these robots over time with high enough volumes, cheaper than like a mid-price car. And then if that robot can last 4 or 5 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 and they're like, who 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 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 in the world. A big chunk of that is the baby boomers and they're retiring out of the market. And then from, you know, 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 like, like about 2.2 births per household. So we're like, we're not putting more into the bottom, the top of the funnel. We're not putting any more in, in the bottom funnel, they're retiring out. So we're basically shrinking the labor force. So when we walk into, the conventional wisdom 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 on 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 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 be in these facilities. So when we walk in 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, 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 prob— 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 demand is like, I think 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 Vetri. 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, a lot of these things that are like these emergent properties that happen in like, say, the marketplace or SaaS 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 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 an hour going like 10, 15 miles. So like, you know, you go to like Pasadena to LAX. If you could fly that in 7 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 7 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? Affordable and like, you know, and gets good performance, like in the reliability side. So that was the, that's the Archer case, similar to 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, 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, 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 to 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 TechCrunch article. 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 at Figure and we played at Archer.

It feels like you're like playing with K'Nex 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 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, it's the world's largest TAM. 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. I don't, we don't have the same safety hurdles that a self-driving car would have to have to drive safely within, on, on, you know, on city streets. And not harm any, 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, we're, 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, 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 these over the next like 24 months. We'll have robots in commercial applications with like some of the world's biggest brands.

In 5 years, you think figures in the, in the, um, $40, $50 billion value range.

I just think like this is a really big industry and we're We're, we're, we're sub-5 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, what it'll look like? 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 labor force that we talked about earlier.

I wish I would've 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 me feel good. I don't want to lose too much of your money.

So, oh, I wish I would've done more, but dude, I appreciate you doing this. You inspire me. 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 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 I— 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 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 5 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.