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My First Million4 wild AI predictions from a $39B tech founder
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Transcript
70 min read · 14,332 words- 0:00 – 3:29
Intro
- SPSam Parr
I think if you Google Brett Adcock net worth, according to Fortune, you're worth nineteen billion dollars. So that's, like, a pretty good swing. How does that make you feel?
- BABrett Adcock
I don't care about that at all.
- SPSam Parr
[laughing]
- BABrett Adcock
Give, like, zero shits about that. [upbeat music]
- SPSam Parr
Okay. So you, uh, Brett Adcock, the, the short of it is that you were raised in a rural area of Illinois. You started a company called Vettery, which you sold for over a hundred million dollars. Then you took a company public called Archer, which is, like, unmanned, uh, flying planes, I guess, helicopters. And then now you have a company called Figure, which is worth I don't know how much, forty-something, thirty-something, fifty-something billion dollars. You have another thing called Cover, which stops, uh, or aims to stop school shootings. And then now you have a new thing called Hark, which you've raised money at, in the billions of dollars, and you seem worn out.
- BABrett Adcock
Feeling great. Feels, like, busy, man.
- SPSam Parr
[laughing] So you've been on... This is your third time on. I think you, I think you've been on one time each year the last three years. You said, uh, you were telling a story about how, I think it was right when Figure started, you basically said, like, "I had... I was worth I don't know how much, tens of millions of dollars. I put almost all of it into Figure to get started," and at one point you were like, "I have a mortgage on my house, and the rest of my money is in Figure, and some of the money's in Archer, and that's not doing so great right now." And since then, I think if you Google Brett Adcock net worth, according to Fortune, you're worth nineteen billion dollars. So that's, like, a pretty good swing. How does that make you feel?
- BABrett Adcock
I don't care about that at all. Give, like, zero shits about that. [laughing]
- SPSam Parr
You're a super competitive guy. I think you said something like, "I just wanna w-" You said, like, "win" a bunch of times the last time we hung out. It was like, "I wanna win for these reasons. I, I'm, I, I'm very competitive. I w- I wanna kick ass." I think that, like, you definitely have to care about this a little bit, and you actually have to... I think you a- care a lot about Figure being the biggest company in the world. You talk about, like... You definitely have this, like, Napoleon energy of, like, "I wanna be the best. I wanna conquer."
- BABrett Adcock
I think, maybe, the way I would characterize it is, like, we're just, the, like, we're just now, like, these companies of mine are just now hitting the inflection point, and they're really early. Like, they can be, like, really big. So if it works, this will, like, a hundred x. Thousand x from here. So most of my energy is like, how do I make sure that works? There is no flat line here. It's either, like, it goes down or goes up, right? Either, like, it's binary. Either the robots go out of scale or they don't go out of scale. So in, like, five years' time, it's either gonna be a bi- very big thing or very bad. And so all my energy's going into making this, like, a thousand or a million x from where we're at here. And so it's, uh, it's like the pressure's on to, like, really just deliver.
- SPSam Parr
Where, where are you now? What's the, uh, outlook now for the next five years then? I think last time you were on three years ago, we said that... I think I said it. Uh, I was like, "You'll probably be in the forty to fifty million dollar valuation range," which I think you are now. But in terms of, like, you- you're still lacking output of robots. Like, you still need, we still need that to come. When- where are you gonna be in five years? What's your prediction?
- BABrett Adcock
I think at a high level, I think the AI work that we're seeing here now is gonna be so much... It's gonna be, like, a hundred times bigger than the internet. It's just like everything is just so... It just working so well. Like, the system is working well. Like, deep learning works. And everything's happening faster than I would think. And my tr- like, you know, having done, like, fifteen years of, like, software and internet, like, it was just like nothing was ha- happening faster on a trend line. Here, it's happening like that in AI.
- SPSam Parr
Can you give an example of something
- 3:29 – 8:00
Hark, a human in a box
- SPSam Parr
that has happened that's blown you away?
- BABrett Adcock
We started at... So Hark, I have a new AI lab called Hark. About a year ago, I was, like, very interested in this idea of, like, kind of building this AI to human symbiosis digitally. It's like, um, Figure's gonna be like... I think Figure's gonna be like the max ceiling of AGI, of, like, being able to put that out, and then there's gonna be a version of this in the digital world. There's gonna be, like, a human's gonna have this, like, AI pairing that's gonna have, like, ultimately maybe your own AI weights, your own memories, maybe your own hardware. It's gonna be, like, really close. And fundamental to that thesis was, like, you gotta figure out how to get AI to use computer as general purpose. You would never hire an assistant that couldn't use a computer. So you gotta be able to, like, give things out to it that can, like, do everything you can do. Financial models, book flights, like, order DoorDash, whatever you need to do. It needs to be able to do it all, uh, autonomously. But only one in a thousand websites have APIs. So in most, you know, glo- like, most computer use globally is on the in- on an internet, in-browser. My in- uh, my, my inclination within two or three years you'd have a system that you'd be able to talk to and say, "Go do this," or, "Do that," and it'd be able to, like, go off, uh, go online and, like, maybe, maybe, like, use the internet really well. Like, uh, almost like a robot would where you can, like, move the mouse and use the keyboard. That's what you have to do to solve, like, general purposeness for around a computer is you, you can't rely on API or MCP. You have to figure out how to, like, navigate it like a human can. Now, at Hark, we've, like, we just released our first, uh, kind of model and research preview, um, last week. It's really hard for us to find now something that we tell it to go do on the internet it can't do.
- SPShaan Puri
What did you guys do differently than the other... 'Cause k- uh, everyone's trying to do computer use, right? So, like, I think Elon's got Macro hard and ChatGPT had their computer use thing. Everybody's doing it. You guys feel like you've cracked something. What'd you guys do differently?
- BABrett Adcock
Okay, there's a couple things we did a little differently. First is, like, everybody's tackling this from, like, using APIs and MCPs. Like, the reason why OpenClaw got so great, it was like it could only... It couldn't use the brow- It couldn't, like, go on and use DoorDash end to end, 'cause DoorDash has no consumer API. So we tried to figure out how to use like a... How to look at a screen, and one was we spin up a virtual computer for every agent, so they don't need, like, a MacBook or anything, so you can just spin up as many of these environments as you want in the sandboxes. And, uh, and then we need to give it ability to, like, look at a screen, and use, like, move the, move the cursor and use the keyboard.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, but I used ChatGPT's computer use and it was doing that. I was like, "Hey, book a massage," and it opened up a browser, and I saw the mouse going, and it was trying to type the thing, and it would scroll the results. It was bad. It didn't work well, but it was... It wasn't trying to use A- APIs or, or, uh, MCP.
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah. Okay. Well-
- SPShaan Puri
It was trying to use the internet.
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah. I don't know if I... Yeah, yeah. It's gotta work well. I mean, that's the whole point.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughing]
- BABrett Adcock
But, like, if it goes and, like, fumbles internet, it's like the whole point is, like, it's not-
- SPShaan Puri
So, so that's what I'm saying. What'd you guys do to make it work well? Was it, like, an algorithmic breakthrough? Is it-
- BABrett Adcock
It was in our post-training. Like, it was in our re-in... We have a reinforcement learning process that we think is Maybe nobody else in the world has done
- SPSam Parr
Well, get-- let, let's get some context behind this bec- okay, so Figure, that is shockingly easy to understand. Ro- humanoid robots and that business is gonna be massive if it works. If you can crack the code, I think you said there's unbounded, uh, demand. Hark, I don't entirely understand what that is. Can you kind of explain like I'm idiot? Because Shaan, you should see [chuckles] I got the deck, and it was just you talking for like an hour in front of a screen, and then there was a list, there was a list of a team, and it was like 100 guys who just moved here from China who had, like, the greatest backgrounds ever. And you-- it seemed like you pretty much just raised money because the team was amazing, and, uh, that, that's all the deck was. It was just you talking in a video.
