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

Sam Parr

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 do you know about building a fucking airplane? You know what I mean? Did you know anything about that?

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

alright 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 $100,000,000 which in most everyone's case that's a massive home run you're you're incredibly successful of of 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 $1,500,000,000 valuation and he started another company called figr which is making humanoids they're basically robots that can work warehouses and do human labor the reason I wanted brett to come on is because I just wanted to think and learn about how someone who's so unique how they think and how they make decisions and so brett's really subtle he's a 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 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 gonna be in the running of however we think of like these like howard hughes elon musk types of crazy folks who build these amazing world changing things brett's gonna be that I mean he's already up there but I think he's gonna be like that and no one knows who he is now or at least compared to some of those other folks so what I want you to do is listen to this episode particularly like the last 15 minutes when we talk about his latest company it's really fascinating and I want you to tweet at me my handle's the sam parr p a r r so the 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 fascinating with these types of personalities and I'm fascinating with how people can learn so much information so quickly it's just really fascinating to me so let me know give it a listen his name's brett adcock let's start the show alright dude let's just get right into it the reason you're interesting to me is because because you're incredibly successful I imagine you're worth 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars but you you go all in on stuff so you told me with this new company figure you financed it for the 1st 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

Brett Adcock

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 almost three years. So, I basically put all my savings into the company and took no salary for three or four years.

Sam Parr

how much savings did you have you're 25

Brett Adcock

I think I had close to **$200,000** that I put into the business. I didn't take any salary for **3 years**, which meant I had to pay for my own healthcare, food, and rent. I was living in Manhattan, and it was really expensive. In **2015**, things got so bad that I had to borrow **$50,000** to pay for rent and survive. I had credit card debt. I was probably in the red, like negative **$100,000** prior to the acquisition of Vettery.

Sam Parr

well what did vettery exit for

Brett Adcock

a 110,000,000

Sam Parr

so that was a that was a windfall right

Brett Adcock

Yeah, that was great. I raised a little over $10,000,000 over about 7 years, so I had a large percentage ownership of the company. But yeah, it was an overnight success, going from 7 years of agony and debt to having capital for the first time in a significant way.

Sam Parr

And then, did you... I don't know if you're telling me these stories while you're goofing around or not, but you said that you put most of your money into Archer, right?

Brett Adcock

Yeah, when I started Archer in 2018, we called it Archer Aviation. We build electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. These are basically aircraft somewhat similar to helicopters, but they're purely electric. The goal is to use the aircraft to move people around cities. Traffic is just such a terrible phenomenon; nobody's really worked on traffic for a hundred years. So, we were basically out there, and I was out there trying to solve the traffic problem and help with sustainability. The pitch coming out of Vettery was just... it was bad. It was, "Hey, we need basically about $1,000,000,000, maybe more, to get to market, or we don't make it." We're designing this new type of transportation system in the air. Instead of driving to the airport, you would fly, and it needs to be fully electric. Nobody in history had ever certified an electric aircraft before, and I was coming off of software—10 years, 15 years in software—so that pitch did not really resonate too well in 2018.

Sam Parr

You're like, "We made a joke in the last pod where I'm like, if you drink a glass of milk with dinner, you're my type of guy." People were making fun of me for being from the Midwest. You're like...

Brett Adcock

yeah

Sam Parr

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 do you know about... I mean, software is easy in a sense. It's just code, right? No one's gonna die if you screw it up, or in most cases, no one's gonna die. 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?

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

that doesn't make sense to

Brett Adcock

me yeah what

Sam Parr

Do you do that? It doesn't make sense to me. If I wanted to learn about how an airplane is built, or an unmanned drone, I guess I would... well, first of all, you have to have a high IQ to begin with, which I don't. But 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?" Then I would go and read those books and take lessons. Maybe I would take a few college courses. I don't know... it just seems like an impossible thing to learn. And you learned it in how many years?

