AI transcript
0:00:01 If you had to describe yourself,
0:00:03 what would you say you are?
0:00:06 – I just wanna go build important things and win.
0:00:07 That’s it.
0:00:09 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
0:00:12 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
0:00:15 ♪ I put my all in it like the days off ♪
0:00:16 ♪ On the road ♪
0:00:17 – We’re live with Brett Adcock.
0:00:20 I wanted to start off with something crisp.
0:00:22 You told me this story.
0:00:24 And this is something that’s fascinating about you,
0:00:25 which is about your ability to learn.
0:00:27 So I think, I don’t wanna butcher the story,
0:00:29 but you said something like,
0:00:32 I was reading old, I think research papers,
0:00:35 and you found that, I think in the ’70s,
0:00:37 NASA came up with this amazing thing,
0:00:40 and you cold called or cold emailed NASA.
0:00:42 And you’re like, can you actually show me this device?
0:00:44 Is that story right?
0:00:46 – Yeah, it’s pretty close.
0:00:48 This is like the first time I’ve talked about this publicly.
0:00:51 So sorry, maybe from like, for context,
0:00:55 I have been kind of following what’s happening
0:00:57 at K through 12 schools in the U.S.
0:00:59 is related to school shootings.
0:01:03 And if you look at the charts of like,
0:01:04 how many shootings are actually happening at the schools,
0:01:07 how many deaths are happening in schools,
0:01:10 it’s like basically you have like a school shooting
0:01:13 like basically once per day now in the U.S. in K through 12.
0:01:14 – That’s true, is that true?
0:01:15 That’s insane.
0:01:16 – I have to say, we’re like,
0:01:21 I think it was like 200 over 200 people like last year,
0:01:27 were like either shot or wounded or killed in the U.S.
0:01:28 at K through 12.
0:01:31 And a third of those are all in elementary.
0:01:33 And the chart, if you look like a line graph of the chart,
0:01:34 it’s just like exponential.
0:01:39 It’s a, we like five X in 2018,
0:01:42 kind of almost a year over year,
0:01:43 and then we like took another three X move.
0:01:47 So we basically 10 X the number of school shootings
0:01:51 over the last like seven years or so, decade.
0:01:53 And it’s just getting worse and worse.
0:01:57 What I found is that most of all the school shootings
0:01:59 are not what we’re seeing on TV,
0:02:02 where there’s like an over assault
0:02:04 where somebody’s bringing in like a machine gun,
0:02:07 planned it out, driving a truck into campus
0:02:07 and the shooting people up.
0:02:11 That happens a few times a year.
0:02:15 99, 98% of all the other shootings
0:02:19 are from a kid bringing a handgun in every day to school.
0:02:20 They’re getting in a fight at some point
0:02:22 to escalate some new shooting.
0:02:23 So they’re just like, it’s like a, it’s like a,
0:02:24 it’s like a accessory.
0:02:26 It’s like, like bringing a third one.
0:02:28 They have a handgun in their backpack.
0:02:31 And, but from our analysis,
0:02:35 several hundred thousand guns are being brought into schools
0:02:38 in K through 12 every year in the U.S. and not found.
0:02:40 And then a small fraction of those that we see now
0:02:43 in the statistics are basically getting in like bullied
0:02:44 or getting in a fight and they’re shooting somebody
0:02:45 on the school campus.
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0:03:24 – So one of my hobbies,
0:03:25 I love reading like research papers
0:03:27 and there’s papers in general.
0:03:31 And the way I think you solve this
0:03:34 is you need to be able to see the guns.
0:03:37 I think gun control is something that I’m interested
0:03:38 in and passionate about,
0:03:41 but I think it’s not gonna fix all school shootings forever.
0:03:43 There was like last year’s 70 night stabbings
0:03:45 and K through 12 schools.
0:03:46 So like, you know, even if you halted guns,
0:03:48 there’s still like nice stabbings happening here.
0:03:50 So we need to see the weapons.
0:03:53 So I was reading, I came across a research paper
0:03:55 from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab where they were doing work
0:03:57 where they were trying to detect bomb vests
0:04:00 and weapons underneath like garments and clothes
0:04:03 and jackets for like Afghanistan and Iraq.
0:04:07 And they developed some really interesting
0:04:10 like weapons imaging technology.
0:04:14 And I flew to JPL like NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab
0:04:19 in Pasadena and I was talking to the guy that ran it.
0:04:21 – Did you just call the email or something?
0:04:23 – Oh yeah, cold call them for sure.
0:04:24 Yeah.
0:04:26 – And what did you say?
0:04:29 – Oh, I said, hey, I need to learn more about this.
0:04:32 I read your paper, can we have a conversation?
0:04:33 You know, most people in general
0:04:34 will get on a phone with you at this point.
0:04:36 Like if you’re passionate about some work they did
0:04:39 for years and years that they’re no longer doing,
0:04:40 like somebody’s gonna take a phone call.
0:04:42 I think most people could knock on that door
0:04:44 and get that person to react.
0:04:48 Yeah, I don’t think that’s a hard thing to do.
0:04:51 Called them and I flew in and the high level
0:04:54 was that they developed a high frequency radar.
0:04:57 So similar like your wifi or phone,
0:05:00 like it’s like lies in electromagnetic spectrum.
0:05:04 So like radio waves basically that were really high frequency.
0:05:06 So like think about like your phone or wifi
0:05:08 but like really souped up to like a much higher frequency
0:05:12 level and they were able to start penetrating clothing
0:05:15 and start like imaging or building or reconstructing images
0:05:17 of what’s happening inside of bags,
0:05:19 I mean, clothing and stuff.
0:05:20 And if you like read the research papers,
0:05:22 you look at it, it’s like a,
0:05:26 it’s like a airport security cam, like airport security,
0:05:31 but like you can do it 50 meters away
0:05:32 and you can do it like a camera
0:05:35 and you can take like almost like camera frame rate images
0:05:36 which means you could just like point this
0:05:39 at an interest of a school in this example
0:05:43 and you can see every gun and knife and bomb
0:05:44 and it doesn’t need to be metallic.
0:05:45 It doesn’t need metal.
0:05:48 It could be plastic, it could be any material.
0:05:49 – Is it radio waves?
0:05:51 – It’s radio waves.
0:05:52 – Is that dangerous?
0:05:55 – If you have ionized electromagnetic waves
0:05:57 like you would see like an x-ray, yes.
0:05:59 These are non-ionizing rays,
0:06:00 like almost like your cell phone and wifi.
0:06:02 So these are not, I mean listen,
0:06:04 we worked on it for like years and years.
0:06:06 And I think at the end of it was like 2013 or so.
0:06:08 So it was like when I got there,
0:06:11 it was like we were talking and chatting
0:06:13 and didn’t even think to ask to see the machine.
0:06:14 And at the end of the conversation,
0:06:16 he’s like, “You wanna come see it?”
0:06:17 And I’m like, “Of course.”
0:06:19 And we like walked down like four flights of stairs
0:06:20 to the basement.
0:06:23 He takes the cover off, it’s dusty.
0:06:25 It’s like a huge like compact computer at the bottom
0:06:28 and all this old stuff, like all electronics
0:06:30 and all the systems and stuff are like very dated.
0:06:33 He turns it on and demos for me.
0:06:36 He, we have like a mannequin with a gun underneath a shirt
0:06:38 and he shows me it and it was like, it was unbelievable.
0:06:42 It was like, it was like a camera picture of the gun.
0:06:43 But then we also had like,
0:06:44 you also with radio frequency,
0:06:47 we get a 3D reconstruction.
0:06:50 So you’re almost like a camera point cloud of the product.
0:06:52 – Was this before you were gonna do figure
0:06:53 where you were like, this is like my number one
0:06:56 or number two or number three idea or something like that?
0:07:01 – This was a while ago and I’ve been mostly curious
0:07:05 about the space and then what happened from like 2018 to now
0:07:07 is we’ve seen like a five X spike
0:07:09 in the number of school shootings.
0:07:10 So like the charter school shootings
0:07:12 is like looking like a, like NVIDIA stock price.
0:07:14 – Well, we talk about an MFM,
0:07:16 we talk about one chart businesses
0:07:17 where you like, you see some crazy chart
0:07:20 and you’re like, oh, well, there’s like an opportunity.
0:07:22 And it’s like, well, if you just, there’s a tide of wave
0:07:24 if you just sort of catch that wave
0:07:26 and you aren’t even that good,
0:07:28 like the market’s like pulling it out of you.
0:07:30 Like everyone just wants this thing.
0:07:32 And so that was like your, you’re kind of one chart
0:07:34 where it’s like, oh, well, this is obvious.
0:07:39 Somebody came in to figure at one point in 2023,
0:07:42 it was an investor and he was looking at solutions
0:07:45 for school shootings, like just coincidentally,
0:07:48 and they were basically at the time looking at a startup
0:07:50 that was using like CCTVs, like basically the cameras
0:07:53 that are as a school to find guns.
0:07:56 The problem is like all the guns are hidden.
0:07:57 So whenever you like, brandish a weapon
0:07:59 or pull it out and wave it around,
0:08:02 you’re at a point where like a second later you’re shooting it.
0:08:03 So you can’t stop the shootings,
0:08:06 you can just get more prepared about how to get there faster.
0:08:08 Maybe get to the right location, maybe stop,
0:08:10 like save some lives if the shooting lasts
0:08:11 for a long period of time.
0:08:13 You’re not like, you’re not stopping weapons
0:08:13 from getting in school,
0:08:16 you’re not theoretically even stopping real shootings.
0:08:19 So I was telling him about my experience here
0:08:22 and the guy like looked me dead in the face
0:08:24 and he’s like, listen, as somebody has kids,
0:08:27 like how are you not like trying this
0:08:30 and seeing if you can make this really work?
0:08:32 And yeah, so at that time I said,
0:08:35 I gotta figure out how to spend some time
0:08:38 and money making this useful.
0:08:39 – And so is that what you’re gonna do?
0:08:41 You’re launching this as a startup?
0:08:42 Are you gonna have someone else run it?
0:08:43 What are you gonna do?
0:08:45 – Yeah, so we haven’t announced this yet,
0:08:49 but like it is, we have about 12 people on the project
0:08:53 and we own all the intellectual property
0:08:55 from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, licensed all of it.
0:09:02 And we will have our first system brought up
0:09:07 to start imaging weapons in 30 days.
0:09:08 – Are you gonna run it?
0:09:09 Who’s gonna run it?
0:09:10 – We have a team from JPL
0:09:12 that’s running the system, running there right now.
0:09:16 – I don’t think that business can be as big as figure,
0:09:18 but I feel like that’s a monster business.
0:09:20 – Let’s talk about this for a minute.
0:09:21 This is not a school thing.
0:09:24 This is a stadiums, churches,
0:09:28 anywhere it’s like a lot of hospitals, everything.
0:09:32 So my view of this is over a long enough period of time
0:09:34 as longevity improves for humans,
0:09:38 the severity to having to accident
0:09:40 and dying is gonna be higher and higher,
0:09:43 meaning we’re not gonna wanna do more riskier things
0:09:44 as we live longer.
