EXCLUSIVE: $3B Founder Reveals His Next Big Idea

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  If you had to describe yourself, what would you say you are?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  I just want to go build important things and win. That's it.

• 0:15Sam Parr?

  We're live with Brett Adcock. I wanted to start off with something crisp. You told me this story, and this is something that's fascinating about you, which is about your ability to learn. So I think, I don't want to butcher the story, but you said something like, I was reading old, I think, research papers. And you found that, I think in the seventies, NASA came up with this amazing thing. And you cold called or cold emailed NASA. And you're like, can you actually show me this device? Is that story right?

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty close. This is like the first time I've talked about this publicly. So sorry, maybe from like, for context, I have been kind of following what's happening at K through 12 schools in the US as it relates to school shootings. And if you look at the charts of like, you know, how many shootings are actually happening at the schools? How many deaths are happening in schools? It's, it's, it's, it's like, basically you have like a school shooting, like basically once per day now in the US in K through 12.

• 1:13Sam Parr?

  That's true. Is that true? That's insane.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  I have to say, we're like, I think it was like 200, over 200 people, like, um, last year were like either shot or wounded or, or wounded or killed in the US at K through 12. And a third of those are all in elementary. And the chart, if you look like a line graph of the chart, it's just like exponential. It's a, we, we like 5Xed in 2018, uh, kind of almost a year over year. And then we like took another 3X move. So we basically 10Xed the number of school shootings, uh, over the last, um, like seven years or so, decade, and it's just getting worse and worse. What I found is that most of all the school shootings are not what we're seeing on TV.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Where, you know, there's, um, like an over assault where somebody's bringing in like a machine gun, uh, planned it out, driving a truck into campus and just shooting people up. That's, that's, that's, that's, that happens a few times a year. Ninety, ninety, ninety-nine, ninety-eight percent of all the other shootings are from a kid bringing a handgun in every day to school. They're getting in a fight at some point to escalate into a shooting. So they're just like, it's like, it's like, it's like an accessory. It's like, like bringing a

• 2:25Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Third, and they have a handgun in their backpack. And but from our analysis, several hundred thousand guns are being brought into schools in K to 12 every year in the, in the U S and not found. And then a small fraction of those that we see now in the statistics are are basically getting in like bullied or getting in a fight and they're shooting somebody on school campus. So one of my hobbies, I love reading like research papers and papers in general. And the way I think you solve this is you need to be able to see the guns. I think gun control is something I'm interested in and passionate about, but I think it's not going to fix all school shootings forever. There was like last year was 70 knife stabbings in

• 3:07Speaker 01

  K 12 schools. So like, you know, even if you halted guns, there's still like knife stabbings happening here. So we need to see the weapons. So I was reading, I came across a research paper from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab where they were doing work where they were trying to detect bomb vests and weapons underneath like garments and clothes and jackets for like Afghanistan and Iraq. And they developed some really interesting like weapons imaging technology. And I flew to JPL, like NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. And I was talking to the guy that ran it.

• 3:43Sam Parr?

  Did you just cold, cold email him or something?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Cold called him for sure. Yeah.

• 3:48Sam Parr?

  And what did you say?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Oh, I said, Hey, I, I, I need to, I need to learn more about this. I read your paper. Can we have a conversation? You know, most people in general will get on the phone with you at this point. Like if you're passionate about some work they did for years and years that they're no longer doing, like somebody's gonna take a phone call. I think, I think most people could, could knock on that door and get that person to react. Yeah, I don't think that's a hard thing to do. Called him and I flew in and the high level was that they developed a high frequency radar. So similar like your wifi or phone, like, like, it's like, it like lies in electromagnetic spectrum. So like radio waves, basically, that were really high frequency. So like, think about like your phone or wifi, but like

• 4:31Speaker 01

  really souped up to a much higher frequency level. And they were able to start penetrating clothing and start like imaging or building or reconstructing images of what's happening inside of bags underneath clothing and stuff. And if you like, read the research papers, you look at it, it's like, it's like a It's like a airport security, uh, cam, like airport security, but like you can do it uh, 50 meters away and you can do it like a camera and you can take like almost like camera frame rate images, which means you could just like point this at the interest of a school in this example and you can see every gun and knife and bomb and it doesn't need to be metallic. It doesn't need metal. It could be plastic. It could be any material.