- BABrett Adcock
Well, I mean, that's kinda all we had at the time [chuckles] we started. So okay, what is Hark?
- SPSam Parr
I think the best way to become successful is to see how other people did it, whether you're gonna copy them or just use it as inspiration, because then now you know what's possible. So starting at the age of 24, I did this relentlessly, and I was very methodical about it, and I created a spreadsheet where I tracked roughly 50 people who were uber successful, and I looked at the year that they were born, the year that they started their apprenticeship, and then the year that they started the first thing that made them successful, finally the year that they broke through. And I aggregated all this data along with the stories of what they did to be an apprentice and what they did to finally break through, and I put it together in a database. And HubSpot went and found this thing that I frankly even forgot about, but it did change my life, and they resurfaced it, they made it even better, and they put it into a thing that you can download for free right now. So if you click the link in the description or click the QR code right here, you can see this database that I made when I was 24, and it changed my life. And so if you're looking to become successful or you're already successful and just want some more inspiration, check it out.
- BABrett Adcock
I strongly believe, like, AI will head in two directions.
- 8:00 – 17:32
zero constraints
- BABrett Adcock
Like, uh, like, and then at some point maybe even, like, maybe, like, head together. Like, the first is we'll have AI out in the physical world that will, like, do everything in the, in, in the environment for you, like laundry, dishes, cooking, like run the supply chain end-to-end, be in healthcare. The vessel for that is a humanoid robot. It's just a human form, and it will just go out and do, like, you, like, want one piece of hardware that can, like, you know, the hardware capable of doing everything, and you put, like, smart AI into it, and it'll go off and do everything in the world. That's what Figure's working on. Separately than that, there's gonna be this, like, really close, like, digital, like, AI to human symbiosis that forms. You're gonna have, like, this very special thing that you can, like, talk to that's with you everywhere you go that will know all your stuff, have access to all your memories, have access to all your accounts and systems, and be able to actually go do things for you like a superhuman assistant. It'll be like, um, maybe the closest thing is, like, JARVIS from "Iron Man," and it will be able to do, like, it'll be, like, superhuman in almost every way. It'll know everything about your life. You'll be able to access it at any moment whenever you need it. It'll be in the background helping you out at all times. If you're on a f- like, if you're on a flight with, like, a long layover or a flight with, like, maybe say a short, short layover and you miss it, it'll, like, already have backup plans, already help you, like, figure that out. Like, it'll just be something with you everywhere you go. We don't have that. We have, like, really good coding agents. We have really good chatbots. But we don't have, like, something that can go off and, like, be my JARVIS. In order to get there, we need to work on the, like, model side. It's gotta be just better than text chat. [chuckles] It's gotta be able to use computers, have, like, basically near-perfect memory, be able to talk to you, like, just like a human would back and forth, and, uh, we have to have vision in the system. It has to be able to, like, look at the world and understand what you're seeing with it. And I think secondly, you need to have, um, you need to fix the, the interface to AI. You have, like, um, AI over here and a human, and you have, like, an old hardware system in between, like a, call it like a MacBook or iPhone. They were designed 20 years ago. They're complete rubbish for AI. They're not the right interface. So we went out and b- we are out there d- designing what we think comes, like, after the iPhone for AI. And it's like an upgrade cycle. We see this all the time in startups. You guys see it, right? Like, we're, and we're in an upgrade cycle with the computers and phones. They're just gonna go away. They're gonna be, and new ones are gonna be all AI computers and phones and systems, and they're gonna be great. They're gonna be all real-time. You can always access them when you want. They'll always be, like, understanding what's happening. They'll always be able to reference things w- what, what's going on. You'll be able to abstract away most apps. You'll probably not have an app store. You'll probably have an AI operating system. Uh, it'll be perfect for you. You'll ultimately have your own weights on your own devices that you'll own and have with you everywhere you go. It'll be, like, a really great, uh, pairing. And we hired a incredible team, a team that's, like, you know, maybe, like, 80 or 90 now. Uh, the guy that leads, uh, hardware design, Abs, previously designed for last several generations of iPhone, MacBook, MacBook Pro. Like, he's just, like, the, he's a stud. He's great. So we're designing what we think are the next generation of AI devices that will kill the phone and computer, and then, uh, we're designing the next generation of AI models. The models need to get a lot more mot- multimodal. They need to get a lot more expressive. Like, the text encoding is just not enough for us to, like, really have a, like a, like a real AGI feeling with AI. So we're working on that. We have our first AI pr- we did our first research preview of our computer-using agent that we came out last, last week. I think we were, like, top on some of, like, the leading, like, you know, browser computer-use benchmarks in the world. And, uh, it'll keep getting better. This will keep getting better and better. Like, every month we'll just, like, it'll be better and smarter at using a computer and faster. We're working on a couple other different types of technologies internally on the AI side, and then we'll launch the ability to use Hark on, like, traditional browser and iPhone and Android in about a month. So, um, you'll be able to start using it, and then we'll have hardware coming. Um, we're working on it now. We actually have hardware in a lab now we're using, testing, and it's, it's crazy shit. Like, the stuff is like a sci-fi movie hardware.
- SPShaan Puri
What do you think those devices look like? You know, people have been speculating 'cause Johnny Ive, you know-
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... got ac- his, his, his shop got acquired by OpenAI, and-
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... you've seen the videos of the puck and then the-
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... like, this kinda little puck, and then there's, like, an earring. I don't know if that's real or if that's fake. There was, like, a leaked commercial for the Super Bowl. Again-
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... is that real or is that fake? What, what's the story of that, and then-
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... what do you think these devices end up looking like? Are these watches, glasses, something else altogether?
- BABrett Adcock
I think I've, like, really changed my mood on this a lot in the last, like, year or so, but we have a really strong opinion here internally. Our opinion is that we, what sits in the middle Is devices that could possibly reach a billion units a year in the world. The only kind of things that we have like that in the world right now are computers and phones that kind of meet that. They call it, like, mega- they call it, like, mega devices. And then you have things on the ancillary around it, like orbiting this, like, big thing that are, like, AirPods- AirPods and, you know, like, a watch or things like this that are like they don't sell a billion units a year. They're, like, three percent of, like, Apple's revenue, and they're, like, they're- they help the ecosystem as a platform. What we care about at Hark is trying to solve what's in the big middle piece. To solve that, you gotta take down the computer and the phone. There's no way around that. So you have to rebuild a new computer or a new phone that's better and replaces your existing systems end to end. And then what's around there is things that, like, you will have, we will even have at Hark, that are, like, helps with the family of devices that are, um, not a billion units a year, but important for the ecosystem.
- SPShaan Puri
Am I understanding right? You're s- you're kinda saying the next- the- the next device, it might be like a phone. It's just gonna be an AI native first phone, right? You're not gonna try to change the form factor.
- BABrett Adcock
No, I'm not saying that at all. You're gonna wanna-
- SPShaan Puri
Okay
- BABrett Adcock
... like, really radically rethink everything. Uh, the, like, the first version hardware we have now in our lab is, like, unlike anything I've ever seen in my whole life.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay.