0:09:46 It’s why in the movies, if somebody’s immortal,
0:09:47 they’re like living in their home,
0:09:50 they don’t leave because if you die, you’re dead forever.
0:09:53 And if you don’t die, you’re like alive forever.
0:09:56 Right now we have like some finite period of time
0:09:58 where we won’t be alive anymore.
0:10:00 So humans take a lot of risks.
0:10:01 We drive cars that are extremely dangerous
0:10:04 and motorcycles, we do motorcycles.
0:10:08 We do all this like stupid stuff that like has pretty high,
0:10:10 I would say, you know, pretty high risk.
0:10:12 But if you were gonna live forever,
0:10:15 like you wouldn’t be doing that stuff.
0:10:17 I would say over a long enough period of time,
0:10:20 I don’t think you’ll really move through the world
0:10:23 without imaging systems like this for safety.
0:10:25 – You’re really good at like telling a story.
0:10:28 So you’ve did this before when I found out with you
0:10:32 about humanoids and robots and you just like,
0:10:35 you tell these stories that are so grand.
0:10:37 I just get bought into and I’m like,
0:10:39 well, that makes perfect sense.
0:10:41 But you do it at a much larger scale.
0:10:43 So you went with like the longevity angle,
0:10:44 which is like, well, we’re gonna live much,
0:10:48 I mean, that’s just such like a challenging way to think
0:10:50 for a lot of people, myself included.
0:10:53 And it’s just such an easy, like when I hear that pitch,
0:10:56 I think, yeah, of course that makes wonderful sense.
0:11:00 And it makes me, it makes me think going big
0:11:03 and having these grand visions is almost easier than not,
0:11:06 than doing the alternative of something smaller.
0:11:07 Do you know what I mean?
0:11:09 – It’s a hundred percent easier.
0:11:12 You can hire better people ’cause they’re more ambitious
0:11:15 and they’re interested in working on harder things.
0:11:16 They’re generally larger.
0:11:17 We could be larger outcomes.
0:11:18 We’re talking about like, you know,
0:11:19 building like new industries
0:11:23 that maybe never have been built before with huge tams.
0:11:26 Investors want like very high risk reward trades
0:11:28 where they can make, you know, 50, a hundred times
0:11:31 of their money, you know, most investments from BC’s fail.
0:11:33 So they really need like the hundred bagger
0:11:37 in their portfolio, big grand things offer that risk reward
0:11:38 opportunity for investors.
0:11:40 Yeah, I have this philosophy.
0:11:42 I think harder things are easier.
0:11:45 And I think it really depends what industry
0:11:46 and what market you’re going into.
0:11:48 But relatively speaking, I think it’s,
0:11:50 there’s some, there’s some truth in that.
0:11:52 – Yeah, because Vettery was,
0:11:53 you sold Vettery for a hundred million dollars.
0:11:54 That’s a big outcome.
0:11:56 That’s a big outcome for virtually everyone.
0:11:58 They’re like, that’s a life-changing thing.
0:12:05 But it doesn’t have an inspirational angle to it necessarily.
0:12:06 – I mean, no, I think like, listen,
0:12:08 outside of spending time with loved ones
0:12:11 where it worked most of our lives as humans,
0:12:16 most people, we are, most people don’t like where they work.
0:12:19 If you’ve ever looked for a job, it’s like the worst process.
0:12:21 We talk about bad, like bad products.
0:12:24 Looking for a job is, is embarrassing.
0:12:26 It’s, it’s like soul crushing.
0:12:29 So what we try to do at Vettery is like,
0:12:31 if we can get all the world’s employers together
0:12:33 with all the candidates in the world,
0:12:35 we can use AI to make matches at scale
0:12:38 and find the best opportunity for you with machine learning.
0:12:41 And if you can solve that, you could put people in
0:12:44 much better places for employment, much happier places,
0:12:46 like they can find jobs they really love.
0:12:47 – Yeah, I mean, you just,
0:12:50 I would have pitched it as a sick job board.
0:12:53 And you just totally like make it to be
0:12:54 some really inspirational thing.
0:12:57 But that, even as good as you are at pitching that,
0:12:59 that pales a comparison to, I think,
0:13:03 to like when you pitch this, this x-ray machine,
0:13:04 whatever you’re gonna call it.
0:13:07 And so it’s just, it’s cool to see like this evolution though,
0:13:10 even though you’re actually quite good at pitching
0:13:12 something like Vettery.
0:13:14 And I, again, buy into it.
0:13:15 What’s the name of this thing gonna be?
0:13:18 – Yeah, the name is cover, C-O-V-E-R.
0:13:20 And what’s your philosophy on names?
0:13:25 – I think names need, I think people,
0:13:28 I have a certain philosophy towards it,
0:13:31 but I think I really like names that are at the very basic
0:13:35 level are really easy to say and spell and pronounce.
0:13:38 And I think most company names like Violet,
0:13:40 one of those first three rules,
0:13:44 most names are just like too hard to spell and remember
0:13:46 and pronounce in my mind.
0:13:52 And yeah, I really want something that over time
0:13:54 we can build like a real iconic brand in the space.
0:13:56 And that just takes a lot of time, I would say there too,
0:13:59 but this, the branding around the name
0:14:01 and the way you think about the, you know,
0:14:04 the icon, the font, everything for me is like this,
0:14:05 like almost like when you build a house,
0:14:07 you take a really good foundation and pour a lot of concrete.
0:14:09 It’s that concrete, it’s that foundation.
0:14:12 And you do it in the early days, hopefully do it right.
0:14:15 You know, I’ve definitely done it wrong before,
0:14:17 I’ve done name changes before.
0:14:22 And, you know, these names are all unique to my perspective
0:14:24 of how I want my businesses to look and feel
0:14:27 at like whatever better your archer figure and cover.
0:14:31 But like, I think, yeah, we, I just,
0:14:33 I just spend a decent amount of time taking through that
0:14:36 in the early days to build a good foundation for the brand.
0:14:38 – Are you adamant on a certain URL or domain name?
0:14:42 Because cover.com is, it looks like an insurance company.
0:14:44 I assume that’s a huge insurance company.
0:14:46 I don’t know.
0:14:48 But based off of the fact that they have that URL,
0:14:50 I imagine they’re quite large.
0:14:52 Do you care about the domain?
0:14:55 – We own cover.ai and I own like obviously cover
0:14:58 our sort of figure.ai.
0:15:03 And I bought archer.com a month before going public.
0:15:05 So not really.
0:15:09 So it was like flyarcher.com for a while.
0:15:10 That was like, you know, $9.
0:15:13 And then I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
0:15:17 buying archer.com, you know, a year later, two years later.
0:15:23 We bought figure.ai for a hundred grand.
0:15:26 And then we bought cover for a few tens of thousands of dollars.
0:15:31 So I would own the .coms or .ai’s in these cases, if possible.
0:15:32 – I know you don’t care about money,
0:15:33 but when you are pitching to investors,
0:15:35 when you’re thinking about how big cover is going to be,
0:15:36 what’s your pitch?
0:15:38 – We’re not pitching to investors now.
0:15:39 I’m just funding it.
0:15:42 It’s more like a passion project, to be honest.
0:15:44 The pitches are going to be really unique
0:15:46 because if we end up do raising capital outside,
0:15:48 I don’t know, there might be a path
0:15:49 where we never raise capital here.
0:15:53 They’ll also path through, the technology is very difficult.
0:15:55 So I mean, hopefully we make it work.
0:15:59 Is the biggest market is not in school.
0:16:01 Schools is like the worst market to go into.
0:16:03 It’s just a bad pitch.
0:16:05 The schools have very low budgets.
0:16:06 They don’t have systems like this
0:16:08 exactly at the schools right now.
0:16:12 You know, like, sure the severity is high with shootings,
0:16:14 but like the money-making opportunities
0:16:17 like relatively small comparatively like stadiums
0:16:21 and concerts and hospitals and areas that have big budgets.
0:16:22 Like most big stadiums you go through now,
0:16:25 like you go through like some metal and hector and stuff.
0:16:27 TSA, Pre-Check, like the Homeland Security,
0:16:30 there’s like, there’s real security applications for this
0:16:32 outside of schools that could pay a lot more.
0:16:36 The schools is like the worst pitch for like fundraising.
0:16:38 For me, I don’t give a shit.
0:16:41 I really want to solve the K through 12 school problem.
0:16:44 I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for that.
0:16:46 And we’re going right to schools to help solve.
0:16:50 Like I want to see if I can help prevent school shootings
0:16:52 over time and that’s the only reason
0:16:55 I’m working on this like, you know,
0:16:57 like funding this project, I’m trying to work on it.
0:17:00 – If I had to bet, you’re sort of like me
0:17:01 where like you have a document
0:17:03 where you just like jot down interesting ideas
0:17:05 and you probably aren’t ever going to get to them.
0:17:06 Maybe you would.
0:17:10 If you had an additional 24 hours in your day,
0:17:12 some more time in your week,
0:17:14 what would you be spending it on?
0:17:15 What ideas interest you?
0:17:17 – I think a few things.
0:17:20 I think there’s areas on like genetics
0:17:24 I’m interested in a bit that I, you know,
0:17:26 when I have time, I’m doing a lot of research.
0:17:30 I think there’s areas of like electric supersonic
0:17:31 that are really interesting.
0:17:33 I’m really interested in supersonic travel
0:17:35 and I’m really interested in electric.
0:17:38 And there’s areas of my experience at, you know,
0:17:42 building EVTEL aircraft that I’m like pretty excited about.
0:17:44 I have like a couple of like ideas
0:17:45 about how to design an aircraft
0:17:48 that could like work through these very divergent like
0:17:53 parts of the mission, very like high altitudes
0:17:54 and high speeds.
0:17:56 I really like the industry of like synthetic foods.
0:17:58 There’s been a lot of like controversy recently.
0:18:01 – Is this synthetic meat, is that like impossible?
0:18:03 Or is that like the people who are like literally growing
0:18:06 like a cow that like they’re growing meat
0:18:07 that you’re, you can eat?
0:18:08 It’s not the impossible.
0:18:10 So those are all plant-based.
0:18:13 It’s, you’re basically taking, these are like,
0:18:15 these are like cultured cells.
0:18:19 You’re growing, you’re growing real meats in a lab.
0:18:20 – Why does that interest you?
0:18:22 Does that interest you in because you’re an animal lover?
0:18:26 Does it interest you because cows create a lot of pollution?
0:18:28 Where does the interest come from?
0:18:33 – It seems super unnecessary to like raise animals
0:18:34 and butcher them and eat them.
0:18:37 It just seems like super, like for many reasons.
0:18:40 Like if you, if you could choose to eat a steak
0:18:43 and it was just as good as a steak you have today
0:18:48 and it is real steak, like real muscle tissue and fats
0:18:51 and it wasn’t come from a cow and it came from a lab
0:18:56 but it had all the same, you know, same chemical properties.
0:18:58 What would you say?
0:19:02 – Well, I think that I’m a little bit an early adopter
0:19:04 on weird things and I would say that sounds awesome.
0:19:05 I’m in.
0:19:08 You understand how that’s weird for like your average person.
0:19:10 Like, dude, do you remember when we were kids?