Brett Adcock

So, yeah, here's what I did. First, 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 I really wanted to be very thoughtful about my next steps. I basically spent a large amount of time figuring out, "Okay, what is the right opportunity I want to spend my time on?" It was Archer. It was very clear to me that I wanted to do Archer Aviation and build it. The first thing I did was build a spreadsheet. I called everybody I could think of in the world. I think that spreadsheet has about 300 people I connected with, whether they were at NASA, professors, or working in the industry at rotorcraft, airplanes, or turbofan development—whatever it looked like. I just immersed myself. I wanted to know every technical book that was on the market. I wanted to understand how to build electric aircraft: what the components are, and so on.

Sam Parr

what are

Brett Adcock

What are the physics governed by in space? I probably spent almost six months in a room just making phone calls, like cold calling everybody in the world.

Sam Parr

What's that call look like? "Hey, Mister Conway, my name's Brett. Yeah, yeah, can you talk to me about helicopters?"

Brett Adcock

It's crazy, man. People will pick up the phone for you. You just have to pick up the phone and call. People will talk to you. People want to help.

Sam Parr

what was the most like breathtaking call you had or meaningful call you had

Brett Adcock

I did a meeting, and in addition to calling everybody in the world, the parallel track was that I was going back to school. I went back and learned how to do mechanical and aerospace engineering. Leading up to that, I attended an event in 2018. I think it was early 2018, at a Hyatt hotel in Atlanta. They were hosting an electric aircraft design course. It was attended by a lot of aerodynamics experts and folks in the industry who really wanted to understand the physics around electric aircraft. I went down there and basically sat for two days being lectured on how to build an electric aircraft from scratch. I learned how to think about propulsion, aerodynamics, and batteries. It was just like all my heroes in electric aviation were there. One of the guys there was in his PhD program at the University of Florida. He said, "Me too! I'm doing my PhD in electric aviation, and I want to build an eVTOL aircraft." I told him I went to undergrad at the University of Florida as well. He said, "You need to come by ASAP and see our lab. I'm trying to build electric aircraft on a smaller scale, and we could help you." So, I did this course, got on a plane, and went down to Gainesville. I met the head of the group there, who is basically the head of all mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Florida. He had this lab with about 12 people building things like hobby-grade electric aircraft drones. I said, "I want to take this lab over, and I want to just build electric aircraft." This lab happened to be off Archer Road, so I called the business Archer Aviation.

Sam Parr

What percentage of the veterinary windfall did you put into this education portion, as well as our starting archer?

Brett Adcock

oh like all of it yeah all of it

Sam Parr

but what does that actually mean like how are you living

Brett Adcock

Well, I was living off the cash. I had just been paying my bills from Betteridge. I took no salary at Archer for two years, I don't know, something like that. This is a zero, like COBRA insurance type thing. You know, I went from having nothing to having tens of millions of dollars after tax. So, it was a lot of money. I just didn't need almost any of it. I wanted to work on this new thing, and nobody would... 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."

Sam Parr

what did he say

Brett Adcock

He was like, it was mid... it was right when COVID hit. I got a big introduction from him, from one of my investors, Mark Lohrey. He introduced me to Joel, and he was like, "Dude, this is the best guy you've got. You gotta talk to him." I got on a call with 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. The hospitals are filled up, and you're asking me for money for this flying car idea? What are you talking about? This is not possible. Why would you be doing this?" I said, "I'm running out of money personally. I need somebody to fund this or we're all... like, nope. I know COVID's bad, but the business is gonna die. This is what you do; you fund companies. This is why I'm calling you." Yeah, I would say probably to this day, it was the worst phone call I've ever taken.

Sam Parr

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 gonna spend 6 or 12 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 3 months of like kinda normal 20 or 40 hour work weeks and low stress and I was like alright cool that's what I needed I 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 fray it's like this japanese like concept where there's like 4 rings that overlap and one of the rings is like what does the world wanna 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 wanna pay for 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 a crappy job it's so like you wanna find something right in the middle so I was like what am I skilled at and basically I 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 they're like I don't wanna go 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 alright this software thing this battery 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 because I know at vettery 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

Brett Adcock

I think at the end of the day, I just want to wake up with an amazing future that's exciting and inspiring.