• 5:12Sam Parr?

  Is it radio waves?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  It's radio waves.

• 5:15Sam Parr?

  Is that dangerous?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  If you have ionized, uh, electromagnetic waves, uh, like you would see like an X-ray, yes, these are not ionizing rays, uh, like almost like your cell phone and wifi. So these are not. Yeah. I mean, listen, we worked on it for like, for like years and years. And I think at the end of it was like 2013 or so. So it was like, when I got there, I was like, we were talking and chatting and didn't even think to ask to see the machine. And at the end of the conversation, he's like, you want to come see it? And I'm like, of course. And we like walked down like four flights of stairs to the basement. He, uh, you know, takes the cover off. It's dusty. It's like a huge like compact computer at the bottom and all this old stuff, like all, all electronics and all the systems and stuff are like very dated. He turns it on and demos for me. Uh, he, we have like a

• 5:58Speaker 01

  mannequin with a gun underneath his shirt and he shows me it and I was like, it was unbelievable. It was like, it was like, it was like a camera picture of the gun. But then we also had like, you also with radio frequency, we get the, we get a 3D reconstruction. So you're almost like a camera point cloud of the product.

• 6:14Sam Parr?

  Was this before you were gonna do figure where you're like, this is like my number one or number two or number three idea or something like that?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  This was a while ago and I've been mostly curious about the space. And then what happened from like 2018 to now is we've seen like a 5X spike in the number of school shootings. So like the, the chart of school shootings is like looking like a, like Nvidia stock price.

• 6:37Sam Parr?

  Well, we talk about an MFM, we talk about one chart businesses where you like, you see some crazy chart and you're like, oh, well, there's like an opportunity. And it's like, well, if you just, there's a tidal wave. If you just sort of catch that wave and you aren't even that good, like the market's like pulling it out of you. Uh, like everyone just wants this thing. Yeah. So that was like your one, your kind of one chart where it's like, oh, well, this is obvious.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Somebody came into Figure at one point in 2023. It was an investor and he was looking at solutions for school shootings, like just coincidentally. And they were basically at the time looking at a startup that was using like CCTVs, like basically the cameras that are as a school to find guns. The problem is like all the guns are hidden. So whenever you like brandish a weapon or pull it out and wave it around, you're at a point where like a second later you're shooting it. So you can't stop the shootings. You can just get more prepared about how to get there faster. Maybe get to the right location, maybe stop, like save some lives if the shooting lasts for a long period of time. You're not like, you're not stopping weapons from getting in the school. You're not theoretically even stopping real shootings. So I was telling him about my experience here.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  And the guy like looked me dead in the face. And he's like, listen, as somebody has kids, like, how are you not like trying this and seeing if you can make this really work? And yeah, so at that time I said, I gotta figure out how to spend some time and money making this useful.

• 8:02Sam Parr?

  And so is that what you're gonna do? You're launching this as a startup? Are you gonna have someone else run it? What are you gonna do?

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we haven't announced this yet, but like it is, we have about 12 people on the project. And we own all the intellectual property from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, licensed all of it.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  And we will have our first system brought up to start imaging weapons in 30 days.

• 8:31Sam Parr?

  Are you gonna run it? Who's gonna run it?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  We have a team from JPL that's running the system, running there right now.

• 8:37Sam Parr?