0:19:12 Do you remember when green ketchup came out?
0:19:14 I remember eating green ketchup and I was like,
0:19:16 I know this is the exact same thing
0:19:17 but for some reason because it looks different.
0:19:19 I don’t even want to touch it.
0:19:22 – Yeah, but like TV and radio and lights and electricity,
0:19:24 where those were all weird for folks at some point.
0:19:25 Like those were all just like-
0:19:26 – Yeah, it takes time.
0:19:27 – Cars were weird, right?
0:19:29 Like everybody’s like, why would you have a car
0:19:30 and you have a horse?
0:19:34 Like, all of these are just like really radical in the moment.
0:19:35 – Yeah.
0:19:37 – But like, if we think about the civilization
0:19:38 a thousand years from now,
0:19:41 we’ve been around for like thousands of years.
0:19:43 If you think 10,000 more years
0:19:45 and we’re on Mars and the moon,
0:19:49 you’re gonna be like having cows and bubbles on Mars
0:19:50 and then butchering that.
0:19:51 Like we’re not having a room for that.
0:19:53 Like, it just seems unrealistic.
0:19:56 – I don’t think you understand how unique
0:19:58 some of the things you think are.
0:20:03 And I like to think that because of where I’m from,
0:20:04 which oddly you are too,
0:20:06 but I don’t know if you like totally grasp that.
0:20:08 The way that you think is quite unique
0:20:10 and a little bit larger than the average person.
0:20:13 And so, yeah, what you’re saying makes sense,
0:20:15 but there’s just a lot of emotional baggage
0:20:17 that comes with that to overcome.
0:20:18 But I do agree with you.
0:20:19 I think that that interests you
0:20:20 or that interests me as well.
0:20:22 And I would do it.
0:20:25 If you had to describe yourself as an entrepreneur
0:20:28 in one word, what would you say you are?
0:20:31 What word best describes your philosophy?
0:20:32 – I don’t know.
0:20:35 I don’t really reflect like that too often.
0:20:39 I just wanna go build important things and win.
0:20:41 That’s it.
0:20:44 – What percentage of your philosophy is based on winning
0:20:48 versus the excitement of making stuff?
0:20:49 – All of it’s winning.
0:20:53 I don’t wanna do something exciting in a lab
0:20:57 that doesn’t have the ability to have commercial applications
0:20:58 and build a big business
0:21:01 that has implications for the masses.
0:21:03 Like that’s just, I’m not a research scientist.
0:21:06 Like I don’t have passion for that.
0:21:10 I like thinking about how we’ve evolved as species
0:21:13 the last like even like several hundred years
0:21:15 and how technology has like been probably the biggest
0:21:18 lever arm for our consciousness
0:21:19 and understanding of the world.
0:21:23 And the only way to really do that is on a mass level.
0:21:25 Like you know, like trisiting a lab
0:21:28 that wasn’t brought to all civilization
0:21:33 is marginally helpful, marginally.
0:21:36 But the orders of magnitude improvements we’ve had
0:21:38 in humanity have come from like releasing that to the world
0:21:40 as like an ubiquitous utility.
0:21:44 And for me, winning is the most important thing here
0:21:46 because you know, let’s call it,
0:21:48 like we have a certain finite time to say,
0:21:50 I’m like to do this kind of stuff.
0:21:52 At some point we’ll be just too old
0:21:53 or incapable of doing it.
0:21:55 And it’s on to the next generation.
0:21:56 So I think we have a certain amount of time
0:21:58 to go win and go do things useful with our time
0:22:02 because I use just devastating to spend like 20, 30 years
0:22:03 working on something that doesn’t work.
0:22:07 That’s like, that’s the worst case scenario
0:22:10 for an entrepreneur as you’re devoting all your time
0:22:13 away from friends and family or whatever
0:22:15 you could be spending time on as an opportunity cost
0:22:16 into this business.
0:22:17 Like if it doesn’t win,
0:22:20 it’s just like a terrible story.
0:22:23 – Yeah, I think that when I talk to people
0:22:24 who are just starting stuff,
0:22:26 it’s often what I’ll say is like,
0:22:28 the biggest issue is that you spend 10 years on this
0:22:31 and it’s just a mediocre thing.
0:22:33 It’s better for it to suck right away.
0:22:34 – Agreed.
0:22:36 I actually do like all these calls sometimes
0:22:38 with like early entrepreneurs that are just getting going.
0:22:41 And I’m like so intense about like the idea
0:22:42 and the direction and the why’s.
0:22:45 And they’re just like, yeah, yeah, like whatever.
0:22:48 How do we hire like the first engineer in here?
0:22:49 I need to raise a safe note.
0:22:50 Like how do I do that?
0:22:52 I was just like, dude, like if I had a reverse time,
0:22:55 I would spend like a month on these questions.
0:22:58 And then like most early guys just don’t want to hear it.
0:23:01 They don’t want to get moving and go build.
0:23:04 And I think, you know, we’ve talked about this here
0:23:07 last time I was on MFM, like I kind of fell into vetery.
0:23:10 And I kind of like, I really built Archer and Figure
0:23:12 with a lot of purpose and intense.
0:23:15 It’s the one thing I would pass down to like the newer
0:23:17 generation that’s coming up, building stuff.
0:23:20 Like we have a choice on what to go build.
0:23:24 – What’s your criteria that you tell them is your checklist
0:23:27 for if something is worth my time?
0:23:29 – Like you can’t just get the one thing right.
0:23:31 Like you just can’t get the idea right
0:23:33 or the commercial plan right or the fundraising.
0:23:35 Like you can easily fundraise this
0:23:37 ’cause it’s a hot topic and get that right.
0:23:40 I think it’s like really about, you have to build this,
0:23:44 you know, I mean, you could call it a business plan
0:23:46 or something, but like, you have to come up with an idea
0:23:49 of like how you’re actually going to get this thing done
0:23:52 in the face of like 95% of all companies that go try
0:23:54 to do this and start a plan failing.
0:23:58 And I would say it’s not just about the idea
0:23:59 and how you’re going to execute it
0:24:00 and how you’re going to balance like moving fast
0:24:03 and for slower and product quality.
0:24:05 And what you’re going to build is feature sets first
0:24:07 or later and who you’re going to be your first clients
0:24:09 or the enterprise or the SMBs
0:24:12 and how are you going to actually get distribution?
0:24:13 Is it, you know, is it organically?
0:24:14 Is it through social?
0:24:16 Is it outbound or inbound sales?
0:24:18 Like I think it’s like putting that whole thing together
0:24:20 and having a good, clear direction
0:24:22 of where the ship sailing is most important.
0:24:23 I have like a little chart I always draw people
0:24:25 of like North, South, East and West.
0:24:26 Like you want to go North,
0:24:29 you want to get this cone going North, right?
0:24:30 You want to be heading this direction.
0:24:32 You’re not going to be straight dead North,
0:24:34 but you want to be like not heading South for too long
0:24:35 or you’ll die.
0:24:38 And those are a factor of like all those kind of like,
0:24:40 you know, characteristics I talked about earlier,
0:24:42 which is like just commercialization plan,
0:24:43 how you’re going to make money,
0:24:45 how you’re going to fund the business,
0:24:48 whether it’s like organically or you’re going to raise capital
0:24:50 and team you’re going to bring on the culture you go build
0:24:51 and the execution of the product.
0:24:53 Like all those have to be like very thoughtful
0:24:55 and driven in the right direction.
0:24:57 And you know, we have us a figure, right?
0:24:59 Like we’re going to BMW,
0:25:01 we’re going to these industrial settings,
0:25:02 but we want to be in the home.
0:25:04 Like if we could be in the home today,
0:25:06 like home robots, we would do that.
0:25:10 We are using the commercialization industrialization industry
0:25:12 as a way to get us ready and more prepared
0:25:15 for putting a robot in every home in the world.
0:25:16 – Which is a common way of going about it.
0:25:19 You know, you think, I think Tesla did this
0:25:21 where they started more expensive,
0:25:22 even though he was like, you know,
0:25:25 I would like it to be the Model T where everyone could have one,
0:25:26 but I’m just going to start with high end
0:25:29 because that will give us more profits to fund more stuff.
0:25:32 – Sure, but then why has like Fisker failed twice in a row
0:25:34 while Tesla has just been dominating?
0:25:35 – What’s the answer?
0:25:37 What’s your answer for that?
0:25:39 – They didn’t get the product
0:25:40 and some of the other stuff, right?
0:25:42 The same way Tesla did.
0:25:45 They didn’t get speed right and the product quality
0:25:47 and the way they introduced in the world.
0:25:51 Like all of that, was it balanced well enough?
0:25:54 And the companies all failed twice in a row.
0:25:55 – All right, if you’re listening to this pod,
0:25:57 I already know something about you.
0:26:00 You, my friend, are nosy.
0:26:02 You want to know the numbers behind all of these things
0:26:04 that we’re talking about, how much money people make,
0:26:07 how much money people spend, how much money businesses make.
0:26:10 You want to know all of this, people’s net worth, all of it.
0:26:12 Well, I’ve got good news for you.
0:26:15 So my company Hampton, we’re a private community for CEOs.
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0:26:46 Now, back to the pod.
0:26:49 You were on 60 minutes the other day.
0:26:52 And on 60 minutes, I think you had a plate
0:26:56 and an apple and a banana sitting in front of the robot.
0:26:59 And you said, hey, hand me the apple
0:27:00 or hand me the orange or something like that.
0:27:02 And it did a good job where it reached
0:27:04 and it found the right fruit.
0:27:06 And I think it made a mistake once or twice,
0:27:07 but then it corrected itself
0:27:09 and you’re like, hey, that’s the wrong one.
0:27:10 And it was like, oh, I’m sorry.
0:27:12 And it like picked up the right one.
0:27:14 What’s crazy to me is that you’re two years old.
0:27:16 The company’s two years old.
0:27:18 I’ve seen that you’ve been able to do this so quickly.
0:27:21 And I think when I talk to someone, they go,
0:27:25 everything’s late with tech and in hardware.
0:27:27 But somehow Brett hasn’t been late.
0:27:30 Figure has been lightning fast.
0:27:33 What have you guys done to be so fast?
0:27:35 – So when I started Figure and also Archer,
0:27:37 I did this at Archer too.
0:27:39 I started the company before he was even incorporated
0:27:41 with his idea of like how to move extremely fast.
0:27:44 So like, listen, it’s like a whole company
0:27:46 was built just for speed.
0:27:48 We have our company mission statement,
0:27:50 which is like, we wanna go this direction as a company,
0:27:53 then everything else as we like built out the org chart
0:27:54 and thought about how we’re gonna do that,
0:27:56 the values that we think about hiring people for
0:27:58 or firing people for,
0:27:59 how we think about compensation,
0:28:02 how we think about, how do we build schedules?
0:28:03 How do we plan for schedules?
0:28:05 Like we don’t have, we’re 120 engineers here.
0:28:07 We have zero program managers.
0:28:09 Zero.
0:28:12 And we have a certain philosophy
0:28:16 around like what to do and how to build hardware
0:28:18 and software that I think we’re kind of
0:28:21 the anti-Silicon Valley company in Silicon Valley
0:28:23 as it relates to this.