- BABrett Adcock
What lives outside of here on the edge are, like, like, glasses and pendants and wearables and things. They're not, they're not the main show. In fact, like, the Meta glasses are probably one of the worst products I've ever bought. They're just horrible. They're horrible. Like, if you... Like, I can't even, like, figure out how to use it. It doesn't have its own network. It piggybacks on the iPhone network. It means your app needs to be open on your phone. The pairing's long. Like, it doesn't work well. Like, I can't think of any reason why I would need this thing strapped to my head for fourteen hours a day. Like, it's just, like, the wrong device. It's, it's not. Like, what, what... The end state is BCI in the brain, and we're gonna have, like, AI language devices for the next ten years before that. And that, like, that's, that's the path, and it's not glasses. Glasses, I think, I don't even know if glasses will make our top, like, ten list of devices.
- SPSam Parr
When your, when you and your team are, like, brainstorming, do you have a framework on how you can think outside of preexisting norms? Because when you're talking about... Like, I, I literally can't imagine at all what you're talking about.
- BABrett Adcock
Let's, let's get down to, like, the substrate level here. Like, first order, what, what has changed? The- what's changed is we have, like, a new type of computer, which is the, like, the AI- think of AI as a new type of computer. A new type of automation that's here. The automation can do a few things that are, like, like... And when we were designing this, we wanna design around, like, key principles that could be, like, 10X better. If it's, like, one or two times better than your phone or computer, you're not gonna use it. It's gotta be, like, literally 10X better. What are things now that, like, uh, a deep learning brings that are, like, 10X better? There's a few of them. Like, one is AI can, like, basically now, like, think and use computers and systems for you, just like a human can. It can, like, talk to you. It can, like, see. It has, like, visual understanding. It has real-time speech-to-speech. It can, uh, it can use computers and systems for you as fa- oh, close to as fast or around as fast as a human can. Over time, it'll be just as good as a human and faster, um, in terms of success rate. So you have a system that's, like, almost, like, human-like in capabilities. It also can, like, have memory, meaning that you can put memory into it, and it, like, won't f- it won't, it won't forget anything. It'll be near perfect over time. So you have a system that's almost like a human in a box that has all the same, like, affordances a human has, and it's almost like the ability of, like, almost like if you could bring a little human around with a computer on your, on your shoulder everywhere you went. That'd be insane. Like, where just, like, it was only for Sam, though. Only Sam could see it, and only Sam could talk to you, and only was, like, there to help with Sam, and that was, like, your whole life, and it was getting smarter and better along the way and had perfect memory and could use computers and talk to you and see. You'd be like, "Damn." That thing would be like, uh... It'd be, like, be able to do anything you do on a computer.
- SPSam Parr
Okay. So your first step with your team is, like, just, like, let's just get rid of, like, any constraint ever. What would be the coolest magical thing if we had, like, a little guy on our shoulder that was AI, all-knowing, and could see and hear everything we see and hear and then give advice to us?
- BABrett Adcock
Like, like, what is the thing that's gonna bring, that's gonna fundamentally reshape all this?
- SPSam Parr
Okay.
- BABrett Adcock
And then from there, like, we gotta, like, we gotta design around that system. The competitive advantages here are that it, uh, is human-like in capabilities, and it has almost near perfect memory. It can go back and reference over time. My phone doesn't have that. Like, I put a contact in my phone, like, last week, and I was like, I was, like, busy when I was, like, putting the phone number in, and, like, a day later, uh, like, somebody's like, "Hey, did you g- did you call that person?" I'm like, "I don't even know the name. I forgot." I can't even ask my phone. Like, it's just, like, it's so stupid, like, the whole system is. And then I go in there and, like, order DoorDash like a monkey, like, every day now I'm pushing things. Like, I don't do any of that now with Hark. It does it end-to-end for me on my drive to work. I just, like, say, "Order me coffee," and it's just done. It does it all for me in the background. I don't have to touch anything. It's all abstracted away. And it's like if you had that little human with you everywhere you go, you would just say, like... It would even predict probably, "Brett, you want coffee today?" And I'd be like, "Eh, yeah, I do." Like, "Let's get, let's order a... You know what? Make it a double shot today," and, you know, like, route it to the Hark office instead of Figure. Like, I can, like... I would just... And done. I got it. Let me take care of it. I don't sit here like a monkey on my phone for the next, like, three minutes, like, trying to do checkout DoorDash.
- SPShaan Puri
It, it's almost like the phone is, like, a tool in the... It's like a hammer, right? If you want the hammer to do anything functional, you have to pick up the hammer and start swinging it, whereas the next generation is basically like having a handyman next to you at all times. And so you just tell him-
- BABrett Adcock
Got it
- SPShaan Puri
... "Hey, can you fix that window?"
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
And he'll just go fix the window. You don't have to pick up the hammer and start figuring how to use it.
- 17:32 – 21:38
rapid prototyping
- BABrett Adcock
prototype. So when you come over, like, we have, like, we've, we've designed everything you could possibly think of. We 3D printed it.
- SPSam Parr
What were the designs that didn't work but were kinda cool?
- BABrett Adcock
What were designs that didn't work that were kinda cool? The thing is, we're building, like, many different devices now [laughs] that cover, like, a pretty wide area of this. We have some pretty crazy stuff that we were, like, designing, so, like, it's not like you look at that and you're like, "That looks like a... That looks like this," and it... Well, that does over, well, over here, so it's like, it's not as easy as drawing those parallels. It's, like, pretty quite radical. But we w- we rapidly prototype all this. We have, like, a fabrication facility that does this stuff. We, like, we have a whole design studio where we work on this. I, like, u- like, use this stuff, like, over the coming, like, weeks and months. I'll, like, either carry it around with me, wear it, whatever way we end up doing it, and we'll, like, kinda down selection. Like, we, we had, like, one of the biggest telecom CEOs in, in the world here that actually helped, um- With, with the work with, like, Steve Jobs on iPhone 1, and he was here two weeks ago, and he'd just come from meeting Tim Cook. Uh, you know, Tim Cook's on his way out of Apple, but he's like was over there at Apple and came over here, and we- he saw our stuff, and he's just like, "Holy shit, man. This is the first time I've ever seen anybody that could possibly take out, like take out the big guys."
- SPShaan Puri
It- well, is it true to say that with, like, Archer, Figure, and Hark, the, the hard problem seems like, can I just mass produce this?
- BABrett Adcock
The hard problem is not that. We think-- we believe now the most important constraint to really solve is, like, bu-building a really intelligent robot system we can put out to the world. Like, there's a bunch of robots you can go buy now. You can buy some from China, and you get them and they're complete crap. They can't do anything. They can, like-- you can joystick around. That's all you can do, and you, like, hit a button and it waves. And it's got no hands, [laughs] and it's got nubs, and you're like, "What do I do with this thing? It's a toy." It's like, it's like when I-- it's like when, like, early when I bought a D-- I bought a DJI drone, like, years ago, and I was, like, playing around with it, and then like a day later, I was like, "What do I do with this thing?"