Sam Parr

are you motivated by money

Brett Adcock

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 there's a risk-reward balance in startups. If it was just about money, I think I'd be basically back in software still. I think going and doing these projects I'm working on now are probably the surest path to losing everything.

Sam Parr

When you're starting to figure things out, like you know, you read about Elon Musk and he's like, "Well, I put everything in." He's like, "I was sleeping on couches." And it's like, well, the couch was like Sergey Brin's, you know? It was like his couch, which probably isn't a normal couch. 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 when you're starting to figure things out, are you ever worried about running out of money and losing everything that you've earned?

Brett Adcock

I basically almost went personally bankrupt last year. The figure...

Sam Parr

what what yeah tell me that

Brett Adcock

Yeah, so when I left Archer, I had basically all my assets, all my money tied up in Archer. I just had like...

Sam Parr

and you you can't sell that as an officer right yeah or as like insider

Brett Adcock

Yeah, we were like, you know, I made it pretty clear when I started the business and even when I went public that, as the founder and CEO, I'm not selling stock. We're pre-revenue. I told the board this, I told all of our investors this, and I even put $1,000,000 in the stack pipe as we went public at $10. So personally, I was like, I'll put another $1,000,000 in here at a $3,000,000 valuation to show you guys that's all I got. When I left Archer in April of 2022, I had a 12-month stock lockup. This is public; there's an SEC document for this. I couldn't sell. The majority of all my stock was fully locked up until April of this year. I had some percentage I could sell over time, limited by certain volumes of the market cap. So there wasn't just that much volume a year ago. I was selling some stock to fund a figure, and the stock went from, like, when I left, the stock was at $5 or $6. It went down to $1.80 at the end of last year, earlier this year. I was just like, I don't know if I can get to... I don't know if I can get to the 12-month mark, which was April of 2023. That's like April, you know, April 18, 2023, promised land. I could sell unlimited stock, no volume restriction, all stock lockup, which I have a bunch of stocks though here. I'm not selling right now, but that was the...

Brett Adcock

Where I needed to get to, I thought, you know, I was underwriting, saying that stocks are $3, $4, $5, $6, $7. Like, no problem, I'll be able to get there. We were building a team, teams that were like, you know, 40 or something like that. We're building, we're spending like $1,000,000 on hardware.

Sam Parr

figure was at 40

Brett Adcock

Yeah, we were like... within six months, we were at a seven-figure-a-month burn rate. I figured, 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? It was a full system of trying to get the... like not hitting the limits every day on stock selling, getting the cash into the bank account, and putting money in the figure. And I wasn't... you know, this was during a recession. The banks were going bankrupt. It wasn't a pretty market for Series A or capital raising. It was the worst market we've been in since the financial crisis from a fundraising perspective. I had a stock that was going down like 75%, and I was just like, "I'm running out of cash." So, I'm in my same Hampton group, and everybody's like, "What's your most important thing you're doing right now that you need to talk about?" I'm like, "I'm running out of money. I might not make it."

Sam Parr

what did they say what was their feedback

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

I think everyone thinks you're a maniac. I mean, I've talked to a lot of people who know you. That's what fascinates me about you. What fascinates me is that you handle stress differently. I've toured your factory, and you were smiling and jumping around. It seems like you're almost jolly. I remember going to your factory or your office, and you were like, "Check this out! We got the knee working!" I don't know if it was a knee or an ankle, but you showed me something about the robot. There were like 10 or 18 people just sitting around, and it felt like I was hanging out with buddies in a garage, just watching you guys finally figure out how to work like a remote control car or something ridiculous. It seemed exciting, though. I remember being there and thinking, "I have to be part of this." It was exciting, but I didn't realize how close you were to running out of money. I don't understand how you deal with that. What's your wife saying when you're like, "Hey, we might file for bankruptcy personally in the next couple of months?"