  I don't think that business can be as big as Figure, but I feel like that's a monster business.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Let's talk about this for a minute. This is not a school thing. This is stadiums, churches, anywhere. It's like a lot of like hospitals, everything. So my view of this is over a long enough period of time, as longevity improves for humans. The the the severity to having an accident and dying is going to be higher and higher. Meaning we're not going to want to do more riskier things as we live longer. It's why in the movies, if somebody's immortal, they're like living in their home. They don't leave because if you die, you're dead forever. And if you don't die, you're like alive forever. Right now, we have like in some finite period of time where we won't, we won't be alive anymore. So humans take a lot of risks. We drive cars that are extremely dangerous and motorcycles.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  We do, you do motorcycles. We do all this like stupid stuff that like has pretty high, I would say, you know, pretty high risk. But if that, if you were to live forever, like you wouldn't be doing that stuff. I would say over a long enough period of time, I don't think you'll really move through the world without imaging systems like this for safety.

• 9:47Sam Parr?

  You're really good at like telling a story. So you've, you did this before when I hung out with you about humanoids and robots. And you just like, you tell these stories that are so grand. I just get bought into and I'm like, well, that makes perfect sense. But you do it at a much larger scale. So you went with like the longevity angle, which is like, well, we're going to live much. I mean, it does, that's just such like a challenging way to think for a lot of people, myself included. And it's just such an easy, like when I hear that pitch, I think, yeah, of course, that makes wonderful sense. And it makes me, it makes me think going big and having these grand visions is almost easier than not, than not, than doing the alternative of something smaller. Do you know what I mean?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  It's a hundred percent easier. You could hire better people because they're more ambitious and they're interested in working on harder things. They're generally larger, it could be larger outcomes. You're talking about like, you know, building like new industries that maybe never have been built before with huge TAMs. Investors want like very high risk reward trades where they can make, you know, 50, 100 times of their money. You know, most investments from VCs fail, so they really need like the 100 bagger in their portfolio. Big grand things offer that risk reward opportunity for investors.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have this philosophy, I think that harder things are easier. And I think it really depends what industry and what market you're going into. But relatively speaking, I think it's, there's some, there's some truth in that.

• 11:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah, because Vettery was, you sold Vettery for a hundred million dollars. That's a big outcome. That's a big outcome for virtually everyone. They're like, that's a life changing thing.

• 11:24Sam Parr?

  But it doesn't have an inspirational angle to it necessarily.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  I mean, no, I think like, listen, outside of spending time with loved ones where it worked most of our lives as humans. Most people, we are, most people don't like where they work. If you've ever looked for a job, it's like the worst process. We talk about bad, like bad products. Looking for a job is, is embarrassing. It's, uh, it's like soul crushing. So what we tried to do at Vettery is like, if we can get all the world's employers together with all the candidates in the world. We can use AI to make matches of scale and find the best opportunity for you with machine learning. And if you can solve that, you could put people in much better places for employment, much happier places, like they can find jobs they really love.

• 12:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, you just, I would have pitched it as a sick job board. And you just totally like make it to be some really inspirational thing. But that, even as good as you are at pitching that, that pales in comparison to, I think, to like when you pitch this, this, uh, this X-ray machine, whatever you're gonna call it. And so it's just, it's cool to see like this evolution though, even though you're actually quite good at pitching something, uh, like Vettery. And I again buy into it. What, what's the name of this thing gonna be?

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, the name is, is Cover, C O V E R.

• 12:42Sam Parr?

  And what, what's your philosophy on names?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  I think names.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Need, I, I, I think people, I, I have a certain philosophy towards it, but I think, um, I really like names that are at the very basic level or really easy to say and spell and pronounce. And I think most company names like violate one of those first three rules. Most names are just like too hard, uh, to spell and remember and pronounce in my mind. Um, and yeah, I really want, um, something that over time we can build like a real iconic brand in the space. And that just takes a lot of time, I would say there too, but this, the branding around the name and the way you think about the, you know, the icon, the font, everything for me. Is like this, like, almost like when you build a house, you take a really good foundation and pour a lot of concrete. It's that concrete, it's that foundation.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  And you do it in the early days, hopefully do it right.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  You know, I've definitely done it wrong before. I've done name changes before. Um, and, uh, and you know, these names are really unique to my, my perspective of how I want my businesses to look and feel. I like whatever better your Archer. Figure and cover, but like, I think, um, uh, yeah, we, I, we, I just spent a decent amount of time thinking through that in the early days to build a good foundation for the brand.

• 14:00Sam Parr?

  Are you adamant on a certain URL or domain name? Because cover.com is, it looks like an insurance company. I assume that's a huge insurance company. I don't know. Uh, but based off of the fact that they have that URL, I imagine they're quite large. Do you care about the domain?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Uh, we own cover.ai and I own like obviously cover or sorry figure.ai. And, um, I bought Archer.com a month before going public. Uh, so not really. So. It was like fly Archer.com for a while. That was like, you know, nine dollars. And then. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying Archer.com, you know, a year later, two years later.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  We bought figure.ai for a hundred grand. And then we bought cover for a few tens of thousands of dollars. So, um, I would own the dot coms or dot AIs in these cases, if possible.

• 14:55Sam Parr?

  I know you don't care about money, but when you are pitching to investors, when you're thinking about how big cover is going to be, what's your pitch?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  We're not pitching investors now. I'm just funding it. It's more like a passion project, to be honest. Um. The, the pitches are going to be really unique because, uh, if we end up doing raising capital outside, I don't, I don't know. There might be a path where we never raise capital here.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  There are also pathways, technologies is very, is very difficult. So, I mean, hopefully we make it work.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Is the, the biggest market is not in school. Schools is like the worst market to go into. It's just a bad pitch. The, the schools have very low budgets. They don't have systems like this exactly at the schools right now. You know, like, sure, the severity ties with shootings, but like the, the money-making opportunities, like relatively. Small comparatively like stadiums and concerts and hospitals and areas that have big budgets, like most big stadiums you go through now, like you go through like some middle. Protector and stuff TSA pre-check like the homeland security. There's like, there's real security applications for this outside of schools. I could pay a lot more. The schools is like the the worst pitch for like fundraising. For me, I don't give a shit. I really want to solve the

• 16:03Speaker 01

  K through 12 school problem. I wouldn't be doing this if I, if it wasn't for that. And we're going great, great to schools to help solve. Like I, I want to see if I can help prevent school shootings over time. And that's what I, that's, that's the only reason I'm working on this. Like, you know, like funding this project. I'm trying to work on it.

• 16:21Sam Parr?

  If I had to bet, you're sort of like me where like you have a document where you just like jot down interesting ideas and you probably aren't ever going to get to them. Maybe you would. If you had an additional 24 hours in your day, some more time in your week, what would you be spending it on? What ideas interest you?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  I think a few things. I think there's areas on like genetics. I'm interested in a bit that I, you know, when I have time, I'm doing a lot of research. I think there's areas of like electric supersonic that are really interesting. I'm really interested in supersonics travel and I'm really interested in electric. And there's areas of my experience at, you know, building EV tall aircraft that I'm like, pretty excited about. I have like a couple of like ideas about how to design an aircraft that could like work through these very divergent like parts of the mission, very like high altitudes and high speeds. I really like the industry of like synthetic foods. There's been a lot of like controversy recently.

• 17:22Sam Parr?

  Is this synthetic meat? Is that like impossible? Or is that like the people who are like literally growing like a cow? Like they're growing meat that you're, you can eat?

• 17:31Speaker 01

  It's not the impossible. So those are all plant-based. It's, you're basically taking, these are like, these are like cultured cells. You're growing, you're growing real meats in a lab.

• 17:43Sam Parr?

  Why does that interest you? Does that interest you? And because you're an animal lover? Does it interest you because cows create a lot of pollution? Where's the interest come from?

• 17:52Speaker 01

  It seems super unnecessary to like, like raise animals and butcher them and eat them. It just seems like super like for, for many reasons, like if you, if you could choose to eat a steak and it was just as good as a, as a steak you have today, and it is real steak, like real muscle, muscle tissue and fats, and it wasn't come from a cow and it came from a lab, but it had all the same, you know, uh, same chemical properties, what, what, what would you say?

• 18:23Sam Parr?

  Well, I think that I'm a little bit an early adopter on weird things and I would say, that sounds awesome. I'm in. You, you understand how that's weird for like your average person. Like dude, do you remember when we were kids? Do you remember when green ketchup came out? I remember eating green ketchup and I was like, I know this is the exact same thing, but for some reason, because it looks different, I don't even want to touch it.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like TV and radio and lights and electricity, where those are all weird for folks at some point. Like those were all just like-

• 18:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it takes time.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Cars were weird, right? Like everybody's like, why would you have a car when you have a horse? Like all of these are just like really radical in the moment. But like, if we think about the civilization, a thousand years from now, we've been around for like thousands of years. If you think 10,000 more years and we're on Mars and the moon, you're going to be grow, like having cows in bubbles on Mars and then butchering that. Like we don't have a room for that. Like it just seems unrealistic.

• 19:18Sam Parr?

  I don't think you understand how unique some of the things you think are. And I like to think that because of where I'm from, which oddly you are too, but I don't know if you like totally grasp that the way that you think is quite unique and a little bit larger than the average person. And so, yeah, what you're saying makes sense, but there's just a lot of emotional baggage that comes with that to overcome. But I do agree with you. I think that that, that interests you or that interests me as well. And I would do it. If you had to describe your, yourself as an entrepreneur in one word, what would you say you are? What word best describes your philosophy?

• 19:55Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't really reflect like that too often. I, I just, I, I just want to go build important things and win. That's it.

• 20:05Sam Parr?

  What percentage of your philosophy is based on winning versus the excitement of making stuff?

• 20:12Speaker 01

  All of it's winning. I don't want to do something exciting in a lab that doesn't have the ability to have commercial applications and build a big business that has implications for the masses. Like, that's just, I'm not, I'm not a research scientist. Like, I don't have passion for that. I like thinking about how we've evolved as species the last, like, even like several hundred years and how technology has like been probably the biggest lever arm for our consciousness and understanding of the world. And the only way to really do that is on a mass level, like, you know, electricity in a lab that wasn't brought to all civilization

• 20:53Speaker 01

  is marginally helpful, marginally. But the orders of magnitudes improvements we've had in humanity have come from like releasing that to the world as like an ubiquitous utility. And for me, winning is the most important thing here because, you know, let's call it like we have a certain finite time to say I'm like to do this kind of stuff. At some point, we'll be just too old or incapable of doing it and it's on to the next generation. So I think we have a certain amount of time to go win and go do things useful with our time because I think it's just devastating to spend like 20, 30 years working on something that doesn't work. It's like, that's, that's the worst case scenario for an entrepreneur as you're devoting all your time

• 21:35Speaker 01

  away from friends and family or whatever you could be spending time on as an opportunity cost into this business. Like, if it doesn't win, it's just like a terrible story.

• 21:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think that when new, when I talk to people who are just starting stuff, it's often what I'll say is like, the biggest issue is that you spend 10 years on this and it's just a mediocre thing. It's better to for it to suck right away.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Agreed. I actually do like all these calls sometimes with like early entrepreneurs that are just getting going. And I'm like so intense about like the idea and the direction and the whys. And they're just like, yeah, yeah, I like whatever. How do we hire? I get the first engineer in here. I need to raise a safe note. Like, how do I do that? I was just like, dude, like, if I had a reverse time, I would spend like a month on these questions. And like most early guys just don't want to like, don't want to hear it. They want to get move in and get go build. And I think, you know, we've talked about this here last time I was on MFM, like, I kind of fell into vettery and I kind of like, I really built Archer and Figure with a lot of purpose and intense.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  It's the one thing I would pass down to like the newer generation that's coming up, building stuff like, um, like we have a choice on what to go build.