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- BABrett Adcock
And, uh, it was, like, it was, like, hard to set up. It didn't really work well. Like, you know, whatever. It's just like I flew it into a bunch of trees. Like, it just didn't work. I was like, "This is-- what am I doing with this thing?" Robots are like that now, like where you can-- we can go manufacture a ton of them, but, like, if they're not really smart, like, it's not really gonna be that helpful. We're trying to crack, like, the true human-level intelligence at Figure. Like, we really wanna tackle, like, how do we make it so I can put it into any home, it can do every, every, every job I'd want it to do? That's what we're working on. We think that's the largest, like, like, you know, think about the largest, like, gap in the schedule of what we need to go solve for. Like, it's that. Then beyond that, like, you know, people generally sometimes confuse, like, consumer electronics manufacturing with car manufacturing. There's no company, big company in the world that would look-- like, say, like, uh, uh, "I'm scared of manufacturing this consumer electronics at high rate if there's so much demand." Like, this is just possible to go do. I mean, you can make a b- you make a-- we make a billion phones almost, like, you know, pseudo by hand in the world [laughs] and with some automation. But cars is a different story. Cars, like, you will die trying to manufacture cars. There's, like, there's, like, a lot of comp-- like, you just, like, it's so... And having seen, like, you know, B-BMW's a commercial customer of ours. I-having been to BMW and a few other groups, like, it's gnarly. The reason why c-cars are so hard is that you can't hold the part in your hand. Phones you can just, like, always hold in your hand and go change or whatever, move and hold. Like, cars you can't. You physically can't, so you need robots that, like, literally pass it to other robots that put things on the chassis, and if any of those break across, like, thousands or 800 robots, you're d- it is, you're d- your whole line's down. And so it's just, like, just a huge giant robot you're building that's building the car. And with Figure, you can hold any part in your hand. So I think we're, like, if we're, like, between cars and, like, consumer electronics, we're, like, over here-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- BABrett Adcock
... closer to, like, you know, we're like, you know, the 40% level over here by, like, cell phones. Like, we, you know, we just made our 1000s, uh, EVT robot for Figure 03 last week or week before that.
- SPShaan Puri
When you say you made 1,000, those are 1,000 that go to customers like BMW, or you're just making prototypes internally? What does that mean?
- BABrett Adcock
We have, like, two big, like, large customers. Uh, we have, uh, us as a c- as, like, an engineering and, like, AI research org that needs, like, robots, like, here. Like, every engineer needs a robot. We need, like, every lab needs robots. Like, we need, like, to do tons of testing. Uh, there's just a lot of work we need to go do, uh, internally. We call, like, maybe, like, engineering fleet we need to go to, and the second one is go to customers, so we have it going to both right now. Uh, we've actually shipped out robots to our third customer this,
- 21:38 – 23:45
What are the robots doing?
- BABrett Adcock
this, this week.
- SPShaan Puri
When they go to customers, what do they do? What, what, what, what can the robot do? What, you know, maybe can't it do at, at this point?
- BABrett Adcock
Uh, we do a lot of, like, logistics stuff right now and packages. Uh, we have other stuff we've done in manufacturing. Mostly just manufacturing and logistics is stuff we've done in the past. Um, but, like, we're also talking to folks about other industries.
- SPShaan Puri
And at this point, when it goes to a customer and it's doing y- I don't know what you said, like packaging work or what, what is that? Like sorting or carrying or what is it doing?
- SPSam Parr
They just did a live YouTube video, and they had hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of views of people watching this robot sort packages off of a conveyor belt.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
Did you see that?
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, I saw that. So is, is that the type-- is that, like... Would that... Give me an example of one of the jobs. Is it just like a ro-ro-
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah. That's, that, that's an example of, I guess, a, a, like a ver-a very close to, like, one of the, one of the works we do.
- SPShaan Puri
Is that customer like, "Oh, this is awesome because I can't find the labor to do this. Uh, it's too expensive-
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... to pay humans. This is way cheaper"? Or is it just like, "Hey, look, today it's not faster, cheaper, or better necessarily, but, like, it's an investment in the future where two years from now that cost curve is gonna work, and it will be faster, cheaper," you know, whatever?
- BABrett Adcock
No, no, no. It's like, uh, it's... The pitch is, like, they come to us and they're saying like, "We're dying with labor." It's like, "We're like, we have, like, really high turnover. Some areas have over 100% turnover per year. It's really expensive to find talent. We have, like, a, just a large talent shortfall. The talent's really expensive, like wages are going up, and we, like, we don't have a solve for this. We can't figure out how to automate all this work, and, uh, we need you to come in and help us." We have an ability to make a lot of g-good money in our contracts, and the customers make, like, really good ROI, uh, on this. Like, w- you gotta think, like, a robot can do, like, multiple shifts per day, work seven days a week. Like, it c- we can, like, have a lot of uptime. Uh, the task you saw, like, on the, on the, on the, like, um, logistics line that we just livestreamed was actually a real use case for one of our customers. Uh, that needs to be done at three seconds a package, and it, and this needs to be done five hours a day. Like, I think it was, like, five days a week. We did that 200 hours straight at 2.9 seconds a package. [laughs] So we're already at human speeds. We're already doing this here now. They already have an ROI, and, uh, we're now in the early stages of, like, getting these out to these customers and scaling up. Uh, over time it will just put billions out to these
- 23:45 – 27:54
what about the hype is real?
- BABrett Adcock
groups.
- SPShaan Puri
Can you help me with, like, the kind of truth versus fiction? 'Cause, uh, one of the weird things is as an enthusiast or a layperson who's, who's excited about this future, you can't really... It's, like, really expensive or hard to test this, right? So I'll see, like, a, a Chinese robot, and it's 20 grand if I wanna buy this robot. I have no idea really what it can do. I see, uh, you know, Elon will go out there and say, "We're gonna, we're gonna build a million of these things in the next year. We're gonna ship them." Uh, then you get, like, 1X and they're showing their hand and they're like, "Look at our hand. Look at this. This is the best hand you've ever seen."
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
And then there's this service in San Francisco where they'll send a robot in to clean your apartment-
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... and they're like, "Yeah, that works today." So can you help me separate fact from fiction? It seems really hard compared to most categories where I can just try the products quickly online or buy them and, and, and test them out.
- BABrett Adcock
One is, um- The amount of, like, noise in the market for a signal is just, like... It's like, like you mentioned, it's like, it's like, it's out, it's out of control. Like the... Like, there's just so much bullshit out there in the market, it's, like, really hard to tell what the hell is going on. So let me summarize what I think is, like, the most important and work backwards.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay.
- BABrett Adcock
What I think the most important thing to do is, uh, to be able to ship robots autonomously at scale in useful work environments. Like, they can like, you know, cook you dinner, like, like clean your dishes, like, um, like make your bed, like run the supply chain end to end-
- SPShaan Puri
Sure
- BABrett Adcock
... work in healthcare, build a building, like do logistics. Like that sort of stuff. That stuff requires, uh, fundamentally onboard AI that you can run, so you can do, like, autonomous work. You can't solve it with code. You need to do it autonomously, you need to do it over long periods of time, and you probably need to move around and use, like, something in your hands and move, move, move stuff through the world. You know what I mean? It's like really you gotta like do, do stuff economically. Like you gotta move, you gotta move, like, electrons around. So I think at a high level, like what we care about is not, like, the best robot that's doing back flips and running the fastest mile or dancing or in a parade or running outside in the woods. Like, you know, we don't care about that stuff.