Brett Adcock

yeah I think it's even worse like we I had a I had a second mortgage on my house to go through it

Sam Parr

no way what did she say

Brett Adcock

Yeah, so I also fall into the category of people thinking I'm a maniac. My wife, she's been with me for 15 years now through all of this. We lived in a $1,000 a month apartment in New York, and we had to downsize to get through the battery stuff to now Archer. She's great; she's a warrior. She believes in me and has total faith in what we're doing. I don't take these things lightly. These are planned exercises I need to go through, and I've been through many near-death experiences. I mean, with Archer, when I went through a figure, it was probably just the tip of the iceberg compared to what I went through at Archer over the last five years. Archer going public was just a recipe to get sued. We were going public through the SPAC process, and as soon as we priced the SPAC deal, the market turned on SPACs. It was just a roller coaster. So yeah, I've been through many exercises like this before, and I think I can weather them pretty well now.

Sam Parr

I don't know anything about business finances. I remember when we started our company, I didn't know the difference between cash flow and revenue, which is a pretty big deal. You need to know that. I didn't understand what that was until about three years into the company. I thought cash flow and revenue were the same thing. I don't understand how to read a balance sheet. I don't know how to do any of that. So, I'm taking classes right now to figure that out. I was Googling stuff and I found this website called **streetofwalls.com**. So, I went to Street of Walls, and there are these amazing articles where you click "Start Training." It looks like a book. If you're on your computer, go to streetofwalls.com. There’s an introduction, information on what an investment bank does, how to do a discounted cash flow analysis, and all this stuff. I scroll to the bottom and I always click the "About" page. There’s a link that says "Follow this site and author on Twitter." I clicked the Twitter link, and it was you! You wrote me; you made this website. I was texting you ahead of time, saying, "Hey, I know you took a company public. I don't know anything about finances. How did you learn how to do it?" You replied, "Oh, I actually taught myself how to do it, and then I did most of the preparation work for the IPO." I was like, "That's amazing!" You didn't even tell me you had this site, which is a whole resource for your learning and education. What was the site? What is streetofwalls.com?

Brett Adcock

Yeah, so when I went to college, I enrolled in Industrial and Systems Engineering, also Finance. This is not something I talk about a lot, but I basically spent a few years in finance after school before doing the startup life.

Sam Parr

why don't you talk about that was that embarrassing

Brett Adcock

It just doesn't... the pitch isn't great. I think people just don't like hearing about finance folks. I also didn't really enjoy it. I look back at those years and think, "Man, I wish I had spent more time doing technology development." I was working full-time but building startups on the side. I just look at that and say, "I think it was helpful in some ways, but probably, net-net, it would have been more important for me to dive in and start building businesses full-time." So, when I was in school, somebody gave me this book. It's called "The Fast Track to Investment Banking, Management Consulting, and Trading." I read it, and it was like, you know, people going into finance drive Ferraris. They do so well and make $150,000 after school. I was dead broke in college, taking out loans to pay for school. I thought, "Man, this is how I'm going to make some money and start my career." I went into an interview with Goldman Sachs, and I just whiffed. They asked me some accretion/dilution, M&A modeling, and LBO (leveraged buyout) questions, and I just didn't know anything. The guy was nice; he said, "Listen, you just have to have a certain bar of understanding of finances."

Sam Parr

He's like, "This is such a disrespectful interview." Yeah, this is like, that's the second time you've been... you're disrespecting people constantly.

Brett Adcock

Yeah, exactly. And he's like, "You're wasting my time." I was like, "Man, I'm not really learning how to do this stuff in college, so I'm just going to have to go learn it." I started writing notes and documenting what I was learning. When my brother actually went into finance—he works at a private equity company now—I thought, "I'm just going to repackage all these notes, put them online, and also give them to my brother." I wondered, "Where am I going to use them again?" That was the genesis for Street of Walls. I think I've gotten like 30 million views on that site over the last 15 years, which has been great. A lot of folks have said, "This has been my primary reason for getting a job." But, as you can see, I haven't spent a nickel on it in over a decade.

Sam Parr

Do you know how they get traffic? I mean, according to SimilarWeb, it's still getting around 100,000 people a month coming to it.

Brett Adcock

it's all organic seo

Sam Parr

That's insane! I mean, that's kind of a lot, right? I mean, for such a high... this would be an expensive term to rank for.