0:28:27 We really care about getting things brought up quicker
0:28:29 and iterating faster and doing that
0:28:31 over a very long period of time, like decades.
0:28:35 And building a company that can do that is extremely hard.
0:28:38 Like there’s really no good precedent maybe outside
0:28:42 of like Tesla and SpaceX that have done this well at scale.
0:28:45 Like Tesla has well over a hundred thousand people,
0:28:49 like arguably tens of thousands of product design engineers
0:28:52 and they’re moving at a speeds of a small startup.
0:28:55 And generally when you’re adding headcount,
0:28:57 the companies are all slowing down.
0:29:00 It’s almost every company slowing down with more headcount.
0:29:03 You’re just getting slower over time.
0:29:04 You don’t notice that you don’t care.
0:29:07 The board is giving you indication
0:29:09 that you should slow down and be safer.
0:29:12 And everything is just slowing to a halt and the limit.
0:29:15 So you have to basically fight this.
0:29:17 And you have to like the best way you can fight it
0:29:20 is like design the whole word from the ground up to do this
0:29:23 or do what Elon did with Twitter
0:29:25 and walk in and fire 80% of people
0:29:29 and restructure it at the start at that point in time
0:29:31 to go faster and ship product.
0:29:34 And it’s too laborious here to say like,
0:29:36 “Okay, we move fast like one thing.”
0:29:39 It’s like the whole company was built just to move fast.
0:29:41 – But what are you asking your recruits,
0:29:42 your potential app or your applicant,
0:29:44 your job applicants to figure out
0:29:46 if they do have that ability?
0:29:48 – There’s a lot of things happening here.
0:29:50 A lot of times people haven’t been in that environment.
0:29:52 So when they get in there,
0:29:56 when they’re moving a fast and a much quicker pace environment,
0:29:57 it just becomes overwhelming
0:29:59 and just too hard and too stressful to handle.
0:30:02 So if you were like a PhD student for 10 years
0:30:05 where you know, sweatpants and like moving slow
0:30:08 and you come in here, it’s like a real culture shock
0:30:09 coming to the figure.
0:30:10 And we’ve had it happen several times
0:30:12 where they’re like, people are just like,
0:30:14 you know, they’re coming in late, they’re moving slow
0:30:16 and just like, it’s frustrating for them
0:30:17 having to move much faster
0:30:21 and it’s like probably a lot of anxiety there.
0:30:22 There are other folks that believe
0:30:24 the longer that you take to build something,
0:30:26 the safer it is and the better job you’ll do at it.
0:30:30 So if you give me, you know, two years to design a robot,
0:30:34 it will be, that robot will be safer at the end of the two years
0:30:37 and better design, like folks feel like that.
0:30:38 It’s for sure wrong.
0:30:41 People think that the longer you spend designing something
0:30:43 the safer it’ll be and the better it’ll be.
0:30:44 It’s for sure wrong.
0:30:45 ‘Cause in that two year period of time
0:30:46 without one robot got out,
0:30:49 I’m gonna have my third gen robot out.
0:30:53 And I’ll have run it like an order of magnitude longer.
0:30:55 I will have found all the problems 10 times sooner.
0:30:57 I will have had time to go fix it recursively
0:30:58 and make it better.
0:31:01 It’ll just be a worse product.
0:31:03 – How do you measure and how do other people measure
0:31:05 if someone’s fast enough?
0:31:08 – You look at how many iterations somebody is doing
0:31:09 and how much progress they made
0:31:11 between those iteration cycles.
0:31:14 – And what is, what are your expectations?
0:31:17 – A car could be like how many car versions
0:31:18 you’ve gotten out over the last decade
0:31:21 and how much progress you’ve made between those.
0:31:23 A rocket could be similar viewed.
0:31:26 A robot could be how many robot iterations are we doing?
0:31:28 What version of robot are we on?
0:31:30 iPhone could be, you know,
0:31:31 how many versions of iPhone have you gotten out
0:31:33 over the last 15 years?
0:31:34 How much progress have you made between each one of those?
0:31:37 That will ultimately set the slope of the curve for speed.
0:31:40 That will ultimately be correlated at a high level
0:31:42 to how much risk there is
0:31:44 of failure in the business long-term.
0:31:47 – As we wrap up here, I wanna ask something
0:31:49 that I’ve been thinking about with you a lot.
0:31:54 So you’ve mentioned some type of genetically engineered food.
0:31:56 You’ve mentioned planes.
0:31:59 You’ve mentioned figure, humanoids,
0:32:01 these machines that detect guns.
0:32:04 You have like a pretty wide range of knowledge,
0:32:07 but unlike a lot of people who have a wide range of knowledge,
0:32:08 you, I’ve been to your home.
0:32:10 I’ve seen like textbooks at your house
0:32:11 on a variety of topics.
0:32:14 And you have a really unique way of learning.
0:32:17 You’re basically like a human AI.
0:32:21 Do you have a framework for learning new things?
0:32:24 – Learning stuff is always like really challenging for me.
0:32:26 I think like I have to first,
0:32:27 I think everything like a tree,
0:32:30 I have to first build this like trunk
0:32:32 of like first order understanding about the topic
0:32:37 before I can ever comprehend and remember
0:32:39 the limbs and the leaves.
0:32:42 And so I have to have like a really
0:32:46 fundamentally sound understanding of the tree trunk
0:32:48 as I look at certain topics.
0:32:49 – Where do you turn to for that?
0:32:51 – You just gotta like, you know,
0:32:56 find this stuff, whether it’s Wikipedia, papers,
0:32:59 like Google searches, you can use GPT-4.
0:33:03 Like can you clearly communicate this topic,
0:33:05 whether it’s an engineering topic or not,
0:33:07 to a 12 year old sitting on a bar stool?
0:33:11 And most people can’t do that.
0:33:13 It’s like the skill that most people can’t do.
0:33:15 Like even people I work with,
0:33:17 I have a hard time sometimes understanding
0:33:20 what’s the update on the, you know,
0:33:22 this thing or that thing.
0:33:23 And it’s a skill.
0:33:24 Like you have to learn how to do that.
0:33:26 Same way of like understanding something.
0:33:27 It’s a skill to really boil things down
0:33:30 and really truly understand the basic characterization
0:33:32 of what’s really happening.
0:33:34 Some of the smartest people I know
0:33:39 are also the most clear worded folks about a topic.
0:33:41 – That’s a really good insight.
0:33:44 And it probably comes because you’re an outsider
0:33:46 that got into this stuff when you’re older.
0:33:50 – Maybe or there’s so many different multidisciplinary areas
0:33:52 of like software and hardware and like electromagnetic
0:33:54 and everything else that needs to be done here
0:33:56 that you really need to be able to communicate clearly
0:33:57 across several groups.
0:33:58 And it’s important even here,
0:34:00 like we try not to use acronyms
0:34:02 and a software purpose person that writes firmware
0:34:04 and electromagnetic person that builds
0:34:06 like a rotor stator for electric motor.
0:34:08 Like those folks don’t understand
0:34:11 those other disciplines generally.
0:34:13 So they need to communicate with each other as well.
0:34:16 And they can’t be using inside baseball terms
0:34:19 a lunch magnetic work when like a firmware engineer
0:34:21 hasn’t spent any time on like, you know,
0:34:23 stator and rotor design for electric rotors.
0:34:26 So like, I think this topic of being able to like
0:34:28 communicate really well and understand things really well,
0:34:29 it’s just like super important.
0:34:32 – You have like a pretty strong outlook on life.
0:34:36 It seems like you have strong beliefs
0:34:38 on what you want the outcome of your life to be,
0:34:40 how you want to spend your time.
0:34:43 Which people who you’ve read about
0:34:48 has had the biggest influence on that philosophy
0:34:50 or influenced you the most?
0:34:51 – I think there’s like,
0:34:53 there’s been like really great entrepreneurs over time
0:34:56 to show a path that this all can be done.
0:34:57 Like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk,
0:35:00 these guys are the best at what they do
0:35:02 have been able to show the world
0:35:04 like really incredible things can be done
0:35:08 on the back of like persistence and focus.
0:35:11 And I think it’s just like really incredible.
0:35:13 Like every time I watch like a SpaceX launch
0:35:16 or hold an Apple product in my hands,
0:35:19 you know, every company in the world
0:35:20 started out as a startup at some point.
0:35:22 So I think it’s just, I don’t know,
0:35:25 I think it’s very energizing to think that, you know,
0:35:28 somebody with enough willpower can actually go out
0:35:30 and do really incredible things for the world.
0:35:32 And I think that gives me energy every day
0:35:34 I wake up and says, you know,
0:35:35 even if you’re a figure, we have like,
0:35:40 we haven’t done really anything noteworthy today
0:35:40 over two years.
0:35:42 It’s been interesting, we have robots and stuff,
0:35:44 but people have built robots.
0:35:46 We need to go out now and like prove
0:35:48 that we can actually ship really high quality product,
0:35:50 which is going to take us, you know,
0:35:51 several more years from here.
0:35:53 But like that’s just like a really exciting challenge
0:35:54 for us now.
0:35:57 And it’s really hard and everybody has attempted that,
0:35:58 at least in human robotics,
0:36:00 commercially has failed in history.
0:36:02 So, but that should be doable.
0:36:04 And there are people that have gone over this hump
0:36:07 in other industries of other very difficult things,
0:36:10 maybe less difficult or more difficult here in history.
0:36:11 And that’s just,
0:36:13 that should be very energizing for us here at figure
0:36:17 and other entrepreneurs out there trying to do hard things.
0:36:18 – You’re the man.
0:36:19 I have this joke.
0:36:23 I’m like, cornrows are cool, but not for me.
0:36:26 And that’s kind of how I feel about the way you think,
0:36:29 where I’m like, I don’t know if I can do what you do,
0:36:31 but I am really excited and happy
0:36:33 that people like you exist.
0:36:36 So thank you for doing everything you’re doing.
0:36:38 I feel great after talking to you.
0:36:39 – Yeah, thanks for having me on.
0:36:41 – All right, that’s the pot.
0:36:43 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
0:36:46 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
0:36:48 ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
0:36:52 ♪ On the road, let’s travel, never looking back, life ♪
0:00:03 what would you say you are?
0:00:06 – I just wanna go build important things and win.
0:00:07 That’s it.
0:00:09 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
0:00:12 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
0:00:15 ♪ I put my all in it like the days off ♪
0:00:16 ♪ On the road ♪
0:00:17 – We’re live with Brett Adcock.
0:00:20 I wanted to start off with something crisp.
0:00:22 You told me this story.
0:00:24 And this is something that’s fascinating about you,
0:00:25 which is about your ability to learn.
0:00:27 So I think, I don’t wanna butcher the story,
0:00:29 but you said something like,
0:00:32 I was reading old, I think research papers,
0:00:35 and you found that, I think in the ’70s,
0:00:37 NASA came up with this amazing thing,
0:00:40 and you cold called or cold emailed NASA.
0:00:42 And you’re like, can you actually show me this device?
0:00:44 Is that story right?
0:00:46 – Yeah, it’s pretty close.
0:00:48 This is like the first time I’ve talked about this publicly.