- SPShaan Puri
Dude, I can't wait till I see a Figure, like, on a smoke break at the B&W fact. Like-
- BABrett Adcock
[laughs] Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
"I could have been a great back in high school, but I blew it. Now I'm working at a B&W factory." I've made jokes with you before where I was like, you started with Vettery, which is just like a job recruitment thing, now you're on these world-changing things. And you were like, "Well, Veter-Vettery actually is world-changing, and here's why," and you gave this pitch. It was very good. You're very good at pitching. You're very good at raising money. You're very good at, um, being char-charismatic and convincing people of stuff. When you're crafting a pitch to recruit and convince people to ch-change their lives, to uproot their lives and to trust in you and to come and build a company, how do you craft that pitch? And what was that pitch for some of your companies?
- BABrett Adcock
I mean, most of all these are online. I mean, the Figure master plan is on the [laughs] on the internet, on the site. Archers was up for a long time, like posted about it. Like, I think, like, deep down, I really wanna find folks that really care and are obsessed. And I'm like, I think most of my time is not... I know you wanna know about the pitch. Most of my time is trying to find those folks. I found that even in the Bay Area, where it's probably like the richest AI and engineering, like, uh, folks in the world, 90% of everybody out here is not good at their jobs.
- SPShaan Puri
How do you tell who's good and who's not?
- BABrett Adcock
I technically assess them, all of them. Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
To do that, does that mean you need to be as good or better than them technically to be able to assess somebody?
- BABrett Adcock
I need to know, like, a certain guiding principles. Like for instance, like I need to know, like, if A, if you did the work or if you, like, watched somebody do the work. If you've done the work, it's like, it's like, it's like a scar you carry with you. It's like, it's like dug into you. Like you know all the details. You can talk about it freely. You don't need to think. You'll understand how to, like, reverse engineer everything you've done and dis-discuss it. The folks that haven't done it can't do that. They just like, they can't even go, like they get one layer, and they just like instantly blow up. They can't talk about it. They don't know why.
- SPShaan Puri
Out of 100 candidates who sound good, how many, uh, like their resume looks good, the recruiter thinks they're good, out of 100 candidates, how many do you... would you say actually hit that bar?
- BABrett Adcock
I'll give you an example. We have, like, a really challenging process to go through to be a mechanical engineer here at, at Figure. You have to be able to build, like, actuators from scratch. There's bearings and motors and, you know, we have a, we have
- 27:54 – 30:14
finding the best people
- BABrett Adcock
a, we have a gearbox. We have, like, other sensors inside the system. It's a really... it's very compact. You know, uh, it's just a very difficult thing to do, uh, and like really hard requirements. We've been doing 10 case studies a week for six months and have not hired anybody.
- SPShaan Puri
That's insane.
- BABrett Adcock
It's insane.
- SPShaan Puri
So but when you do get someone qualified, and their competing offers are companies that are larger or, or more liquid than you, and the offers are... I, I, I, I think they're like tens of millions of dollars a year, right?
- BABrett Adcock
The AI side is certainly like that. Like the AI side has gotten, um... and it's, it's mostly all driven from Meta. Like at Hark, like I've never seen... I thought maybe like Meta was like paying these people for like, like a year ago, and it was, like, it would go away. They've not stopped.
- SPShaan Puri
So what are they... Like, what's a crazy story that you've heard?
- BABrett Adcock
We gave an offer to somebody that was really senior that was like they were coming from xAI. Like xAI completely blew up. Like everybody just left and about six months ago. Just like every- it was just like Macrohard, like got fully disbanded. Like there was basically a bunch of stuff that happened. We interviewed a pretty senior guy on the AI infra side. It was great. I think I gave him like a really good package, like of Series A stock at Hark. And it was, I don't know, I don't know, $15, $20 million of stock.
- SPShaan Puri
Over four years?
- BABrett Adcock
Over... We do five.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay.
- BABrett Adcock
Like for, uh, my companies in the early days, then we transitioned to four a little bit later, so we're still at five. And, uh, you know, I was like, I think we're as, like, a... I think we can like 10X Hark here pretty quick. And so I was like, "Okay, you have like, you know, 15, $20 million. I think 10X, you'll have a few hundred million dollars. I mean, 10X more time, you have a few billion dollars. And I think we can do it. I think we like, we have to, like obviously it's gonna be hard, but I think we can do it." And he got an offer for to go to Meta for 36 million of four years of our issues. And he was just like, "It's kinda guaranteed cash." [laughs] You know-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- BABrett Adcock
... like go there. And I have to like weigh this like maybe like $200 million at Hark or $20 million or maybe like 36 for sure at Meta. And he left and went to Meta, and they've been doing that. Like, every candidate we sp-speak to is like making some absurd, absurd thing. It hasn't stopped. They've just been at, they've been at it since like for like a year, a year and a... They've been buying talent. They've been buying their way into the AI race.
- SPShaan Puri
What, what do you think of that strategy? Like, you know, even if you kinda hate it, do you respect it? Do you just think it's a fool's errand? What do you think of that?
- BABrett Adcock
I really like it. I think, like, the AI space is... what I found is the folks that really understand how to
- 30:14 – 32:03
$20M dollar salaries for engineers
- BABrett Adcock
do, like, language pre-training and mid-training and post-training, especially pre-training and the infra around super computing and data and evals and all the right stuff you need to get put in place to do that right, and the amount of folks that really understand the right kind of like recipes that transformers do well in and, you know, around MOE or whatever you're gonna look at, I think it's really hard to find. It's actually really hard to find the actual folks that know what they're doing. I think there's probably... My rough calculus now is probably like A rough back of the envelope. It's probably like 20 to 30 people in California know how to build really good AI models
- SPSam Parr
Wait, so but is that trickling down? So you said that there was a senior guy, but like, are even some of the less than senior, the 20-somethings, the young 30-somethings, are they still getting eight figures a year?
- BABrett Adcock
No. The, like, the junior guys, like the guys in like their 20s, you know, like the late, late 20s or something are getting like a... They're making like a few million total. So they're making like 200, 250 in base. They're making like another million or whatever like in s- in a year in like, uh, RSUs every year. And so they're gonna be-
- SPSam Parr
Crazy
- BABrett Adcock
... making a million to, like, you know, or like 750 to like 2 million or so range per year. And that's, uh, that's been driven up by Meta and but then all of the other labs have, have like, have f- have kind of like followed comp.
- SPShaan Puri
When, when I asked you what do you think of that, you said, "I like it." Were you being sarcastic or you're, you're saying no, actually, that is smart given how hard it is to get this talent?
- BABrett Adcock
I think it was really smart, and I would've done the same thing if I was, I was, I was Mark. I would've bought my way into the race. And I think he's like, he's doing that now. I, I don't think I would've done that. I wanna understand it, and I wanna like first order, like find the right folks that really care deeply about this and not hire like, like mercenaries.
- SPShaan Puri
Mm-hmm.
- BABrett Adcock
And he so he hired a bunch of mercenaries. They're just purely money-driven. He- they came over there. There's no other... Nobody wants to go to Meta. They just, they're going there 'cause they're getting paid a guaranteed RSU package
- 32:03 – 35:44
How Zuck is buying his way into AI
- BABrett Adcock
by sitting around. And w- what's happening is like you don't need like 1,000 people or 500 or 300 to design AI models. You can make a really good team of 20 or 30 or 40 people, and that, you can get there without doing this. [laughs] And those people probably would care more deeply about the mission and where you're at and be more committed than just if you purely throw money at the problem. But I think if I was like... I, I think it was a really good strategy, and it's working. I think hats off, like really good execution, their recruiting efforts and how they're structuring this stuff, and, uh, it's like, I think it's r- I, I think it's like paying off for them. Jury's still out if they can like actually ship real products. I think like the problem I have with those groups is they've just traditionally have not been able to do things new well. I mean, I think Facebook is probably gonna... Meta's gonna go down as like one of the greatest ac- acquirers in all time with like, you know, Instagram and WhatsApp in different way. They like bought their way into those spaces. Uh, but like, you know, if you look at like the Ray-Bans and everything they're doing, it's just like it's just not great work. And so I think the question really is how do you really do great work here? I think like we're even talking like we're, we're using like the Hark system right now, and it's so good. It's so much better than anything I use today.
- SPShaan Puri
You gotta send it to us.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, can we use it?
- BABrett Adcock
Well, yeah, we used you guys early on that. Yeah, for sure.
- SPShaan Puri
It's like research preview. There's like 500 PhDs-
- BABrett Adcock
Mm-hmm
- SPShaan Puri
... and then me and Sam.
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah, exactly. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Yes.
- BABrett Adcock
No. Well, like, like every other platform is-
- SPSam Parr
Hark, what's the weather outside?
- BABrett Adcock
I can answer that. Yeah, no problem.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- BABrett Adcock
So like I, I, I think what I'm trying to say is like every week there's like five or 10 like junk AI slop startups or like things that are coming out. They're just like not very good. Like, this whole space has gotten to a point where like there's just not great things coming out the door. I think the stuff in coding is probably really excellent right now, but ev- everything beyond that is like just kinda like not great.
- SPShaan Puri
On January 1st of this year, you made four predictions for the year. I wanna check in and see how, how you think they're going. First one, uh, number one, humanoid robots will perform unsupervised multi-day tasks in homes they've never seen before, driven entirely by neural networks, long time horizons going straight from pixels to torques. How are we doing on that one? On track, off track, or done?
- BABrett Adcock
On track.
- SPShaan Puri
On track.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, four months.
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah. My, I see every day like what we're doing. I think we're on track. The hard part here is, um, we already do pixels to torques. [laughs] It just means like we're taking camera feeds, and we output like where to put the mo- like put the, like you know, we wanna put a, we, we wanna like tell the motor like what to, what to do to get to the hand in the right spot or the joints. So we're, we're ready to do that. Um, getting into a new house it's never seen to do work, that's the hard part of this problem. Um, we're working on that. I'm working on that every day. It's where I spend about three, four hours a day every single day, seven days a week on this problem.
- SPShaan Puri
So if a Figure robot showed up at my house, what would it... What's the par- bottleneck right now? Like, it wouldn't know what to do. It wouldn't know where to go. It wouldn't be able to, you know, fine-tune handle my dishes. Where would it suck for me?
- BABrett Adcock
We can fold laundry, like as an example, but then going to a new place where we're folding in a different location with different lighting and maybe different like table height and different types of laundry and different like types of scenarios it's never seen before, it's like the model's like out of distribution. It doesn't know what to do. It's like if you removed all the pyramid data from the, the pre-training of LLMs, it wouldn't know how to talk about pyramids.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- BABrett Adcock
And we just like, we don't have enough of that data out there. It's not on the internet, so you have to go out and collect it. So what we need to know is like how much of that data we have to go sample in the world to be able to train the model to be able to go into your house and say, "Fold clothes" as like an example.
- SPShaan Puri
Hey, stupid question. Why do all the robot companies care about folding clothes and, and doing laundry? Wouldn't it be commercially better just to say, "Hey, we're gonna build like the best warehouse worker 'cause there's already 20 million of those in the world, and that represents this much billions, and of course, that buys us the runway to like get the robot folding, you know, robot
- 35:44 – 42:33
Auditing Brett's 2026 predictions
- SPShaan Puri
done"? But like why do you care about that at all today? Why not just industrial work that people don't wanna do, companies need done, they're w- ready to pay, and it's not like my home where there's all these other sensitivities?
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Why do you guys care about that right now?
- BABrett Adcock
Uh, we didn't care about it in the past, where we like when we first launched we're like, "We're gonna basically do the commercial side to pay for the home long term." And, uh, that was the strategy. It made a lot of sense. Like, there's like we can charge a lot more in the commercial market. It's like much easier to do. It's like lower variability. We're in like a little work site.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- BABrett Adcock
We can just work 24/7. Just so much simpler. Uh, what I've learned now is that the home is super solvable today. So like we can like not go work on that problem and just like sit here and work in a warehouse, but n- me or none of my guys wanna solve that problem. We wanna solve a robot that can go into any environment just through language and do work. We wanna be the first to do that. You can probably do that with 100 robots and a 50-person team. So that, that company overnight would be a trillion-dollar market cap.
- SPSam Parr
That sounds good. Do that. [laughs]
- BABrett Adcock
We're doing that. That's what we're doing.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- BABrett Adcock
Like, we're gonna solve that. I think we'll be the first... We call it like solving general robotics.
- SPShaan Puri
In I, Robot, don't they attack the humans? [laughs] I don't remember this movie very well, but-
- BABrett Adcock
It's like just... Yeah, don't worry about that.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay, not that part of I, Robot.
- SPSam Parr
Who, who could win in-
- BABrett Adcock
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Who could win in a, who can win in a fight right now?
- SPShaan Puri
Can a, can a human still win?
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah, a human can still win
- SPSam Parr
Okay
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah
- SPSam Parr
Uh, what are the other predictions, Shaan?
- SPShaan Puri
All right, other prediction. Um, one you had on here, "Daily AI usage will shift. People will move beyond text to highly multimodal voice agents with permisa- per- uh, persistent memory will become common, which will push AI closer to the synthetic human intelligence we've imagined in sci-fi."
- BABrett Adcock
We're doing that at Hark. We'll ship that in a month, and our first version of it. It'll get better and better. Uh, I think we're on track for that.
- SPShaan Puri
Have the labs ever... Like, has ChatGPT or Claude, have they ever released the data on this? Like, I use a ton of the voice thing. Sam, do you use the, the voice stuff a lot?
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, I don't type really at all.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. I wonder, it's probably already a huge percentage of use-
- SPSam Parr
It's gotten to the point where, like, o- offices need to change. Like, these open-air offices that are-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- SPSam Parr
... like, popular in startups, they're kinda wack right now because, like, I wanna talk in private.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. Yeah, a lot of engineers have microphones now, where they're whispering and [laughs] they're just, like, in hushed tones whispering to their computers.
- 42:33 – 44:00
reducing your buckets
- BABrett Adcock
laptop a lot. Uh, laptop and phone. I would say I use Hark now for all my AI stuff end to end. Um, even like tracking re- like stuff I'm doing on engineering projects, recruiting, all of it, I do, it tracks. It's, it's in my, it's in my email. It's in my Slack.
- SPSam Parr
What about your to-do lists?
- BABrett Adcock
That's all in Hark. Hark manages all that.
- SPSam Parr
So what about before Hark?
- BABrett Adcock
Um, I would... My to-do list was done in a Google Doc. I had like a, a doc called Re-planning, and it would constantly keep updating every week. I would come in on Sundays usually and update my plans for the week, and I updated there
- SPSam Parr
And what about health? Are you doing anything for health?
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah, I do like, um... I've ju- I've gotten like access to like some special doctors and things now, where they basically send you through like a, the quarterly blood tests and like the, the whole body scans and like the, the CT scans of the heart, everything, and it's been ac- honestly unbel- pretty unbelievable.
- SPSam Parr
What was unbelievable about it?
- BABrett Adcock
The amount of data you get back and the amount, thoroughness of all this. Like, uh, like for instance, like, like, you know, if you get a... You can get a CT scan of your heart for like 100 bucks. Uh, I think you can basically prevent heart attacks. You can get a full body MRI, and I think you can like have early cancer detection. A lot of blood work can find some anomalies that you can go fix and better for your health. Um, so, and there's like maybe like a dozen of those. Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, but the solution to all those things are probably things you're unwilling to do. It's like, you're probably willing to eat whole foods, but like, it's like, get up, go for walks, exercise, and that was outside of your buckets of, of, of focus.
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah. Unfortunately,
- 44:00 – 46:17
show us your home screen
- BABrett Adcock
I haven't been able to have enough time to exercise enough. But, you know, eat right, like I've, I've like, uh, I eat pretty well now. Yeah. I mean, listen, like something's gotta give. I can't sit here all day-
- SPSam Parr
Yeah
- BABrett Adcock
... meeting and like, I gotta go work.
- SPSam Parr
Dead.
- BABrett Adcock
I, like, I lo- I, I like, you know, I wanna go crush these businesses.
- SPShaan Puri
When you, uh, you wrote in a, in like our prep doc, you said, "I went all in on my first three startups, and I pretty much hit rock bottom every year." Can you describe what you mean by rock bottom, and what is your method of dealing with rock bottom? What's the conversation you have with yourself or kind of the, the entrepreneurial strategy you have when you kinda hit those lows?
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah. I, um, I basically, almost for like 15 years, was like always running out of money. You know, at Vettery, we, we had a couple pivots early on. We ended up raising like a $500,000 convertible note in 2015. I-- at that point, I think I took out like a 50 or $100,000 loan. I was not paying myself a salary. I was in New York City. I was like so broke. I was ne- in the negative. We raised a convertible note. It did not look great. And I think it was like six months later, we launched the marketplace at Vettery, and it just like completely took off, and then a year later, we sold for $110 million. And I think that period from 2012 to 2017 was just like, was like n-n... I, like, I had like, basically like debt. Things weren't working, and it's hard.
- SPShaan Puri
And what's, what's the inner monologue? What do you tell yourself?
- BABrett Adcock
Uh, the inner monologue is like, "This really sucks. Super painful." I think at that point, you just gotta go like day per day. You just gotta make it like day... You gotta make... Uh, when things get really bad like that, you gotta build a punch list, and you just gotta get through it. Like, there's only way out is through. So you need to build a punch list, and you need to get to day to day. You gotta go day to day. You can't go week to week, th- two days, can't look at Friday. You look... You gotta go every, like every... You gotta get to the next day. Plow through it.
- SPSam Parr
I was training for this ultra-marathon, and I hate, like, really long-distance running, and I read this story about this guy who kinda helped me, and he was like, "Just all you gotta do is, like, pick something, like, it doesn't matter if it's 100 feet or half a mile in the distance. Even though you have 49 miles left to go in the race, just pick something half a mile away and tell yourself, once you get there, then you'll consider quitting." And then you get there, and you're like, "Okay, maybe I have a little bit more," and you pick another
- 46:17 – 57:22
hitting rock bottom 3x
- SPSam Parr
thing just, like, only 200 yards away. You're like, "Okay, I'll consider quitting when I get to that."
- BABrett Adcock
No, it was great. I think it's exactly how I thought about it. But it was like, it's like, okay, so then I sold Vettery, and then I was like doing Archer. I was like, "Oh, man, I just made $110 million. Made like 12X to all the inve- venture guys." And then I was like, "We're gonna raise money. It'll be f- I'll be... Raise money, it'll be fine." And like everybody's like, "What are we do- what are you doing?"
- SPShaan Puri
For Archer?
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah. Everybody's like, "What are you doing? We're not gonna fund this. What are you talking about?"
- SPSam Parr
How do you fight that inner monologue where everyone says you're stupid and wrong and this is silly? Just go do software.
- BABrett Adcock
It's coming from a place of conviction. Like I, I know I'm right because I've been in the, I've done the work. I understand it. I'm on the floor.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, but the odds are still against you, right?
- BABrett Adcock
But that's, that's, that, that's the game. That's when you play this game, it's like you like sign up and like 95% of everybody around you will fail. Like I, I remember what... At Vettery, we like, we, we started at the NYU Incubator. I was like so excited. We got in like the, one of the, like, the s- the semesters, and there was like, I think it was like 50 companies that were there. We started in SoHo. Um, it was great. We had a great time. The... I think if you look back, like, I think like five years later, m-me and one other guy are the only two people that made greater than $0 on our c- on our team. 48 companies went to zero. And I was just like, holy shit, if you're around this game for long enough, like everybody dies. And that's everywhere. It's been like that since, for 20 years now I've been watching around. You like, you see all the TechCrunch stuff and things on X about people raising money and all this, and just like over time, that all just kinda fades away, and it's just really brutal. Um, so I had to like, I had to like, I, you know, I had to like, I bought a house, and like I had to put all the rest of the money into Archer. And then I had like a stock lockup. So even while I was coming over to Figure, like the, like the stock was like unlocking. I was funding Figure with stock from Archer because I had no other cash. Stock was coming down. The stock was just like literally like a falling knife with, at that point. [laughs] It was just like, yo, I think it went from like 10 bucks to like two, and it's since like gone up a lot. But like, uh, I had to take a second mortgage out on my house to even fund Figure. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
We asked you one of your philosophies, and you said, um, "I believe that doing hard things is easier in many ways than doing easier things." Can you explain?
- BABrett Adcock
Like everybody's trying to do easy things. When you work on harder things, you have like less... Generally, like overall, probably there's like first order, like less competition. You have probably like a hard thing probably means like it could be a potential like really big TAM, really big exit if it works. You have like this like, you know, risk-reward trade. You have folks that probably wanna work on hard things, probably like the best overachievers in the world that kinda wanna, wants to work there. Generally, like, you know, hard things have this like binary payoff for investors. They wanna like really wanna fund those things because it could have like a 100X return for the portfolio. And I think there's like a nonlinear curve to scaling like here, I mean, like of, of the difficulty here, meaning like I think a lot of the hard things are not like 10 or 100 times harder. I think the hard things sometimes are like two or three or four times harder Maybe five times harder, but they're not 100 times harder. So you might have 100 times better payoff, but it might be, like, three or four times harder. I'll give you an example in robotics. I think, like, largely building, like, quadruped robots, like four-legged dog robots versus humanoids, like, probably humanoids are probably, like, three times harder than that. Maybe four. That's it. But, like, there's really no... I don't think there's, like, really a real market for cu- for humanoid, like, like, those dogs. I, I think it's just, like, a niche thing. I don't think there's a real business for it. And I don't know anybody that really at this point and, like, really wants to spend a lot of time on that. So, like, you do humanoids, like, okay, three times harder, but it's probably, like, a, a million times higher payoff. Probably, like, a million X or a billion X higher ROI for that. You know what I mean? For investors, for humans that want to work there and get stock and participate in upside and for everything else. Like, why, why would you ever, like, want to work on, like, like, four-legged dogs? What, what economic value can a, like, a robot dog bring at scale? Like, if you really understand it, like, I think there's... E- everybody's trying to do the easy work, and it just becomes really difficult. You know, like, look at, look at all the AI slop, like OpenClaw harnesses out there today. It's all crap. It's all not good. They're all gonna g- I, I don't think any of them will make it long term. You might have some consolidation here and there for acquihires and stuff, but, like, that's gonna go all away.
- SPSam Parr
Dude, you talk in so many absolutes. H- has that not gotten in, you in trouble ever?
- BABrett Adcock
I don't know. I mean, mark my words. Like, like, you think, like, like, I... Have you guys even used OpenClaw since then?
- SPSam Parr
No, I don't know how to. [laughs]
- BABrett Adcock
Shaan, do you use OpenClaw?
- SPShaan Puri
I, I never, I never trusted OpenClaw to set it up. I was not gonna use it.
- BABrett Adcock
I mean, I used to use it. I don't use it anymore. It's not very good. Like, the wave's over. I don't know. I just, I'm just trying to say, like, I think it's, like, I think the most important thing you can do as a founder is to think through what you're gonna actually go do. 'Cause you're gonna spend the next 10, 15 years doing it, and it'll, it'll, like, it'll map the whole course, the probability course, like a probability-weighted decision of, like... or a probability of, like, of, like, potential outcomes.
- SPSam Parr
Well, but you're, you're, you're, you're talking about a, a very particular game. Like, like, for example, uh, you're, as you've said, you're like, "We're gonna be a trillion-dollar company or we're gonna go bankrupt." Like, it's, it's binary. Most business is not binary. You're, you know, you're playing the game where binary is the outcome, and that's what you like. But it's not like that for a lot of people. Um, like, for a lot of people, if they can build a really cool $10 million a year business, that's a massive home run.
- BABrett Adcock
Is it? Where, like, if, like, if things do that well, and you look back when you're 70 or 80, would they, would you have asked the same person, "Hey, you built a really cool five or $10 million business. You did it for 30 years. You didn't do anything else. You didn't try anything else while you were doing it. You just, like, worked on that business. Would you have gone back 30 years ago and tried to take a bigger swing?"
- SPShaan Puri
Like, w- would, would you have taken a different swing than Vettery? Vettery was like that.
- BABrett Adcock
Vettery was my bridge. I stayed inside of Vettery for, like, seven years. Like, we literally built, like, a marketing automation tool for us internally, and then, like, a year later, I was like, "Oh, man, look at this. It's outreach.io." And it was, like, a billion-dollar company. We built that internally a year or two prior. And then, like, watching all this different stuff happen, and I was like, man, we, like, we actually did some of this work internally. It's, like, value less than some other groups out there. Like, this whole decision of, like, what you spend time on is, like, super critical, uh, for startups. Assuming, like, there's a... And I do think startups are, like... I think it is kind of binary. Even guys that get the $10 million, there's probably, like, another 90% of those folks that just didn't make it when they're out there trying. So I think it's just, I think it's just hard. And I think, dude, kudos to guys getting to, like, five or 10 million in business. Those- that's, that's hard. Um, especially doing that if we maybe with a little bit of capital or no capital coming in. That's-
- SPShaan Puri
Hey, let me ask you real quick about your, your, uh, other stuff you've seen. So I'm sure because you're doing really interesting work, you meet other founders that are doing interesting things in, in, you know, unrelated spaces. So not humanoid robots, but equally cool, interesting peek at the future. I think you've probably seen more of the future than, than us and definitely more, more than most of the listeners. Can you give us, uh, anything that you've seen or heard or read about, a founder you've met that's doing something that's like, oh, yeah, y- y- you guys, you guys realize, right, the future is actually gonna look like this, and we're just, you know, not, it's not evenly distributed for all the rest of us yet?
- BABrett Adcock
I like, I like looking at, like, I like trying to think through this problem of what was the world gonna look like in 30 years, where is every- where everything's headed. I think we have an energy problem. Like, not an energy consumption, like, like a generation problem. So how we... Well, I mean both, but, like, ultimately, how do we, like, g- generate more energy, uh, as, like, a species? I think there's, like, there's, like, a, there's, like, a secular trend here that you wanna go ride and re- really help, and I think there's, um, a lot of work done correlating this to, like, like, standards of living for humans. So I think there's a lot of work here on, like, what is that next generation of? Is it solar? Is it wind? Is it nuclear? Like, and then there's a bunch of different trades inside of here for fusion and fission and the rest. Like, I think that's a really exciting area. I think it would take a long time, but you need, like, I think you need, like, really great entrepreneurs, like, there solving that stuff. I think AI is just gonna dominate a, a lot of stuff in the next 10 or 20 years for all of us here. I think it's gonna be, like, 100... We all lived through the internet. Like, I think it's gonna be 100 times bigger than the internet. I think it's gonna be so, so big. It's gonna, it, it's gonna, AI's gonna eat the whole internet. It's gonna eat it all up. And, uh, I think it's gonna be a extremely, like, large trend both physically and digitally.
- SPSam Parr
What... Are there any products that you're looking at or companies that you're looking at now that are not already the mainstream that you think are good examples of what you're talking about?
- BABrett Adcock
I mean, we're working on this stuff at Hark Configure. Um, it's unclear. We're still in this spot where, like, it's really not clear who's gonna do well here in this stuff, and we're in this, like, foggy area for a lot of these stuff of, like, there's no been no breakout here. Uh, there's been early wins and early breakouts, but there's, like, a next leg here that we're gonna go through, and we're, like, we're in it now. I think we'll know more in the next year or two what that really looks like. But, um, I mean, I've used, like, every AI device out there, haven't been super thrilled. Um, I don't know if you guys are seeing stuff [laughs] in the market for these type of things, but, like, I haven't, like, you know, been like, "Man, this is, like, a crazy great product." Uh-
- SPSam Parr
I like the small stuff. Like, I, I like Whisper. Whisper Flow has, like-
- BABrett Adcock
Mm
- SPSam Parr
... pretty meaningfully changed how I communicate
- BABrett Adcock
Yeah
- SPSam Parr
Um, that's been pretty cool. I think that's been my big standout the last six months. What about-- Last question, what about, um, people who inspire you?
- BABrett Adcock
I think I really admire the folks that are, like, fully dedicated in their craft. You, like, watch the Michael Jordan documentary, he's just like, he's just like, "I just wanna be, like, the best in the world at this." I think for, like, for-- Startups have that same thing, too. And I think first and foremost, like, you know, what I can read, I never met Steve Jobs, but, like, my Lord, like, stories I've heard and everything else, the guy was just, like, an unbelievable operator and product line founder. Um, I've also gotten to know Jeff Bezos pretty well. He invested in Figure, and he's been here a lot of times. And I think, uh, I, I think Jeff has, has been a really good soundboard for a lot of the things we've gone through. Um, I had Jensen in here last week again, like, we're fairly close, and I think Jensen's just an unbelievable operator as well. He's very hands-on, has a very unique way of managing NVIDIA and his organization the last 30 years, and it's, uh... I, I think he's, like, I think he's done a lot of really good things.
- 57:22 – 58:10
who inspires Brett
- BABrett Adcock
inference on board. It's outputting where all the joints go. It, you know... It's, it's unbeli- it's unbelievable. And, uh, it's crazy it works. And, um, and yeah, the next leg up is just, like, making that work at higher scale. So I don't know. He's been great. I think it's, um... I don't know. I think those are kinda some, like, I think, really good folks to look up to that really, like, like, love their craft deeply and really care.
- SPSam Parr
Well, Brett, I think it's time for you to get back to work, my friend.
- BABrett Adcock
Great. Thanks, guys. It was good to see you again.
- SPSam Parr
Thank you so much, dude. All right, that's it. That's the pod. [upbeat music]
Episode duration: 58:10
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Transcript of episode 3JNYPOS2o5Q