Brett Adcock

Yeah, these are like, you know, there's a lot. There are thousands of pages of content there with good original content, and it's just ranking high on Google.

Sam Parr

you wrote all these I wrote all those articles yeah were you gonna turn this into a business

Brett Adcock

Yeah, I saw at one point I was making like $5,000 a month selling those interview guides. It was about one year out of college. It was great! I mean, it was like a 98% margin business.

Sam Parr

Alright, 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 a month, I'm like, "This is the thing."

Brett Adcock

Yeah, I strongly believe that to touch the mass market and have a significant impact in technology, you need to have either a lot of people using your product or very few that use it and really like it a lot. I just felt like the products and services I was starting were just not important enough for my time.

Sam Parr

So, in the pod, we talk a lot about ideas and different opportunities in terms of Vettery. What opportunities did you see that you guys weren't able to pounce on that still exist?

Brett Adcock

One of the things we did is, you know, so what? I started Vettery at the NYU incubator, and one of the guys there handed me a book one day. It was *The Predictable Revenue Book*, which is basically an outbound lead generation marketing playbook. He said, "Hey, you need to read this. It would probably be pretty helpful for Vettery." Those guys were actually TapCommerce, and they sold for over $100 million to Twitter. It was Brian, the founder there. I ended up reading the book because I thought, "This is great! We need to replicate the system fully, end to end." So, I started working on writing this outbound lead generation process. We ultimately gave it to a person that's here with me today, Leah Rendacio. We said, "Hey, can you go figure out how to build this?" She brought on an engineer, and we basically built this outbound lead generation software system that ended up powering all of Vettery. So, that was basically how we put contact information of people together and created a cadence of emails to drum up leads. You can do this for both customers...

Sam Parr

where'd you get the emails

Brett Adcock

We built an offshore team of about 300 people in the Philippines, and we did it all from scratch.

Sam Parr

what what does that mean going to linkedin or something and just build

Brett Adcock

An email list allows you to find the right people based on job titles. There’s a process you can use to find emails pretty well. You know, there’s a lot on GitHub, and you can get the emails through Facebook pretty easily. Basically, there’s a process where you can back into somebody's personal email address. There are also databases that a lot of folks use. So, we would get emails, plug them into this machine, and go. We basically built this huge engine that powered millions of emails per month. Then, I think it was in early 2013 or 2014, there was a startup emerging called Outreach. We demoed it and thought, "This is the same exact thing we just built internally." You know, Outreach is now like a $4 or $5 billion company. We were watching Outreach scale up while we had a product that was literally built internally for ourselves. At the time, we thought our version was a little bit better, so we didn’t use Outreach, which was more customized for what we were doing. It was really funny to see us build a $100 million company when internally we had a $4 billion company sitting there. There were a few of those instances that happened throughout the life of Battery, and it was just interesting to see. I think that goes back to my same theme, which is to be very thoughtful. My time now is haunted by the question: Am I working on the right things?

Sam Parr

do you think that was the wrong thing

Brett Adcock

I think Metairie 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. I use it as a learning lesson to say what happened with Vettery. I fell into it. I fell into it from Street of Walls. I fell into it because I built up this huge database of traffic from content, and then I used that to help build and boost the marketplace with Vettery. It wasn't as if I was in college when this stuff started and said, "I want to go do recruiting. This is where I'm going to spend the rest of my life." I just fell into it, and it happened to work out really well. I think I wouldn't have been able to start Archer if it wasn't for the Vettery acquisition. So, looking back, it was something I would have done again. I use that as a lesson to say I do have a choice on what to spend my time on, and everybody does. It's the most pressing asset you have because we don't have that much time left.

Shaan Puri

Alright, I gotta tell you about one thing that's one of the great joys of my life. 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 to 30% of my time just doing random, tedious stuff that is not high value. But it's just... tedious. The stuff that has...