0:00:51 So sorry, maybe from like, for context,
0:00:55 I have been kind of following what’s happening
0:00:57 at K through 12 schools in the U.S.
0:00:59 is related to school shootings.
0:01:03 And if you look at the charts of like,
0:01:04 how many shootings are actually happening at the schools,
0:01:07 how many deaths are happening in schools,
0:01:10 it’s like basically you have like a school shooting
0:01:13 like basically once per day now in the U.S. in K through 12.
0:01:14 – That’s true, is that true?
0:01:15 That’s insane.
0:01:16 – I have to say, we’re like,
0:01:21 I think it was like 200 over 200 people like last year,
0:01:27 were like either shot or wounded or killed in the U.S.
0:01:28 at K through 12.
0:01:31 And a third of those are all in elementary.
0:01:33 And the chart, if you look like a line graph of the chart,
0:01:34 it’s just like exponential.
0:01:39 It’s a, we like five X in 2018,
0:01:42 kind of almost a year over year,
0:01:43 and then we like took another three X move.
0:01:47 So we basically 10 X the number of school shootings
0:01:51 over the last like seven years or so, decade.
0:01:53 And it’s just getting worse and worse.
0:01:57 What I found is that most of all the school shootings
0:01:59 are not what we’re seeing on TV,
0:02:02 where there’s like an over assault
0:02:04 where somebody’s bringing in like a machine gun,
0:02:07 planned it out, driving a truck into campus
0:02:07 and the shooting people up.
0:02:11 That happens a few times a year.
0:02:15 99, 98% of all the other shootings
0:02:19 are from a kid bringing a handgun in every day to school.
0:02:20 They’re getting in a fight at some point
0:02:22 to escalate some new shooting.
0:02:23 So they’re just like, it’s like a, it’s like a,
0:02:24 it’s like a accessory.
0:02:26 It’s like, like bringing a third one.
0:02:28 They have a handgun in their backpack.
0:02:31 And, but from our analysis,
0:02:35 several hundred thousand guns are being brought into schools
0:02:38 in K through 12 every year in the U.S. and not found.
0:02:40 And then a small fraction of those that we see now
0:02:43 in the statistics are basically getting in like bullied
0:02:44 or getting in a fight and they’re shooting somebody
0:02:45 on the school campus.
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0:03:24 – So one of my hobbies,
0:03:25 I love reading like research papers
0:03:27 and there’s papers in general.
0:03:31 And the way I think you solve this
0:03:34 is you need to be able to see the guns.
0:03:37 I think gun control is something that I’m interested
0:03:38 in and passionate about,
0:03:41 but I think it’s not gonna fix all school shootings forever.
0:03:43 There was like last year’s 70 night stabbings
0:03:45 and K through 12 schools.
0:03:46 So like, you know, even if you halted guns,
0:03:48 there’s still like nice stabbings happening here.
0:03:50 So we need to see the weapons.
0:03:53 So I was reading, I came across a research paper
0:03:55 from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab where they were doing work
0:03:57 where they were trying to detect bomb vests
0:04:00 and weapons underneath like garments and clothes
0:04:03 and jackets for like Afghanistan and Iraq.
0:04:07 And they developed some really interesting
0:04:10 like weapons imaging technology.
0:04:14 And I flew to JPL like NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab
0:04:19 in Pasadena and I was talking to the guy that ran it.
0:04:21 – Did you just call the email or something?
0:04:23 – Oh yeah, cold call them for sure.
0:04:24 Yeah.
0:04:26 – And what did you say?
0:04:29 – Oh, I said, hey, I need to learn more about this.
0:04:32 I read your paper, can we have a conversation?
0:04:33 You know, most people in general
0:04:34 will get on a phone with you at this point.
0:04:36 Like if you’re passionate about some work they did
0:04:39 for years and years that they’re no longer doing,
0:04:40 like somebody’s gonna take a phone call.
0:04:42 I think most people could knock on that door
0:04:44 and get that person to react.
0:04:48 Yeah, I don’t think that’s a hard thing to do.
0:04:51 Called them and I flew in and the high level
0:04:54 was that they developed a high frequency radar.
0:04:57 So similar like your wifi or phone,
0:05:00 like it’s like lies in electromagnetic spectrum.
0:05:04 So like radio waves basically that were really high frequency.
0:05:06 So like think about like your phone or wifi
0:05:08 but like really souped up to like a much higher frequency
0:05:12 level and they were able to start penetrating clothing
0:05:15 and start like imaging or building or reconstructing images
0:05:17 of what’s happening inside of bags,
0:05:19 I mean, clothing and stuff.
0:05:20 And if you like read the research papers,
0:05:22 you look at it, it’s like a,
0:05:26 it’s like a airport security cam, like airport security,
0:05:31 but like you can do it 50 meters away
0:05:32 and you can do it like a camera
0:05:35 and you can take like almost like camera frame rate images
0:05:36 which means you could just like point this
0:05:39 at an interest of a school in this example
0:05:43 and you can see every gun and knife and bomb
0:05:44 and it doesn’t need to be metallic.
0:05:45 It doesn’t need metal.
0:05:48 It could be plastic, it could be any material.
0:05:49 – Is it radio waves?
0:05:51 – It’s radio waves.
0:05:52 – Is that dangerous?
0:05:55 – If you have ionized electromagnetic waves
0:05:57 like you would see like an x-ray, yes.
0:05:59 These are non-ionizing rays,
0:06:00 like almost like your cell phone and wifi.
0:06:02 So these are not, I mean listen,
0:06:04 we worked on it for like years and years.
0:06:06 And I think at the end of it was like 2013 or so.
0:06:08 So it was like when I got there,
0:06:11 it was like we were talking and chatting
0:06:13 and didn’t even think to ask to see the machine.
0:06:14 And at the end of the conversation,
0:06:16 he’s like, “You wanna come see it?”
0:06:17 And I’m like, “Of course.”
0:06:19 And we like walked down like four flights of stairs
0:06:20 to the basement.
0:06:23 He takes the cover off, it’s dusty.
0:06:25 It’s like a huge like compact computer at the bottom
0:06:28 and all this old stuff, like all electronics
0:06:30 and all the systems and stuff are like very dated.
0:06:33 He turns it on and demos for me.
0:06:36 He, we have like a mannequin with a gun underneath a shirt
0:06:38 and he shows me it and it was like, it was unbelievable.
0:06:42 It was like, it was like a camera picture of the gun.
0:06:43 But then we also had like,
0:06:44 you also with radio frequency,
0:06:47 we get a 3D reconstruction.
0:06:50 So you’re almost like a camera point cloud of the product.
0:06:52 – Was this before you were gonna do figure
0:06:53 where you were like, this is like my number one
0:06:56 or number two or number three idea or something like that?
0:07:01 – This was a while ago and I’ve been mostly curious
0:07:05 about the space and then what happened from like 2018 to now
0:07:07 is we’ve seen like a five X spike
0:07:09 in the number of school shootings.
0:07:10 So like the charter school shootings
0:07:12 is like looking like a, like NVIDIA stock price.
0:07:14 – Well, we talk about an MFM,
0:07:16 we talk about one chart businesses
0:07:17 where you like, you see some crazy chart
0:07:20 and you’re like, oh, well, there’s like an opportunity.
0:07:22 And it’s like, well, if you just, there’s a tide of wave
0:07:24 if you just sort of catch that wave
0:07:26 and you aren’t even that good,
0:07:28 like the market’s like pulling it out of you.
0:07:30 Like everyone just wants this thing.
0:07:32 And so that was like your, you’re kind of one chart
0:07:34 where it’s like, oh, well, this is obvious.
0:07:39 Somebody came in to figure at one point in 2023,
0:07:42 it was an investor and he was looking at solutions
0:07:45 for school shootings, like just coincidentally,
0:07:48 and they were basically at the time looking at a startup
0:07:50 that was using like CCTVs, like basically the cameras
0:07:53 that are as a school to find guns.
0:07:56 The problem is like all the guns are hidden.
0:07:57 So whenever you like, brandish a weapon
0:07:59 or pull it out and wave it around,
0:08:02 you’re at a point where like a second later you’re shooting it.
0:08:03 So you can’t stop the shootings,
0:08:06 you can just get more prepared about how to get there faster.
0:08:08 Maybe get to the right location, maybe stop,
0:08:10 like save some lives if the shooting lasts
0:08:11 for a long period of time.
0:08:13 You’re not like, you’re not stopping weapons
0:08:13 from getting in school,
0:08:16 you’re not theoretically even stopping real shootings.
0:08:19 So I was telling him about my experience here
0:08:22 and the guy like looked me dead in the face
0:08:24 and he’s like, listen, as somebody has kids,
0:08:27 like how are you not like trying this
0:08:30 and seeing if you can make this really work?
0:08:32 And yeah, so at that time I said,
0:08:35 I gotta figure out how to spend some time
0:08:38 and money making this useful.
0:08:39 – And so is that what you’re gonna do?
0:08:41 You’re launching this as a startup?
0:08:42 Are you gonna have someone else run it?
0:08:43 What are you gonna do?
0:08:45 – Yeah, so we haven’t announced this yet,
0:08:49 but like it is, we have about 12 people on the project
0:08:53 and we own all the intellectual property
0:08:55 from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, licensed all of it.
0:09:02 And we will have our first system brought up
0:09:07 to start imaging weapons in 30 days.
0:09:08 – Are you gonna run it?
0:09:09 Who’s gonna run it?
0:09:10 – We have a team from JPL
0:09:12 that’s running the system, running there right now.
0:09:16 – I don’t think that business can be as big as figure,
0:09:18 but I feel like that’s a monster business.
0:09:20 – Let’s talk about this for a minute.
0:09:21 This is not a school thing.
0:09:24 This is a stadiums, churches,
0:09:28 anywhere it’s like a lot of hospitals, everything.
0:09:32 So my view of this is over a long enough period of time
0:09:34 as longevity improves for humans,
0:09:38 the severity to having to accident
0:09:40 and dying is gonna be higher and higher,
0:09:43 meaning we’re not gonna wanna do more riskier things
0:09:44 as we live longer.
0:09:46 It’s why in the movies, if somebody’s immortal,
0:09:47 they’re like living in their home,
0:09:50 they don’t leave because if you die, you’re dead forever.
0:09:53 And if you don’t die, you’re like alive forever.
0:09:56 Right now we have like some finite period of time
0:09:58 where we won’t be alive anymore.
0:10:00 So humans take a lot of risks.
0:10:01 We drive cars that are extremely dangerous
0:10:04 and motorcycles, we do motorcycles.
0:10:08 We do all this like stupid stuff that like has pretty high,
0:10:10 I would say, you know, pretty high risk.
0:10:12 But if you were gonna live forever,
0:10:15 like you wouldn’t be doing that stuff.
0:10:17 I would say over a long enough period of time,
0:10:20 I don’t think you’ll really move through the world
0:10:23 without imaging systems like this for safety.
0:10:25 – You’re really good at like telling a story.
0:10:28 So you’ve did this before when I found out with you
0:10:32 about humanoids and robots and you just like,
0:10:35 you tell these stories that are so grand.