• 22:45Sam Parr?

  What's your criteria that you tell them is is your checklist for if something is worth my time?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Like you can't just get the one thing right. Like you just can't get the idea right, or the commercial plan right, or the fundraising, like you can easily fundraise this because it's a hot topic and get that right. I think it's like really about, you have to build this, you know, um, I mean, you call it a business plan or something, but like, you have to come up with this idea of like, how you're actually going to get this thing done. And in the face of like 95% of all companies that go try to do this and start a plan failing. And I would say it's not just about the idea and how you're going to execute it, how you're going to balance like moving fast and for slower and product quality. And what you're going to build as feature sets first or later, and who are you going to be your first clients, the enterprise, are they like SMBs? And how are you going to actually get distribution?

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Is it, you know, is it organically? Is it through social? Is it outbound or inbound sales? Like, I think it's like putting that whole thing together and having a good, clear direction of where the ship's sailing is most important. I have like a little chart I always draw people of like north, south, east, west. Like you want to go north. You want to get this cone going north, right? You want to be heading this direction. You're not going to be straight dead north, but you want to be like not heading south for too long or you'll die. And those are a factor of like all those kind of like, you know, heuristics I talked about earlier, which is like just commercialization plan, how you're going to make money, how you're going to fund, how you're going to fund the business, whether it's like organically or you're going to raise capital and team you're going to bring on, the culture you go build and the execution of the product. Like all those have to be like very thoughtful and driven in the right direction.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  And, you know, we have this to figure, right? Like, we're going to BMW, we're going to these industrial settings. But we want to be in the home. Like if we could be in the home today, like home robots, we would do that. We are using the commercialization, industrialization industry as a way to get us ready and more prepared for putting a robot in every home in the world.

• 24:39Sam Parr?

  Which is a common way of going about it, you know, you think, um, I think Tesla did this where they started more expensive, even though he was like, you know, I would like it to be the Model T where everyone could have one, but I'm just going to start with high end because that will give us more profits to fund more stuff.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Sure, but why, then why has like Fisker failed twice in a row while Tesla's just been dominating?

• 24:58Sam Parr?

  What's the answer? What's your, what's your answer for that?

• 25:01Speaker 01

  They, they didn't get the product and some of the other stuff right, same way Tesla did. Uh, they didn't get speed right and the product quality and the, the way they introduced in the world, like all of that, um, wasn't balanced well enough, uh, and the company's now failed twice in a row.

• 25:17Sam Parr?

  You were on 60 Minutes the other day and on 60 Minutes, I think you had like a plate and an apple and a banana, like sitting in front of the robot. And you said like, uh, hey, uh, hand me the apple or hand me the orange or something like that. And it did a good job where it like reached and it found the right fruit. And I think it made a mistake once or twice, but then it like corrected itself and you're like, hey, that's, that's the wrong one. And it was like, oh, I'm sorry. And it like picked up the right one. What's crazy to me is that you're two years old, the company's two years old. I've seen that you've been able to do this so quickly. And I think, uh, when I talk to someone, they go, everything's late with tech and, and, and in hardware. But somehow Brett hasn't been late. Figure has been lightning fast.

• 26:00Sam Parr?

  What have you guys done to be so fast?

• 26:03Speaker 01

  So when I started Figure and, and also Archer, I did this at Archer too. I, I started the company before we was even incorporated with this idea of like how to move extremely fast. So like, listen, it's like, it's like a whole company was built just for speed. We have our company mission statement, which is like, we want to go this direction as a company. Then everything else, as we like built out the org chart and thought about how we're going to do that. The high, the values that we think about hiring people for or firing people for, how we think about compensation, how we think about, uh, how do we build schedules? How do we plan for schedules? Like we, we don't have, we're 120 engineers here. We have zero program managers. Zero. And we have a certain philosophy around like what to do and how to build hardware and

• 26:45Speaker 01

  software that, oh, I think we're kind of the anti-Silicon Valley company in Silicon Valley as it relates to this. We really care about getting things brought up quicker and iterating faster and doing that over a very long period of time, like decades. And building a company that can do that is extremely hard. Like, there's really no good precedent, maybe outside of like Tesla and SpaceX, that have done this well at scale. Like Tesla has, you know, well over 100,000 people, like arguably tens of thousands of, you know, product design engineers, and they're moving at a speeds of a small startup. And generally, when you're adding headcount, the companies are all slowing

• 27:26Speaker 01

  down. It's almost every company slowing down with more headcount. You're just getting slower over time. You don't notice it, you don't care. The board is art is like giving you indication that you should slow down and be safer. And everything is just slowing to a halt and the limit. So you have to basically fight this. And you have to, like, the best way you can fight it is like, design the whole world from the ground up to to do this, or do what Elon did with Twitter and walk in and fire 80% of people and restructure it at the start, at that point in time to to go faster and ship product. And it's too laborious here to say, like, okay, we move fast, like one thing. It's like, it's the whole company was built just to move fast.

• 28:09Sam Parr?

  But what are you asking your recruits, your potential app or your applicant, your job applicants, to figure out if they do have that ability?

• 28:16Speaker 01

  There's a lot of things happening here. A lot of times, people haven't been in that environment. So when they get in there, when they're moving it fast and a much quicker paced environment, it just becomes overwhelming and just too hard and too stressful to handle. So if you were like a PhD student for 10 years, wearing, you know, sweatpants and like moving slow, and you come in here, it's like a real culture shock coming to figure. And we've had it happen several times where they're like, people are just like, you know, they're coming in late, they're moving slow, and just like, it's frustrating for them, having to move much faster. And it's like, probably a lot of anxiety there. There are other folks that believe the longer that you take to build something, the safer it is, and the better job you'll do at it. So if you give me,

• 28:57Speaker 01

  you know, two years to design a robot, it will be, that robot will be safer at the end of the two years, and better design. Like, folks feel like that.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  It's for sure wrong. People think that the longer you spend designing something, the safer it'll be and the better it'll be. It's for sure wrong because in that two-year period of time, without one robot got out, I'm gonna have my third gen robot out. And I'll have, I'll have run it like an order of magnitude longer. I will have found all the problems 10 times sooner. I will have had times to go fix it recursively and make it better. It'll, it'll just be a worse product.

• 29:30Sam Parr?

  How do you measure and how, how do other people measure if someone's fast enough?

• 29:35Speaker 01

  You look at how many iterations somebody is doing and how much progress they made between those iteration cycles.

• 29:41Sam Parr?

  And what is, what are your, what are your expectations?

• 29:44Speaker 01

  A car could be like how many car versions you've gotten out over the last decade and how much progress you've made between those. A rocket could be similar viewed. A robot could be how many robot iterations are we doing? What version of robot are we on? iPhone could be, you know, what, how many versions of iPhone have you got now last 15 years? How much progress have you made between each one of those? That will ultimately set the slope of the curve for speed. That, that will ultimately be correlated at a high level to how much risk there is of failure in the business long-term.

• 30:15Sam Parr?

  As we wrap up here, I wanna, I wanna ask something that I've been thinking about with you a lot. So you've mentioned

• 30:22Sam Parr?

  some type of genetically engineered food. You've mentioned planes. You've mentioned figure, humanoids, these machines that detect guns. You have like a pretty wide range of knowledge, but unlike a lot of people who have a wide range of knowledge, you, I've been to your home. I've seen like textbooks at your house on a variety of topics and, and you have a really unique way of learning. You're, you're basically like a human AI. Do you have a framework for learning new things?