Brett Adcock

to get done but it's not creativity

Shaan Puri

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. That stuff is what a virtual assistant does. Like, just this week alone, I lost my wallet. So, she goes to the DMV website, fills out a bunch of forms, and gets me a new license. You know, every morning, while people have their morning coffee, I have my morning metrics. My morning metrics are basically all the business metrics that I care about compiled. She goes, finds it from all the different sources, puts it in an Excel sheet, takes a screenshot, and 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 where the metrics are and what I need to do. I'm just focused on the right things. So, having a virtual assistant is a no-brainer. Whether it's travel booking, managing your email inbox, or just knocking stuff off your personal to-do list that would have lingered there forever, I think it's a no-brainer. If you're a business owner, you should definitely do it. 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. For me, it's super affordable. It's something that you don't need to have the biggest business ever or be the biggest big shot in order to afford it. It's amazing. I now do this for my COO and my CMO too. I just give them assistance without them even asking because I know it makes them more productive. It does that for me, so of course, it's going to do that for them too. So, go to supportshepherd.com, check them out, get an assistant, and tell them I sent you. They'll take good care of you if you do that. So, supportshepherd.com, check it out.

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Sam Parr

What was the math that you saw, or like the graph or whatever, that made you want to start Figr? Was there a signal where you were like, "Oh man, this can be the biggest company in the world"? Because I think you sold it to me. You said, "We're either going to screw up and go bankrupt, or we'll have a very small exit, or it's going to be a $100,000,000,000 company." You said something like that, where it was like, "This is either going to be the biggest thing ever or a total failure." But what did you see that gave you the idea that this could be the biggest thing?

Brett Adcock

so so what what what we're doing here figur is we're building humanoid robots these are robots when we say humanoid I mean it it just 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 with all the internet you can use a keyboard and your little your fingers are like your little little keyboard and mice you can basically interact with all the digital world the physical world the last several 100 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 80,000,000,000,000 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 of gdp and what we've seen now is we've seen this like we we see like these emergent properties happen in 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 that that is that is capable of being built to do human like tasks and and then from a software perspective separately we have software today and we have ai systems today that can basically understand like semantically what's going on in the world and do human like applications from a software perspective so here at figur what's so so at a at a high level the biggest company the next 10 15 years in the world will be human like ai powered humanoids that like that's for sure gonna happen the question is like what groups are gonna do that

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

You can do either. I mean, there's definitely a similar capital expenditure (capex) model that is very much like how we buy cars today. You would want to buy the asset, which would have a certain amount of depreciable life. You'd also have to pay for service fees for maintenance. Then there's another model, which is the operating model, what we're calling "robots as a service." This is a leasing model, so you would basically be able to put robots into, say, warehousing or manufacturing-related applications. You would charge a monthly fee for that work, which would be a lower price per year that you would pay but ongoing. Here at Figueroa, we're pushing the robot as a service operating model. We think it's the way to get costs down and make it affordable for the masses. However, some of the initial conversations we're having with clients indicate that they're interested in buying robots because they've been purchasing them for a decade. I think we're open to exploring both options. What we're seeing here is the ability to get these robots over time at a high enough volume, cheaper than a mid-priced car. If that robot can last four or five years before it's fully depreciated, the cost should be pretty affordable, even for the home. We should be able to put robots in homes for several hundred dollars per month.

Sam Parr

I was talking to my family members, and they asked, "Who are you talking to tomorrow?" I said, "Man, it's the guy Brett. He builds a humanoid." They were like, "What the hell? What the f*** is that?" I explained, "Well, you know how Amazon workers do this stuff? It's going to do that." Inevitably, the response was, "Oh, so he's going to put everyone out of work. Alright, that's cool." So, what's your rebuttal to that? How do you think about it? You seem very altruistic, and you're like, "I want to save the world." So, what are these people going to do, and when are they going to lose their jobs?

Brett Adcock

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 3,300,000,000 humans working in in the world a big chunk of that is the baby boomers and the retiring out of the market and then from you know from the other side we're basically having roughly a little over 1 child per household at this. We're 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 of the funnel we're retiring out so we're basically shrinking the labor force so when we walk into the 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 gonna message this like what are they gonna 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 and 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 a 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 problem I I've never seen a business like this where we walk in and they're like we'll buy a million of them if you could do this and so the the demand is like I would think almost unbounded I don't even know how to handicap it it's if you can build the technology we need 1,000,000

Sam Parr

When we were hanging out, I was like, "Why don't you just do a software company?" And you're like, "Software is harder." I was like, "What? Why?" He goes, "Well, because I had to make people want Veteri. I had to convince them that this was a good idea. Then, I had infinite options on what to build, and I had to hope that I was building the right thing." Then he said, "With hardware, I can find problems where there's already demand. I know if I'm able to build this, people will want it. I know that there's a set of laws dictated by physics that create the rules. I just have to figure out, within that very small set of rules, can I build this?" 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 build this thing. If I build it, the business is going to be the biggest thing ever because I know people want that. I remember when you said that, it kind of changed my perspective on a lot of things. Did I say that right? Yeah.

Brett Adcock

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 kinda keep the the wheels in the car and give keep it running and in hardware if if there is demand for the product it's it really puts the focus on the technology development so at at archer we already know people are driving to the airport there's like in la there's 60,000,000 people driving around every day and 6,000,000 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 7 minutes or you wanna drive that an hour and a half like what do you wanna 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 would take that service so it really puts the burden on technology development of like can you go build something that is safe and affordable and like you know and gets good performance like in the reliability side so that was the that's the archer case it's similar to figur 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 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 like none of that is meaningful it'll make you feel good as a founder because it's usually extremely shitty for like so so many years building companies what really matters is the technology development that you make which means how often you're iterating and then you can measure that by how much progress you're making between those iteration cycles that's basically the game that we're playing a figure and we played an archer

Sam Parr

It feels like you're 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. They weren't drinking beer or anything, but it was like that same vibe of, "We're just sitting around." They giggled when the knee moved, you know what I mean? It felt like it was almost like a glorified Lego set a little bit. It felt pretty exciting.

Brett Adcock

Yeah, I think it feels like the most cutting-edge R&D lab you could walk into, with a focus on moving fast and shipping product.

Sam Parr

how big how big is figger gonna be in 10 years

Brett Adcock

I think the space is... it's the world's largest tam. I think it's probably most similar to autonomous vehicles in terms of the technology development and the risk involved in developing and deploying the technology. However, I think it's easier to scale. We don't have the same safety hurdles that a self-driving car would have to navigate in order to drive safely on city streets without harming anybody at those speeds. So, I believe it's bigger than the self-driving industry, and it's easier to scale once it's working. If we can demonstrate our robots in commercial opportunities, we're learning. We're in commercial work doing useful tasks, and we're training our neural nets with real-world data, getting better recursively. I happen to think this business is probably valued higher than Cruise and Waymo, which are $30 billion pre-revenue companies. I believe we can achieve this over the next 24 months, with robots in commercial applications alongside some of the world's biggest brands.

Sam Parr

In five years, do you think figures in the $40 billion to $50 billion value range?

Brett Adcock

I just think this is a really big industry. We're about five years away 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 getting better over time. I have to think that would create a really large market cap. Who knows what it will look like? I think it will be significant compared to where we stand now. Then hopefully, within 10, 15, or 20 years, we'll be seeing robots at scale in commercial opportunities that really help fill the void in the labor force that we talked about earlier.

Sam Parr

I wish I would have invested more. I think I invested $25,000, but I should have done more.

Brett Adcock

Yeah, it's risky stuff. So, I don't... yeah, it'd be $25,000. It makes me feel good. I don't want to lose too much of your money, so... oh.

Sam Parr

I wish I would have done more, but dude, I appreciate you doing this. You inspired me. I think that 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 that **that energy wears off on you**. Whenever I hang out with you, I feel bad about myself in a really great way. It's like when you hang out with a really fit athlete; you're like, "Oh man, I thought I was fit, but I'm nothing." I could totally step it up. I can push this thing way harder. I can push myself way more than I thought I could. That's how I feel when I'm around you. You are a really special person, and I'm very thankful that I get to hear some of your wisdom. I think that one of the things on this podcast and in my life is that we try to find people early. 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. I'm very thankful that we're able to, you know, buy your stock early.

Brett Adcock

yeah thanks sam

Sam Parr

that's the pod alright now show me the robot