0:10:37 I just get bought into and I’m like,
0:10:39 well, that makes perfect sense.
0:10:41 But you do it at a much larger scale.
0:10:43 So you went with like the longevity angle,
0:10:44 which is like, well, we’re gonna live much,
0:10:48 I mean, that’s just such like a challenging way to think
0:10:50 for a lot of people, myself included.
0:10:53 And it’s just such an easy, like when I hear that pitch,
0:10:56 I think, yeah, of course that makes wonderful sense.
0:11:00 And it makes me, it makes me think going big
0:11:03 and having these grand visions is almost easier than not,
0:11:06 than doing the alternative of something smaller.
0:11:07 Do you know what I mean?
0:11:09 – It’s a hundred percent easier.
0:11:12 You can hire better people ’cause they’re more ambitious
0:11:15 and they’re interested in working on harder things.
0:11:16 They’re generally larger.
0:11:17 We could be larger outcomes.
0:11:18 We’re talking about like, you know,
0:11:19 building like new industries
0:11:23 that maybe never have been built before with huge tams.
0:11:26 Investors want like very high risk reward trades
0:11:28 where they can make, you know, 50, a hundred times
0:11:31 of their money, you know, most investments from BC’s fail.
0:11:33 So they really need like the hundred bagger
0:11:37 in their portfolio, big grand things offer that risk reward
0:11:38 opportunity for investors.
0:11:40 Yeah, I have this philosophy.
0:11:42 I think harder things are easier.
0:11:45 And I think it really depends what industry
0:11:46 and what market you’re going into.
0:11:48 But relatively speaking, I think it’s,
0:11:50 there’s some, there’s some truth in that.
0:11:52 – Yeah, because Vettery was,
0:11:53 you sold Vettery for a hundred million dollars.
0:11:54 That’s a big outcome.
0:11:56 That’s a big outcome for virtually everyone.
0:11:58 They’re like, that’s a life-changing thing.
0:12:05 But it doesn’t have an inspirational angle to it necessarily.
0:12:06 – I mean, no, I think like, listen,
0:12:08 outside of spending time with loved ones
0:12:11 where it worked most of our lives as humans,
0:12:16 most people, we are, most people don’t like where they work.
0:12:19 If you’ve ever looked for a job, it’s like the worst process.
0:12:21 We talk about bad, like bad products.
0:12:24 Looking for a job is, is embarrassing.
0:12:26 It’s, it’s like soul crushing.
0:12:29 So what we try to do at Vettery is like,
0:12:31 if we can get all the world’s employers together
0:12:33 with all the candidates in the world,
0:12:35 we can use AI to make matches at scale
0:12:38 and find the best opportunity for you with machine learning.
0:12:41 And if you can solve that, you could put people in
0:12:44 much better places for employment, much happier places,
0:12:46 like they can find jobs they really love.
0:12:47 – Yeah, I mean, you just,
0:12:50 I would have pitched it as a sick job board.
0:12:53 And you just totally like make it to be
0:12:54 some really inspirational thing.
0:12:57 But that, even as good as you are at pitching that,
0:12:59 that pales a comparison to, I think,
0:13:03 to like when you pitch this, this x-ray machine,
0:13:04 whatever you’re gonna call it.
0:13:07 And so it’s just, it’s cool to see like this evolution though,
0:13:10 even though you’re actually quite good at pitching
0:13:12 something like Vettery.
0:13:14 And I, again, buy into it.
0:13:15 What’s the name of this thing gonna be?
0:13:18 – Yeah, the name is cover, C-O-V-E-R.
0:13:20 And what’s your philosophy on names?
0:13:25 – I think names need, I think people,
0:13:28 I have a certain philosophy towards it,
0:13:31 but I think I really like names that are at the very basic
0:13:35 level are really easy to say and spell and pronounce.
0:13:38 And I think most company names like Violet,
0:13:40 one of those first three rules,
0:13:44 most names are just like too hard to spell and remember
0:13:46 and pronounce in my mind.
0:13:52 And yeah, I really want something that over time
0:13:54 we can build like a real iconic brand in the space.
0:13:56 And that just takes a lot of time, I would say there too,
0:13:59 but this, the branding around the name
0:14:01 and the way you think about the, you know,
0:14:04 the icon, the font, everything for me is like this,
0:14:05 like almost like when you build a house,
0:14:07 you take a really good foundation and pour a lot of concrete.
0:14:09 It’s that concrete, it’s that foundation.
0:14:12 And you do it in the early days, hopefully do it right.
0:14:15 You know, I’ve definitely done it wrong before,
0:14:17 I’ve done name changes before.
0:14:22 And, you know, these names are all unique to my perspective
0:14:24 of how I want my businesses to look and feel
0:14:27 at like whatever better your archer figure and cover.
0:14:31 But like, I think, yeah, we, I just,
0:14:33 I just spend a decent amount of time taking through that
0:14:36 in the early days to build a good foundation for the brand.
0:14:38 – Are you adamant on a certain URL or domain name?
0:14:42 Because cover.com is, it looks like an insurance company.
0:14:44 I assume that’s a huge insurance company.
0:14:46 I don’t know.
0:14:48 But based off of the fact that they have that URL,
0:14:50 I imagine they’re quite large.
0:14:52 Do you care about the domain?
0:14:55 – We own cover.ai and I own like obviously cover
0:14:58 our sort of figure.ai.
0:15:03 And I bought archer.com a month before going public.
0:15:05 So not really.
0:15:09 So it was like flyarcher.com for a while.
0:15:10 That was like, you know, $9.
0:15:13 And then I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
0:15:17 buying archer.com, you know, a year later, two years later.
0:15:23 We bought figure.ai for a hundred grand.
0:15:26 And then we bought cover for a few tens of thousands of dollars.
0:15:31 So I would own the .coms or .ai’s in these cases, if possible.
0:15:32 – I know you don’t care about money,
0:15:33 but when you are pitching to investors,
0:15:35 when you’re thinking about how big cover is going to be,
0:15:36 what’s your pitch?
0:15:38 – We’re not pitching to investors now.
0:15:39 I’m just funding it.
0:15:42 It’s more like a passion project, to be honest.
0:15:44 The pitches are going to be really unique
0:15:46 because if we end up do raising capital outside,
0:15:48 I don’t know, there might be a path
0:15:49 where we never raise capital here.
0:15:53 They’ll also path through, the technology is very difficult.
0:15:55 So I mean, hopefully we make it work.
0:15:59 Is the biggest market is not in school.
0:16:01 Schools is like the worst market to go into.
0:16:03 It’s just a bad pitch.
0:16:05 The schools have very low budgets.
0:16:06 They don’t have systems like this
0:16:08 exactly at the schools right now.
0:16:12 You know, like, sure the severity is high with shootings,
0:16:14 but like the money-making opportunities
0:16:17 like relatively small comparatively like stadiums
0:16:21 and concerts and hospitals and areas that have big budgets.
0:16:22 Like most big stadiums you go through now,
0:16:25 like you go through like some metal and hector and stuff.
0:16:27 TSA, Pre-Check, like the Homeland Security,
0:16:30 there’s like, there’s real security applications for this
0:16:32 outside of schools that could pay a lot more.
0:16:36 The schools is like the worst pitch for like fundraising.
0:16:38 For me, I don’t give a shit.
0:16:41 I really want to solve the K through 12 school problem.
0:16:44 I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for that.
0:16:46 And we’re going right to schools to help solve.
0:16:50 Like I want to see if I can help prevent school shootings
0:16:52 over time and that’s the only reason
0:16:55 I’m working on this like, you know,
0:16:57 like funding this project, I’m trying to work on it.
0:17:00 – If I had to bet, you’re sort of like me
0:17:01 where like you have a document
0:17:03 where you just like jot down interesting ideas
0:17:05 and you probably aren’t ever going to get to them.
0:17:06 Maybe you would.
0:17:10 If you had an additional 24 hours in your day,
0:17:12 some more time in your week,
0:17:14 what would you be spending it on?
0:17:15 What ideas interest you?
0:17:17 – I think a few things.
0:17:20 I think there’s areas on like genetics
0:17:24 I’m interested in a bit that I, you know,
0:17:26 when I have time, I’m doing a lot of research.
0:17:30 I think there’s areas of like electric supersonic
0:17:31 that are really interesting.
0:17:33 I’m really interested in supersonic travel
0:17:35 and I’m really interested in electric.
0:17:38 And there’s areas of my experience at, you know,
0:17:42 building EVTEL aircraft that I’m like pretty excited about.
0:17:44 I have like a couple of like ideas
0:17:45 about how to design an aircraft
0:17:48 that could like work through these very divergent like
0:17:53 parts of the mission, very like high altitudes
0:17:54 and high speeds.
0:17:56 I really like the industry of like synthetic foods.
0:17:58 There’s been a lot of like controversy recently.
0:18:01 – Is this synthetic meat, is that like impossible?
0:18:03 Or is that like the people who are like literally growing
0:18:06 like a cow that like they’re growing meat
0:18:07 that you’re, you can eat?
0:18:08 It’s not the impossible.
0:18:10 So those are all plant-based.
0:18:13 It’s, you’re basically taking, these are like,
0:18:15 these are like cultured cells.
0:18:19 You’re growing, you’re growing real meats in a lab.
0:18:20 – Why does that interest you?
0:18:22 Does that interest you in because you’re an animal lover?
0:18:26 Does it interest you because cows create a lot of pollution?
0:18:28 Where does the interest come from?
0:18:33 – It seems super unnecessary to like raise animals
0:18:34 and butcher them and eat them.
0:18:37 It just seems like super, like for many reasons.
0:18:40 Like if you, if you could choose to eat a steak
0:18:43 and it was just as good as a steak you have today
0:18:48 and it is real steak, like real muscle tissue and fats
0:18:51 and it wasn’t come from a cow and it came from a lab
0:18:56 but it had all the same, you know, same chemical properties.
0:18:58 What would you say?
0:19:02 – Well, I think that I’m a little bit an early adopter
0:19:04 on weird things and I would say that sounds awesome.
0:19:05 I’m in.
0:19:08 You understand how that’s weird for like your average person.
0:19:10 Like, dude, do you remember when we were kids?
0:19:12 Do you remember when green ketchup came out?
0:19:14 I remember eating green ketchup and I was like,
0:19:16 I know this is the exact same thing
0:19:17 but for some reason because it looks different.
0:19:19 I don’t even want to touch it.
0:19:22 – Yeah, but like TV and radio and lights and electricity,
0:19:24 where those were all weird for folks at some point.
0:19:25 Like those were all just like-
0:19:26 – Yeah, it takes time.
0:19:27 – Cars were weird, right?
0:19:29 Like everybody’s like, why would you have a car
0:19:30 and you have a horse?
0:19:34 Like, all of these are just like really radical in the moment.
0:19:35 – Yeah.
0:19:37 – But like, if we think about the civilization
0:19:38 a thousand years from now,
0:19:41 we’ve been around for like thousands of years.
0:19:43 If you think 10,000 more years
0:19:45 and we’re on Mars and the moon,
0:19:49 you’re gonna be like having cows and bubbles on Mars
0:19:50 and then butchering that.