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Learning stuff is always like really challenging for me. I think like I have to first, I think everything like a tree. I have to first build this like trunk of like first order understanding about the topic before I can ever comprehend and remember the limbs and the leaves.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  And so I have to have like a really fundamentally sound understanding of the tree trunk as I look at certain topics.

• 31:17Sam Parr?

  Where do you turn to for that?

• 31:19Speaker 01

  You just gotta like, you know, find this stuff, whether it's Wikipedia, papers, uh, like Google searches, uh, you can use GPT-4. Like, can you clearly communicate this topic, whether it's an engineering topic or not, to a 12-year-old sitting on a bar stool? And most people can't do that. It's like the skill that most people can't do. Like even people I work with, I have a hard time sometimes understanding what's the update on the, on the, on the, you know, this, this thing or that thing. And it's a skill, like you have to learn how to do that. Same way of like understanding something is a skill to really boil things down and really truly understand the basic characterization of what's really happening.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Some of the smartest people I know are also the most clear worded folks about, uh, about a topic.

• 32:10Sam Parr?

  That's a really good insight and it probably comes because you're an outsider that got into this stuff when you're older.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Uh, maybe, or there's so many different multidisciplinary areas of like software and hardware and like electromagnetics and everything else that needs to be done here that you really need to be able to communicate clearly across several groups. And it's important even here, like we try not to use acronyms and a software purpose person that writes firmware and electromagnetics person that builds like a rotor stator for electric motor. Like those, those folks don't understand those other disciplines generally. So they need to communicate with each other as well and they can't be using inside baseball terms or electromagnetic work. Um, when like a firmware engineer hasn't spent any time on like, you know, stator and rotor design for electric rotors. So like, I think this topic of being able to like communicate really well and understand things really well is just like super important.

• 32:59Sam Parr?

  You have like a pretty strong outlook on life. It seems like you, you, you have, uh, strong beliefs on, um, what you want the outcome of your life to be, how you want to spend your time. Which, uh, people who have you've read about?

• 33:14Sam Parr?

  Has had the biggest influence on that philosophy or influenced you the most?

• 33:20Speaker 01

  I think there's like, there's been like really great entrepreneurs over time to show a path that this all can be done. Like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, these guys are the best at what they do, have been able to show the world. Like really incredible things can be done on the back of like persistence and focus. And I think it's just like really incredible. Like every time I watch like a SpaceX launch or hold an Apple product in my hands. I mean, you know, every company in the world has started out as a startup at some point. So I think it's just, um, I don't know. I think it's very energizing to think that, you know, somebody with with enough willpower can actually go out and do really incredible things for the world. And I think that gives me energy every day. I wake up and says,

• 34:03Speaker 01

  you know, eager to have here a figure. We have like, we haven't done really anything noteworthy to date. Over two years, it's been interesting. We have robots and stuff, but people have built robots. We need to go out now and like prove that we can actually ship a really high quality product, which is going to take us, you know, several more years from here, but like, that's just like a really exciting challenge for us now. And it's really hard and everybody that's attempted that, at least in humanoid robotics commercially has failed in history. So, but that should be doable. And there are people that have gone over this hump in other industries of other very difficult things. Maybe less difficult or more difficult here in history. And that's just, that should be very energizing for for us here at Figure and other entrepreneurs out there trying to do hard things.

• 34:46Sam Parr?

  You're the man. I have this joke. I'm like, uh, cornrows are cool, but not for me. And, uh, that's kind of how I feel about, uh, the way you think where I'm like, I don't know if I can do what you do, but I am really excited and happy that people like you exist. Uh, so thank you for doing everything you're doing. Uh, I feel great after talking to you.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Thanks for having me on.

• 35:09Sam Parr?

  All right. That's the pot.