0:19:51 Like we’re not having a room for that.
0:19:53 Like, it just seems unrealistic.
0:19:56 – I don’t think you understand how unique
0:19:58 some of the things you think are.
0:20:03 And I like to think that because of where I’m from,
0:20:04 which oddly you are too,
0:20:06 but I don’t know if you like totally grasp that.
0:20:08 The way that you think is quite unique
0:20:10 and a little bit larger than the average person.
0:20:13 And so, yeah, what you’re saying makes sense,
0:20:15 but there’s just a lot of emotional baggage
0:20:17 that comes with that to overcome.
0:20:18 But I do agree with you.
0:20:19 I think that that interests you
0:20:20 or that interests me as well.
0:20:22 And I would do it.
0:20:25 If you had to describe yourself as an entrepreneur
0:20:28 in one word, what would you say you are?
0:20:31 What word best describes your philosophy?
0:20:32 – I don’t know.
0:20:35 I don’t really reflect like that too often.
0:20:39 I just wanna go build important things and win.
0:20:41 That’s it.
0:20:44 – What percentage of your philosophy is based on winning
0:20:48 versus the excitement of making stuff?
0:20:49 – All of it’s winning.
0:20:53 I don’t wanna do something exciting in a lab
0:20:57 that doesn’t have the ability to have commercial applications
0:20:58 and build a big business
0:21:01 that has implications for the masses.
0:21:03 Like that’s just, I’m not a research scientist.
0:21:06 Like I don’t have passion for that.
0:21:10 I like thinking about how we’ve evolved as species
0:21:13 the last like even like several hundred years
0:21:15 and how technology has like been probably the biggest
0:21:18 lever arm for our consciousness
0:21:19 and understanding of the world.
0:21:23 And the only way to really do that is on a mass level.
0:21:25 Like you know, like trisiting a lab
0:21:28 that wasn’t brought to all civilization
0:21:33 is marginally helpful, marginally.
0:21:36 But the orders of magnitude improvements we’ve had
0:21:38 in humanity have come from like releasing that to the world
0:21:40 as like an ubiquitous utility.
0:21:44 And for me, winning is the most important thing here
0:21:46 because you know, let’s call it,
0:21:48 like we have a certain finite time to say,
0:21:50 I’m like to do this kind of stuff.
0:21:52 At some point we’ll be just too old
0:21:53 or incapable of doing it.
0:21:55 And it’s on to the next generation.
0:21:56 So I think we have a certain amount of time
0:21:58 to go win and go do things useful with our time
0:22:02 because I use just devastating to spend like 20, 30 years
0:22:03 working on something that doesn’t work.
0:22:07 That’s like, that’s the worst case scenario
0:22:10 for an entrepreneur as you’re devoting all your time
0:22:13 away from friends and family or whatever
0:22:15 you could be spending time on as an opportunity cost
0:22:16 into this business.
0:22:17 Like if it doesn’t win,
0:22:20 it’s just like a terrible story.
0:22:23 – Yeah, I think that when I talk to people
0:22:24 who are just starting stuff,
0:22:26 it’s often what I’ll say is like,
0:22:28 the biggest issue is that you spend 10 years on this
0:22:31 and it’s just a mediocre thing.
0:22:33 It’s better for it to suck right away.
0:22:34 – Agreed.
0:22:36 I actually do like all these calls sometimes
0:22:38 with like early entrepreneurs that are just getting going.
0:22:41 And I’m like so intense about like the idea
0:22:42 and the direction and the why’s.
0:22:45 And they’re just like, yeah, yeah, like whatever.
0:22:48 How do we hire like the first engineer in here?
0:22:49 I need to raise a safe note.
0:22:50 Like how do I do that?
0:22:52 I was just like, dude, like if I had a reverse time,
0:22:55 I would spend like a month on these questions.
0:22:58 And then like most early guys just don’t want to hear it.
0:23:01 They don’t want to get moving and go build.
0:23:04 And I think, you know, we’ve talked about this here
0:23:07 last time I was on MFM, like I kind of fell into vetery.
0:23:10 And I kind of like, I really built Archer and Figure
0:23:12 with a lot of purpose and intense.
0:23:15 It’s the one thing I would pass down to like the newer
0:23:17 generation that’s coming up, building stuff.
0:23:20 Like we have a choice on what to go build.
0:23:24 – What’s your criteria that you tell them is your checklist
0:23:27 for if something is worth my time?
0:23:29 – Like you can’t just get the one thing right.
0:23:31 Like you just can’t get the idea right
0:23:33 or the commercial plan right or the fundraising.
0:23:35 Like you can easily fundraise this
0:23:37 ’cause it’s a hot topic and get that right.
0:23:40 I think it’s like really about, you have to build this,
0:23:44 you know, I mean, you could call it a business plan
0:23:46 or something, but like, you have to come up with an idea
0:23:49 of like how you’re actually going to get this thing done
0:23:52 in the face of like 95% of all companies that go try
0:23:54 to do this and start a plan failing.
0:23:58 And I would say it’s not just about the idea
0:23:59 and how you’re going to execute it
0:24:00 and how you’re going to balance like moving fast
0:24:03 and for slower and product quality.
0:24:05 And what you’re going to build is feature sets first
0:24:07 or later and who you’re going to be your first clients
0:24:09 or the enterprise or the SMBs
0:24:12 and how are you going to actually get distribution?
0:24:13 Is it, you know, is it organically?
0:24:14 Is it through social?
0:24:16 Is it outbound or inbound sales?
0:24:18 Like I think it’s like putting that whole thing together
0:24:20 and having a good, clear direction
0:24:22 of where the ship sailing is most important.
0:24:23 I have like a little chart I always draw people
0:24:25 of like North, South, East and West.
0:24:26 Like you want to go North,
0:24:29 you want to get this cone going North, right?
0:24:30 You want to be heading this direction.
0:24:32 You’re not going to be straight dead North,
0:24:34 but you want to be like not heading South for too long
0:24:35 or you’ll die.
0:24:38 And those are a factor of like all those kind of like,
0:24:40 you know, characteristics I talked about earlier,
0:24:42 which is like just commercialization plan,
0:24:43 how you’re going to make money,
0:24:45 how you’re going to fund the business,
0:24:48 whether it’s like organically or you’re going to raise capital
0:24:50 and team you’re going to bring on the culture you go build
0:24:51 and the execution of the product.
0:24:53 Like all those have to be like very thoughtful
0:24:55 and driven in the right direction.
0:24:57 And you know, we have us a figure, right?
0:24:59 Like we’re going to BMW,
0:25:01 we’re going to these industrial settings,
0:25:02 but we want to be in the home.
0:25:04 Like if we could be in the home today,
0:25:06 like home robots, we would do that.
0:25:10 We are using the commercialization industrialization industry
0:25:12 as a way to get us ready and more prepared
0:25:15 for putting a robot in every home in the world.
0:25:16 – Which is a common way of going about it.
0:25:19 You know, you think, I think Tesla did this
0:25:21 where they started more expensive,
0:25:22 even though he was like, you know,
0:25:25 I would like it to be the Model T where everyone could have one,
0:25:26 but I’m just going to start with high end
0:25:29 because that will give us more profits to fund more stuff.
0:25:32 – Sure, but then why has like Fisker failed twice in a row
0:25:34 while Tesla has just been dominating?
0:25:35 – What’s the answer?
0:25:37 What’s your answer for that?
0:25:39 – They didn’t get the product
0:25:40 and some of the other stuff, right?
0:25:42 The same way Tesla did.
0:25:45 They didn’t get speed right and the product quality
0:25:47 and the way they introduced in the world.
0:25:51 Like all of that, was it balanced well enough?
0:25:54 And the companies all failed twice in a row.
0:25:55 – All right, if you’re listening to this pod,
0:25:57 I already know something about you.
0:26:00 You, my friend, are nosy.
0:26:02 You want to know the numbers behind all of these things
0:26:04 that we’re talking about, how much money people make,
0:26:07 how much money people spend, how much money businesses make.
0:26:10 You want to know all of this, people’s net worth, all of it.
0:26:12 Well, I’ve got good news for you.
0:26:15 So my company Hampton, we’re a private community for CEOs.
0:26:17 We do this thing where we survey our members
0:26:19 and we ask them all types of information,
0:26:21 like how much money they’re paying themselves,
0:26:23 how much money they’re paying a lot of their employees,
0:26:26 what their team-wide bonuses are, what their net worth is,
0:26:27 what their portfolio looks like.
0:26:29 We ask all these questions, but we do it anonymously.
0:26:31 And so people are willing to reveal
0:26:32 all types of amazing information.
0:26:35 So if you really cannot Google, you can’t find anywhere else.
0:26:37 And you could check it out at joinhampton.com,
0:26:40 click the reports section on the menu,
0:26:42 click the salary and compensation report.
0:26:43 It’s gonna blow your mind.
0:26:44 You’re gonna love this stuff.
0:26:45 Check it out.
0:26:46 Now, back to the pod.
0:26:49 You were on 60 minutes the other day.
0:26:52 And on 60 minutes, I think you had a plate
0:26:56 and an apple and a banana sitting in front of the robot.
0:26:59 And you said, hey, hand me the apple
0:27:00 or hand me the orange or something like that.
0:27:02 And it did a good job where it reached
0:27:04 and it found the right fruit.
0:27:06 And I think it made a mistake once or twice,
0:27:07 but then it corrected itself
0:27:09 and you’re like, hey, that’s the wrong one.
0:27:10 And it was like, oh, I’m sorry.
0:27:12 And it like picked up the right one.
0:27:14 What’s crazy to me is that you’re two years old.
0:27:16 The company’s two years old.
0:27:18 I’ve seen that you’ve been able to do this so quickly.
0:27:21 And I think when I talk to someone, they go,
0:27:25 everything’s late with tech and in hardware.
0:27:27 But somehow Brett hasn’t been late.
0:27:30 Figure has been lightning fast.
0:27:33 What have you guys done to be so fast?
0:27:35 – So when I started Figure and also Archer,
0:27:37 I did this at Archer too.
0:27:39 I started the company before he was even incorporated
0:27:41 with his idea of like how to move extremely fast.
0:27:44 So like, listen, it’s like a whole company
0:27:46 was built just for speed.
0:27:48 We have our company mission statement,
0:27:50 which is like, we wanna go this direction as a company,
0:27:53 then everything else as we like built out the org chart
0:27:54 and thought about how we’re gonna do that,
0:27:56 the values that we think about hiring people for
0:27:58 or firing people for,
0:27:59 how we think about compensation,
0:28:02 how we think about, how do we build schedules?
0:28:03 How do we plan for schedules?
0:28:05 Like we don’t have, we’re 120 engineers here.
0:28:07 We have zero program managers.
0:28:09 Zero.
0:28:12 And we have a certain philosophy
0:28:16 around like what to do and how to build hardware
0:28:18 and software that I think we’re kind of
0:28:21 the anti-Silicon Valley company in Silicon Valley
0:28:23 as it relates to this.
0:28:27 We really care about getting things brought up quicker
0:28:29 and iterating faster and doing that
0:28:31 over a very long period of time, like decades.
0:28:35 And building a company that can do that is extremely hard.
0:28:38 Like there’s really no good precedent maybe outside
0:28:42 of like Tesla and SpaceX that have done this well at scale.
0:28:45 Like Tesla has well over a hundred thousand people,
0:28:49 like arguably tens of thousands of product design engineers
0:28:52 and they’re moving at a speeds of a small startup.
0:28:55 And generally when you’re adding headcount,
0:28:57 the companies are all slowing down.
0:29:00 It’s almost every company slowing down with more headcount.
0:29:03 You’re just getting slower over time.
0:29:04 You don’t notice that you don’t care.
0:29:07 The board is giving you indication
0:29:09 that you should slow down and be safer.
0:29:12 And everything is just slowing to a halt and the limit.
0:29:15 So you have to basically fight this.
0:29:17 And you have to like the best way you can fight it
0:29:20 is like design the whole word from the ground up to do this
0:29:23 or do what Elon did with Twitter
0:29:25 and walk in and fire 80% of people
0:29:29 and restructure it at the start at that point in time
0:29:31 to go faster and ship product.
0:29:34 And it’s too laborious here to say like,
0:29:36 “Okay, we move fast like one thing.”
0:29:39 It’s like the whole company was built just to move fast.
0:29:41 – But what are you asking your recruits,
0:29:42 your potential app or your applicant,
0:29:44 your job applicants to figure out
0:29:46 if they do have that ability?
0:29:48 – There’s a lot of things happening here.
0:29:50 A lot of times people haven’t been in that environment.
0:29:52 So when they get in there,
0:29:56 when they’re moving a fast and a much quicker pace environment,
0:29:57 it just becomes overwhelming
0:29:59 and just too hard and too stressful to handle.
0:30:02 So if you were like a PhD student for 10 years
0:30:05 where you know, sweatpants and like moving slow
0:30:08 and you come in here, it’s like a real culture shock
0:30:09 coming to the figure.
0:30:10 And we’ve had it happen several times
0:30:12 where they’re like, people are just like,
0:30:14 you know, they’re coming in late, they’re moving slow
0:30:16 and just like, it’s frustrating for them
0:30:17 having to move much faster
0:30:21 and it’s like probably a lot of anxiety there.
0:30:22 There are other folks that believe
0:30:24 the longer that you take to build something,
0:30:26 the safer it is and the better job you’ll do at it.
0:30:30 So if you give me, you know, two years to design a robot,
0:30:34 it will be, that robot will be safer at the end of the two years
0:30:37 and better design, like folks feel like that.
0:30:38 It’s for sure wrong.
0:30:41 People think that the longer you spend designing something
0:30:43 the safer it’ll be and the better it’ll be.
0:30:44 It’s for sure wrong.
0:30:45 ‘Cause in that two year period of time
0:30:46 without one robot got out,
0:30:49 I’m gonna have my third gen robot out.
0:30:53 And I’ll have run it like an order of magnitude longer.
0:30:55 I will have found all the problems 10 times sooner.
0:30:57 I will have had time to go fix it recursively
0:30:58 and make it better.
0:31:01 It’ll just be a worse product.
0:31:03 – How do you measure and how do other people measure
0:31:05 if someone’s fast enough?
0:31:08 – You look at how many iterations somebody is doing
0:31:09 and how much progress they made
0:31:11 between those iteration cycles.
0:31:14 – And what is, what are your expectations?
0:31:17 – A car could be like how many car versions
0:31:18 you’ve gotten out over the last decade
0:31:21 and how much progress you’ve made between those.
0:31:23 A rocket could be similar viewed.
0:31:26 A robot could be how many robot iterations are we doing?
0:31:28 What version of robot are we on?
0:31:30 iPhone could be, you know,
0:31:31 how many versions of iPhone have you gotten out
0:31:33 over the last 15 years?
0:31:34 How much progress have you made between each one of those?
0:31:37 That will ultimately set the slope of the curve for speed.
0:31:40 That will ultimately be correlated at a high level
0:31:42 to how much risk there is
0:31:44 of failure in the business long-term.
0:31:47 – As we wrap up here, I wanna ask something
0:31:49 that I’ve been thinking about with you a lot.
0:31:54 So you’ve mentioned some type of genetically engineered food.
0:31:56 You’ve mentioned planes.
0:31:59 You’ve mentioned figure, humanoids,
0:32:01 these machines that detect guns.
0:32:04 You have like a pretty wide range of knowledge,
0:32:07 but unlike a lot of people who have a wide range of knowledge,
0:32:08 you, I’ve been to your home.
0:32:10 I’ve seen like textbooks at your house
0:32:11 on a variety of topics.
0:32:14 And you have a really unique way of learning.
0:32:17 You’re basically like a human AI.
0:32:21 Do you have a framework for learning new things?
0:32:24 – Learning stuff is always like really challenging for me.
0:32:26 I think like I have to first,
0:32:27 I think everything like a tree,
0:32:30 I have to first build this like trunk
0:32:32 of like first order understanding about the topic
0:32:37 before I can ever comprehend and remember
0:32:39 the limbs and the leaves.
0:32:42 And so I have to have like a really
0:32:46 fundamentally sound understanding of the tree trunk
0:32:48 as I look at certain topics.
0:32:49 – Where do you turn to for that?
0:32:51 – You just gotta like, you know,
0:32:56 find this stuff, whether it’s Wikipedia, papers,
0:32:59 like Google searches, you can use GPT-4.
0:33:03 Like can you clearly communicate this topic,
0:33:05 whether it’s an engineering topic or not,
0:33:07 to a 12 year old sitting on a bar stool?
0:33:11 And most people can’t do that.
0:33:13 It’s like the skill that most people can’t do.
0:33:15 Like even people I work with,
0:33:17 I have a hard time sometimes understanding
0:33:20 what’s the update on the, you know,
0:33:22 this thing or that thing.
0:33:23 And it’s a skill.
0:33:24 Like you have to learn how to do that.
0:33:26 Same way of like understanding something.
0:33:27 It’s a skill to really boil things down
0:33:30 and really truly understand the basic characterization
0:33:32 of what’s really happening.
0:33:34 Some of the smartest people I know
0:33:39 are also the most clear worded folks about a topic.
0:33:41 – That’s a really good insight.
0:33:44 And it probably comes because you’re an outsider
0:33:46 that got into this stuff when you’re older.
0:33:50 – Maybe or there’s so many different multidisciplinary areas
0:33:52 of like software and hardware and like electromagnetic
0:33:54 and everything else that needs to be done here
0:33:56 that you really need to be able to communicate clearly
0:33:57 across several groups.
0:33:58 And it’s important even here,
0:34:00 like we try not to use acronyms
0:34:02 and a software purpose person that writes firmware
0:34:04 and electromagnetic person that builds
0:34:06 like a rotor stator for electric motor.
0:34:08 Like those folks don’t understand
0:34:11 those other disciplines generally.
0:34:13 So they need to communicate with each other as well.
0:34:16 And they can’t be using inside baseball terms
0:34:19 a lunch magnetic work when like a firmware engineer
0:34:21 hasn’t spent any time on like, you know,
0:34:23 stator and rotor design for electric rotors.
0:34:26 So like, I think this topic of being able to like
0:34:28 communicate really well and understand things really well,
0:34:29 it’s just like super important.
0:34:32 – You have like a pretty strong outlook on life.
0:34:36 It seems like you have strong beliefs
0:34:38 on what you want the outcome of your life to be,
0:34:40 how you want to spend your time.
0:34:43 Which people who you’ve read about
0:34:48 has had the biggest influence on that philosophy
0:34:50 or influenced you the most?
0:34:51 – I think there’s like,
0:34:53 there’s been like really great entrepreneurs over time
0:34:56 to show a path that this all can be done.
0:34:57 Like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk,
0:35:00 these guys are the best at what they do
0:35:02 have been able to show the world
0:35:04 like really incredible things can be done
0:35:08 on the back of like persistence and focus.
0:35:11 And I think it’s just like really incredible.
0:35:13 Like every time I watch like a SpaceX launch
0:35:16 or hold an Apple product in my hands,
0:35:19 you know, every company in the world
0:35:20 started out as a startup at some point.
0:35:22 So I think it’s just, I don’t know,
0:35:25 I think it’s very energizing to think that, you know,
0:35:28 somebody with enough willpower can actually go out
0:35:30 and do really incredible things for the world.
0:35:32 And I think that gives me energy every day
0:35:34 I wake up and says, you know,
0:35:35 even if you’re a figure, we have like,
0:35:40 we haven’t done really anything noteworthy today
0:35:40 over two years.
0:35:42 It’s been interesting, we have robots and stuff,
0:35:44 but people have built robots.
0:35:46 We need to go out now and like prove
0:35:48 that we can actually ship really high quality product,
0:35:50 which is going to take us, you know,
0:35:51 several more years from here.
0:35:53 But like that’s just like a really exciting challenge
0:35:54 for us now.
0:35:57 And it’s really hard and everybody has attempted that,
0:35:58 at least in human robotics,
0:36:00 commercially has failed in history.
0:36:02 So, but that should be doable.
0:36:04 And there are people that have gone over this hump
0:36:07 in other industries of other very difficult things,
0:36:10 maybe less difficult or more difficult here in history.
0:36:11 And that’s just,
0:36:13 that should be very energizing for us here at figure
0:36:17 and other entrepreneurs out there trying to do hard things.
0:36:18 – You’re the man.
0:36:19 I have this joke.
0:36:23 I’m like, cornrows are cool, but not for me.
0:36:26 And that’s kind of how I feel about the way you think,
0:36:29 where I’m like, I don’t know if I can do what you do,
0:36:31 but I am really excited and happy
0:36:33 that people like you exist.
0:36:36 So thank you for doing everything you’re doing.
0:36:38 I feel great after talking to you.
0:36:39 – Yeah, thanks for having me on.
0:36:41 – All right, that’s the pot.
0:36:43 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
0:36:46 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
0:36:48 ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
0:36:52 ♪ On the road, let’s travel, never looking back, life ♪
Episode 597: Sam Parr ( https://twitter.com/theSamParr ) talks to Brett Adcock ( https://x.com/adcock_brett ) about his next big idea, his checklist for entrepreneurs, and his framework for learning new things and moving fast.
—
Show Notes:
(0:00) Solving school shootings
(3:15) Cold calling NASA
(6:14) Spotting the mega-trend
(8:37) “Thinking big is easier”
(12:42) Brett’s philosophy on company names
(16:22) Brett’s ideas note app: genetics, super-sonic travel, synthetic foods
(19:45) “I just want to win”
(21:46) Brett’s checklist for entrepreneurs
(25:17) Being fast in hardware
(30:15) Brett’s framework for learning new things
(33:00) Who does Brett admire
—
Links:
• [Steal This] Get our proven writing frameworks that have made us millions https://clickhubspot.com/copy
• Brett Adcock – https://www.brettadcock.com/
• Cover – https://www.cover.ai/
• Figure – https://figure.ai/
—
Check Out Shaan’s Stuff:
Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd
—
Check Out Sam’s Stuff:
• Hampton – https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp – https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That – https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey – https://joinhampton.com/wealth
• Sam’s List – http://samslist.co/
My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano