This $3B Founder Is The Next Elon Musk

Episode 499: Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) talks to Brett Adcock (https://twitter.com/adcock_brett) about how he nearly went bankrupt after his +$100m exit from Vettery (now Hired). How? Betting everything on the next big idea. And he’s doing it again today with Figure.ai, a robotics company bringing a general purpose humanoid to life. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to our YouTube channel here. Want MFM Merch? Check out our store here. Want to see the best clips from MFM? Subscribe to our clips channel here. — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (2:00) How Brett self-funded Archer Aviation (13:00) Nearly going personally bankrupt (19:00) Street of Walls and being a self-taught finance expert (24:00) How to choose the right idea to work on (28:00) Why Future could be the biggest business in the world (32:00) Addressing objections to a robot workforce (35:00) Why hardware is actually easier than software (40:00) How big is Figure going to be in 5 years? — Links: • Brett Adcock’s website - https://www.brettadcock.com/ • Figure (AI Robotics) - https://www.figure.ai/ • Archer Aviation - https://www.archer.com/ • Vettery (now Hired) - https://hired.com/ • Ikagai - https://tinyurl.com/3x9mytpb • Street of Walls - https://www.streetofwalls.com/ • The Fast Track: https://tinyurl.com/yeyz7j7p Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  You're like the whole milk version of an Elon Musk. You know what I mean? You're the Midwest version of an Elon Musk. But what the hell did you know about building a fucking airplane? You know what I mean? What did you? Did you know anything about that?

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:28Sam Parr?

  All right, everyone. We have a really interesting guest. His name is Brett Adcock. I've talked about him on the pod a bunch of times. But let me explain why this guy's interesting. So he started a recruiting website that he sold for $100 million, which in most everyone's case, that's a massive home run. You're incredibly successful, which he is. But then he parlayed that and invested pretty much 100% of his money into another company called Archer, which basically makes unmanned helicopters. And then that went public at like a $1.5 billion valuation. And he started another company called Figure, which is making humanoid. They're basically robots that can work warehouses and do human labor.

• 1:11Sam Parr?

  The reason I wanted Brett to come on is because I just wanted to think and learn about how someone who's so unique, how they think and how they make decisions. And so Brett's really subtle. He's a low key guy. He's not crazy, high energy. He's not one of these guys who we have on, who is a personality where they have a big personality on YouTube or Twitter or anything like that. He's subtle, man. The guy's humble and he's quiet. And I find that to be incredibly fascinating. My opinion, in 10 years, Brett is going to be in the running of however we think of like these, like Howard Hughes, Elon Musk types of crazy folks who build these amazing world changing things. Brett's going to be that. I mean, he's already up there, but I think he's going to be like that.

• 1:53Sam Parr?

  And no one knows who he is now, or at least compared to some of those other folks. So what I want you to do is listen to this episode, particularly like the last 15 minutes when we talk about his latest company. It's really fascinating. And I want you to tweet at me. My handle's the sam par, P A R R. So the, the word the, and then Sam, and then par. Tweet at me and let me know what you think about this guy and what makes people like him special. Because I'm really fascinated with these types of personalities and I'm fascinated with how people can learn so much information so quickly. It's just really fascinating to me. So let me know. Give it a listen. His name's Brett Adcock. Let's start the show. All right, dude, let's just get right into it. The reason you're interesting to me is because you're incredibly successful.

• 2:37Sam Parr?

  I imagine you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But you, you go all in on stuff. So you told me with this new company figure, you financed it for the first year and you put up most all of your money into it. I was like, I was like, what, what, what's your asset allocation for your personal portfolio? And you're like, well, I own Archer stock, which I took public. I own a house and then I put some huge amount of money, which if you want, you could say into the, my company figure and I'm going all in on them. And I, and I just go hard. I go all in. Is that right?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, this has really been out of necessity. My career, when I started Bettery, I couldn't get anybody to invest in the business for the first, like, almost like three years. So I basically put all my savings into the company, took no salary for three or four years.

• 3:29Sam Parr?

  How much savings did you have? You're 25.

• 3:32Speaker 01

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

• 4:06Sam Parr?

  Well, what did Bettery exit for?

• 4:08Speaker 01

  110 million.

• 4:09Sam Parr?

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

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was great. I raised like a little over $10 million over like seven years. So had a large, you know, percentage ownership of the company. So, but yeah, overnight success from going from, you know, seven years of agony and debt to like having capital for the first time in a significant way.

• 4:32Sam Parr?

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

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  When I so I started Archer in 2018, so called Archer Aviation and we build electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. So these are basically aircraft somewhat similar to a helicopter, but they're purely electric and they're they're the goal is to use the aircraft to move people around cities. So the traffic's just like such a terrible phenomenon. Nobody's really worked on traffic for 100 years. So we were basically out there. I was out there trying to solve the traffic problem and kind of help help the sustainability. The pitch coming out of Vettery was just it was bad. Like it was, hey, we need basically probably about a billion dollars, maybe more to get the market or we or we don't make it. We're designing this new type

• 5:28Speaker 01

  of transportation system in the air. So instead of driving to the airport, you would fly and it needs to be fully electric that nobody in history had had ever certified an electric aircraft before. And I was coming off of software, you know, 10 years, 15 years in software. So that pitch did not really resonate too well in 2018.

• 5:50Sam Parr?

  You're like, we made a joke in the last pod where I'm like, if you drink a glass of milk with dinner, you're my type of guy. Like people were making fun of me for being from Midwest. You're like, you're like the whole milk version of an Elon Musk. You know what I mean? You're the Midwest version of the of an Elon Musk. But what the hell did you know about? I mean, software is easy in a sense. Like, you know, like, it's just code, right? Like, no one's gonna die if you if you screw it up, or in most cases, no one's gonna die. And if I talk to a guy who's doing like computer engineering or computer science, I'm like, what the hell do you know about building a fucking airplane? You know what I mean? What did you? Did you know anything about that?

• 6:29Speaker 01

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

• 6:36Sam Parr?

  That doesn't make sense to me. Yeah. What do you do? That doesn't make sense to me. Like, if I wanted to go learn about how an airplane is built, I guess I would like, or a unmanned drone, I don't know what you want to call it. I would go, I guess I would, well, first of all, you have to have a high IQ to begin with, which I don't. But I would like, what I what would I do? I guess I would call people who know what they're talking about and ask them, what books do you read? And then I would go and read the books and take lessons. Maybe I would go to like a college, a few college courses. I don't like, it just seems like an impossible thing to learn. And you learned it in how many years?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so here's what I did. I

• 7:12Speaker 01

  One is I spent a tremendous amount of time after Vettery figuring out what I wanted to work on next. I kind of fell into the recruiting marketplace space with Vettery. And I really wanted to be very thoughtful about what I wanted to work on. So I basically spent a large amount of time figuring out, okay, what is the right opportunity I want to spend my time on? And it was Archer. It was very clear to me, I wanted to do Archer Aviation and build it. So the first thing I did is I basically built a spreadsheet and I called everybody in the, I could, I could think of in the world. So I think I made, I think that spreadsheet is about 300 people I connected with. Whether they're at NASA or professors or working in industry at rotorcraft or airplanes or turbofan development, whatever it would look like.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  And I just immersed myself and I wanted to know every technical book that was on the market. I wanted to understand how to build electric aircraft, like what are the components? And what are, what are the physics governed by in the space? And I probably spent almost six months in a room just making phone calls, like cold calling everybody in the world.

• 8:10Sam Parr?

  What's that call look like? Hey, Mr. Conway, my name's Brett.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:15Sam Parr?

  Can you talk to me about helicopters?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  It's, it's crazy, man. Like people, people will pick up the phone for you. Like it's just like, you just gotta pick up the phone and call and people will talk to you. People wanna, people wanna help.

• 8:28Sam Parr?

  What was the most breathtaking call you had or meaningful call you had?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  I did, I did a meeting. So I, in addition to calling everybody in the world, the parallel track was I was going back to school. So I went back and like learned how to do like mechanical and aerospace engineering. And, you know, leading up to that, I went to an event in 2018. I think it was 2018, like early 2018 at this point. It was at this Hyatt, like, like basically Hyatt Hotel in Atlanta was hosting this like electric aircraft design course. So there was a lot of aerodynamics folks and folks in the industry that really wanted to understand the physics around electric aircraft.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  I went down there and I basically sat for two days being lectured on how to build an aircraft, electric aircraft from scratch. How to think about the propulsion, aerodynamics, batteries. And it was, it was just like all my heroes today in electric aviation. And one of the guys there was in his PhD at the University of Florida and said, Like me too. I'm doing my PhD in electric aviation and I want to build an EVTOL aircraft. And I go to the University of Florida and I said, wow, I went to undergrad at University of Florida as well. He's like, you need to come by ASAP and see our lab. I'm trying to build electric aircraft and you know, smaller scale. And we could help you. So I did this course. I got on a plane. I went down to Gainesville.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  And I met the head of the group there. And he's basically the head of all mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Florida. And he had this like basically 12 person lab building these like hobby grade like electric aircraft drones. And I said, I want to take this lab over and I want to just build electric aircraft. And this lab happened to be off of Archer Road. So I called the business Archer Aviation.

• 10:20Sam Parr?

  What percentage of the vettery windfall did you put into this education portion as well as starting Archer?

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Oh, like all of it. Yeah, all of it.

• 10:30Sam Parr?

  But what does that actually mean? Like, how are you living?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Well, I was living off the cash. So I had just from vettery, just like paying my bills. I took no salary at Archer for two years. I don't know, something like that. Like this is zero.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Like cover insurance type thing. And, um, you know, I made like, I went from like having nothing to like having tens of millions of dollars after tax. So it was, you know, it was a lot of money. I just didn't need, I didn't need almost any of it. So I wanted to work on this new thing and nobody would like, I couldn't even get meetings.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  At one point, I got introduced to the guy that runs like General Catalyst, Joel. And, um, he called my pitch disrespectful.

• 11:17Sam Parr?

  What did he say?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  He was like, it was like mid, it was like right when COVID hit and I got a big introduction from him, uh, from like one of my investors, Mark Laurie, introduced me to Joel. He's like, this is the best guy. You got, you got to talk to him. And I got a call at Joel and he's just like, I got to stop you right here, man. This is the most disrespectful pitch I've ever seen. We have people dying because of COVID. It's like the hospitals are filled up. And you're asking me for money? Like for like, for this like flying car idea? Like, what are you talking about? It's just not possible. Like, why would you be doing this? And I said, like, I'm running out of money personally, like, I need somebody to fund this. Or we're also like, no, I know, I know COVID's bad, but the business is going to die.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  And this is what you do. You fund companies like this is why I'm calling you like this is um. And yeah, I was I would say probably going to stay the worst phone call I've ever taken.

• 12:10Sam Parr?

  So I sold my company three years ago and I had the same thing where I like I didn't I was. I was just barely getting by and then overnight things changed. And I was like, I'm going to spend six or 12 months just like seeking, planning, I'm going to figure out what. Because I don't I don't know if you took time off, but I took like three months of like kind of normal. 20 or 40 hour work weeks and low stress. And I was like, all right, cool. That's what I needed. I felt recharged. I need to get back to it. Except when I went back to it, I was like. Have you heard of Ikki guy? It's like this like phrase. It's like this Japanese like. A concept where there's like four rings that overlap and one of the rings is like, uh, what does the world want to pay for?

• 12:54Sam Parr?

  The other ring is what does the world want? The other one is what do I enjoy doing? And then what am I great at? And like ideally, you find something right in the middle. Because if you find something that you're great at, that you have skills at, but the world doesn't want to pay for it. That's just like an expensive hobby. If you find something the world wants and they're willing to pay for and you're good at, but you hate it. That's just like a crappy job. It's like you want to find something right in the middle. So I was like, what am I skilled at? And basically, I I thought of it like. I'm just gonna use my skills and what do I enjoy? And I'm just gonna try and do something slightly better. And I think that's the pretty rational way to go about doing things like most people are, uh, they're like, I don't want to do too hard, too outside of my realm.

• 13:38Sam Parr?

  What interests me about you is like, you're kind of an alien, like you like, we're like, all right, this software thing, this battery thing. It worked. I don't know if it worked as good or as as you wanted it to or not. I don't know the full story, but. You just like took a total 180 and you're like, screw the 15 years of internet experience that I'm doing. I'm going to do aviation hardware. I'm going to do a totally different thing.

• 14:03Sam Parr?

  What do you think is is unique about you that makes it so you don't actually want to like go the easy route? Because I know at Vettery, I think you like built, did you build like the email marketing software? Like, that's pretty like, it's a very narrow niche, and you did something not even within it, within that niche, not even related to it, and you took the totally different route. What do you think is inside of you that makes you do that? Because I find that fascinating.

• 14:27Speaker 01

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

• 14:34Sam Parr?

  Are you motivated by money?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Not really, no. I think if I wanted to make a lot of money, I'm probably in the wrong field. You know, I think like the, like, there's like a risk reward balance in startups. Like, I think if, if it was just about money, I think I'd be basically probably back in software still. I think going and doing these projects I'm working on now are just probably the, probably the surest path to losing everything.

• 15:00Sam Parr?

  When you're starting Figure, like, you know, you read about Elon Musk, and he's like, well, I put everything in. And he's like, I was sleeping on couches. And it's like, well, the couch was like Sergey Brin, you know, it was like, his couch, which probably isn't like a normal couch, you know, it's probably the couch in the living room of the guest house. And you just don't want to go use the king size bed. But like, when you're starting Figure, are you ever worried about running out of money and losing everything that you've earned?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  I basically almost went personally bankrupt last year, Figure.

• 15:34Sam Parr?

  What, yeah, tell me that.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. So when I left Archer, I had basically, you know, all my asset, all my money tied up into Archer. Like, just had like-

• 15:44Sam Parr?

  And you can't sell that as an officer, right?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:47Sam Parr?

  Or as like insider?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were like, you know, I made it pretty clear when I started the business, and even when I went public, that like, me as the, like, I as a founder and CEO, I'm not selling stock. We're pre-revenue. I told the board this, I told all of our investors this. I even put a million dollars in the SPAC pipe, as we went public at 10 bucks. And so personally, I was like, I'll put another million dollars in here at $3 billion valuation to show you guys. That's all I got. And, um, and when I left Archer in April of 2022, I had 12 month stock lockup. This is public, like there's an SEC document for this. And so I couldn't,

• 16:30Speaker 01

  I couldn't, I couldn't sell, a majority of all my stock was fully locked up until April of this year. So I had some percentage I could sell over, over some time series, I could sell a certain amount of stock, limited by certain volumes of the market cap. So that there wasn't just that much volumes a year ago. So I was selling some stock to fund a figure. And the stock went from like, when I left, the stock was at five or six bucks. It wasn't like a dollar eighty, end of last year, earlier this year. And I was just like, I don't know if I can get to, I don't know if I can get to 12 month mark, which was that 12 month mark was April of 2023. That's like April, you know, April

• 17:11Speaker 01

  18th, 2023, promised land. Like I can sell unlimited stock, no volume restriction, all stock lockup, which, which I'm, you know, I have a bunch of stocks though here, I'm not selling right now. But like, um, but that was the point where I needed to get to. And I thought, you know, I was underwriting and seeing that stocks at three, four, five, six, seven dollars, like, no problem. I'll be able to get there. And we were building a team, teams out like, was that, you know, 40 or something like that. We're building, we're spending like millions on hardware.

• 17:41Sam Parr?

  Bigger was that 40?

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were like, we were within six months, we were at a seven figure a month burn, I figure. And I was just like, it was like, sell stock, transfer to bank account, transfer it into the company, pay payroll. It was like, how fast can we get that done? And it was like a full system of like, trying to get the, like not hitting the limits every day on stock selling, getting the cash into the bank account and putting money into figure. And, um, and I wasn't, you know, this was like, there was a recession we were in, the banks were going bankrupt. It wasn't like it was a pretty market for series A or capital raising. It was the worst market since we've been in since the financial crisis.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  From a, from a fundraising perspective, I had a stock, like a stock's going down like 75%. And I was just like, I'm running out of cash.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  So I'm in my same, I'm in my Hampton group. And I'm like, everybody's like, what's your, you know, more some most important thing you're doing right now? It's you know, talk about, I'm like, I'm running out of money. I'm like, might not make it.

• 18:47Sam Parr?

  What did they say? What was their feedback?

• 18:49Speaker 01

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

• 18:53Sam Parr?

  I think everyone thinks you're a maniac. I mean, like, I've talked to a lot of people who know you. That's what fascinates me about you. But what fascinates me about you is that your hand, you handle stress differently. Like I, I've toured your factory and you were like smiling and like jumping around like you, uh, like it seemed like you were like jolly almost. I don't know. You're showing me this shit. I remember going to your factory or your office and you were like, check this out. We got the knee working and like you see like a knee or ankle. I don't know what it was. Like you see some, something of the robot in your, and there was like 18 or 10 people just sitting around. And it felt like I was hanging out with like buddies in a garage, like just watching you guys finally figure out how to work like a remote control car or something like ridiculous.

• 19:37Sam Parr?

  And it seemed exciting though. Like I remember being there and I met like, I have to be part of this. And it was exciting, but I didn't, I, I know that you go all in on things. I didn't realize how close you were to running out of money. Like, I don't understand how you deal with that. Like, what's your wife saying when you're like, hey, we might file for bankruptcy personally in the next couple of months?

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's even worse. Like we, I had a, I had a second mortgage on my house to go through it.

• 20:02Sam Parr?

  No way. What did she say?

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I also in the category of like, you know, people thinking I'm a maniac. My, my, my wife's just, she's been with me for 15 years now. Through all of this, like we lived in, you know, thousand dollar a month apartment in New York. We had to downsize to, to get through the vettery stuff.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  To, to, you know, to, to now Archer and figure, um, she's great. Like she's, she's a warrior. She like believes in me and she has total faith in what we're doing. And I don't take these things lightly. Like I really, these are like planned exercises I need to go through.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  And I've been been through many near death experiences. I mean, Archer, like, like what I went through at Figure was probably like a tip of the iceberg to what I went through at Archer. Last like five years, like Archer was just a, you know, going public was just like a recipe to get sued. And we were going public to the SPAC process. We, you know, as soon as we priced the SPAC deal, the market turned on SPACs. It was, it was just a roller coaster. So, you know, I just have been through many exercises like this before, and I think I can weather them pretty well now.

• 21:13Sam Parr?

  I don't know anything about like business finances. I remember when we started our company, I didn't know the difference between cash flow and revenue, which was like a pretty big deal. You need to know that. I didn't know what that was until like three years into the company. And I was like, I thought cash flow and revenue were the same thing. I don't understand how to read a balance sheet. I don't know how to do any of that. So I'm, I'm taking classes right now to like figure that out. And I was Googling stuff and I found this website. It's called streetofwalls.com. So I went to Street of Walls and there's these amazing articles where you click start training. And there's like, it looks like a book. So if you're on your computer, go to streetofwalls.com. So there's like introduction. There's like, what does an investment bank do? There's like, how do you do a discounted cash flow analysis?

• 21:58Sam Parr?

  There's all this stuff and I scrolled to the bottom and I always click the about page. And there's a link that says, file this site and author on Twitter. And I clicked the Twitter and it was you. You wrote, you made this website. And I was like texting, this was pretty funny. I was texting you ahead of time. I go, hey, I know you took a company public. I don't know anything about finances. How did you learn how to do it? And you're like, oh, I actually taught myself how to do it. And then I did most of the preparation work for the IPO. And I was like, that's amazing. And you didn't even tell me you had this site where it was like a whole site of your learning and education. What was the site? What is streetofwalls.com?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I, so when I, when I went to college, I enrolled in like industrial and system engineering, also finance. This is like, you know, not something I also talk about a lot, but like, I basically did a few years in finance after school before like doing the startup life.

• 22:52Sam Parr?

  Why don't you talk about that? Was that embarrassing?

• 22:54Speaker 01

  It just doesn't, the pitch doesn't, isn't great. Like, I think like people just don't like hearing about finance folks. And I also didn't really enjoy it. Like, I think.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  You know, I look at those years and say, man, I wish I was like spending more time doing technology development and I was working full time but building startups and stuff on the side. And I just look at that saying like, I think it was helpful in some ways, but like, probably net net like would have been more important just for me to dive in and start building businesses full time.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  So I was at, you know, in school, somebody gave me this book. It's called like the fast track to like investment banking, management consulting and trading. And I read it and it was like, you know, people are going to finance like drive Ferraris. They just like do so well and they make a hundred and fifty thousand after school. And I was like, I was dead broke in college, like taking out loans to pay for school. And I was like, man, I'm gonna go, this is how I'm gonna, you know, make some money, start my career. And I went into an interview with Goldman Sachs and I just, I just whiffed. Like they asked me like some accretion dilution, you know, like M and A modeling and LBO questions or leveraged buyout questions. And I just, I didn't know anything and they're like, you know, I think the guy was nice.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  He was like, listen, you just, you have to have a certain like bar of understanding of finance, finances.

• 24:16Sam Parr?

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

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is like.

• 24:19Sam Parr?

  It's the second time you're disrespecting people constantly.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And he's like, you're like wasting my time. And I was like, man, like, I'm not really learning how to do this stuff in college. So I'm just gonna have to go learn it. And you know, I was learning that I just started like writing notes and writing about it. And when my brother actually went to finance, my brother works at a private equity company now. I was like, I'm just gonna repackage all these notes. I'm gonna put them online and also give them to my brother. And like, what, when I'm, where am I going to use them again? And that was the genesis for Street of Walls. We've, I think I've gotten like thirty million views of that site for the last like, you know, fifteen years, which has been, which has been great.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Like a lot of folks have been like, this has been my primary reason I've gotten a job. And but, you know, as you can see, I've, I've haven't spent a nickel on it in over a decade.

• 25:15Sam Parr?

  Do you, how did it get traffic? I mean, according to SimilarWeb, it's still getting a hundred thousand or so people a month coming to it.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  It's all organic SEO.

• 25:23Sam Parr?

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

• 25:31Speaker 01

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

• 25:39Sam Parr?

  You wrote all these?

• 25:40Speaker 01

  I wrote all those articles, yeah.

• 25:41Sam Parr?

  Were you going to turn this into a business?

• 25:44Speaker 01

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

• 25:55Sam Parr?

  All right, well, when you're in that position, what's stopping you from going full time on that? Because if I'm broke and I'm 24 and I'm making five grand a month, I'm like, this is the thing.

• 26:03Speaker 01

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

• 26:33Sam Parr?

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

• 26:44Speaker 01

  One of the things we did is, um, you know, so, so I started the Vettery at the NYU Incubator. And one of the guys there handed me a book one day and it's like, it was, it was the book, it was the Predictable Revenue book, which is basically like an outbound lead generation marketing playbook. He said, hey, you need to read this, it'd probably be pretty helpful for Vettery.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  And those guys, it was actually TapCommerce, those guys sold for like over a hundred million to Twitter. So it was Brian, the founder there. And I ended up reading the book, it's like, this is great, we need to like replicate this system fully end to end. So I started like working on, um, writing this outbound lead generation, uh, process. And we ultimately gave it to, um, basically a person that's here with me today. So Lee Randazzo gave it to her and said, hey, can you, you go, go figure out how to build this? So she brought on an engineer and we basically built this outbound lead generation software system that basically ended up powering all of Vettery. So that was basically like, how do we put contact information of people and basically do this cadence of emails

• 27:52Speaker 01

  out to folks to do, like, basically drum up leads? And you can do this for both, like, customers.

• 27:57Sam Parr?

  Where'd you get the emails?

• 27:58Speaker 01

  We had an, we built an offshore team of like 300 people in the Philippines. And we did it all by scratch.

• 28:03Sam Parr?

  What does that mean, going to LinkedIn or something and just?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  You can, basically finding the right people based on job titles. And then there's a process where you can use to find emails pretty well, like there's, you know, there's a lot on GitHub, there's a lot of, you can get the emails through Facebook pretty easily. There's basically a process where you can basically back into somebody's personal email address. There's also like databases you can use, a lot of folks use. So we would get emails, plug them into this machine and go. And we basically built this like huge engine that would power like millions of emails we were doing per month. And then I think it was like in early 2013, 2014, there was like this startup emerging, which is Outreach. And we demoed it, we're like, this is the same exact thing we just built internally. You know, Outreach now is like a four or five billion dollar company.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  And we're like watching Outreach scale up. We have a product that is literally built internally ourselves that we're just using ourselves. At the time, we thought it was a little bit better, so we didn't use Outreach. That was more customized for what we're doing and everything else. But it was really funny to see us, you know, me go out and build like a hundred million dollar company when internally we had a four billion dollar company sitting internally. So there was, there was a few of those that happened through the life of Vettery that were, it was just interesting to see. And I think that goes back to my same theme, which is like, be very thoughtful. Like, so my, my time now is haunted by, am I working on the right things?

• 29:29Sam Parr?

  Do you think that was the wrong thing?

• 29:31Speaker 01

  I, I think Vettery was the right thing for me at the right time, but it was definitely not the right thing to do. It was definitely the right call to get into Archer Next and The Figure. And I use it as a learning lesson to say, what happened with Vettery is I fell into it. I fell into it from Street of Walls, I fell into it because I built up this huge database of traffic from like, from, from content. And then I used that to help build and bootstrap the marketplace with Vettery. It wasn't as if I like, I was in college when I kind of the stuff started and said, I want to go do recruiting. This is where I'm going to spend the rest of my life in. It just, I just fell into it and happened to work out really well. And I think I wouldn't have been able to start Archer if it wasn't for the battery acquisition.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  So, you know, I think, I think looking back, it was something I would have done again, but I use that less, I use that as a lesson to say, I do have a choice on what to spend my time on and everybody does. And it's the most precious asset you have because we don't have that much time left.

• 30:32Sam Parr?

  What was the math that you saw or like the graph or whatever? That made you want to start figure like what was there a signal where you're like, oh man, this can be the biggest company in the world. Cause I think you sold it to me. You go, we will either go to screw up and go bankrupt or we'll have a very small exit or it's going to be a hundred billion dollar company. Or you said something like that where it was like, this is either going to be the biggest thing ever or total failure. But what did you see that gave you the idea that this could be the biggest thing?

• 31:02Speaker 01

  So, so what we're doing here figure is we're building humanoid robots. These are robots. When we say humanoid, I mean it, it looks like the human form. So it has legs, arms, hands. We're not trying to look like a human, but we're trying to do everything a human can do. And when you look at the world today, if you like, go out in the world and look at everything you're doing, it requires a human interface in the physical world. So the equivalent to, I always make an analogy is when you use the internet, using a keyboard and mouse and you can interact with all of the internet. You can use a keyboard and your little, your fingers are like your little, little keyboard and mice. You can basically interact with all the digital world. The physical world, the last several hundred years, we built to interact with the human body. So we have like door handles, we have tools, we have stairs.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Everything around us was built for a human interface. And so when you look at what we're doing here is we're trying to build an automation solution to do physical labor. How do we get into the world and do human like tasks? And when you look at the market for human, human like tasks, it's half of GDP. So like, you know, GDP is roughly 70, 80 trillion. Half of that is, goes to human labor to pay wages every single year in the world. And it's roughly half or so for, you know, for, if you go to any company or any country in the world, it's roughly half of GDP. And what we've seen now is we've seen this like, we've seen like these emergent properties happen

• 32:28Speaker 01

  in, in, in the kind of the space we operate here that are allowing us to build and do this this decade. We have hardware from like, um, that is, that is capable of being built to do human-like tasks. And then from a software perspective, separately, we have software today and we have AI systems today that can basically understand like semantically what's going on in the world and do human-like uh, applications from a software perspective. So here at Figure, what's, so, so at a, at a high level, the biggest company the next 10, 15 years in the world will be human, like AI-powered humanoids. That like, that's for sure gonna happen. The question is like, what groups are gonna do that?

• 33:13Sam Parr?

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

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can do either. I mean, this, there's a, there's definitely a similar capex model that is very similar to how we like buy, buy cars today where you would wanna, you know, buy the asset. It would have a certain amount of depreciable life. Um, you'd have to like pay for servicing the maintenance. And then there's another model, which is like operating model, which is, we're calling like robots as a service, which is a leasing model. So you'd basically be able to put robots into, say, you know, Warehousing or manufacturing related applications and you would charge basically a monthly fee for that work. And that would be a kind of a lower price per year that you would pay, but ongoing. And so we, you know, here at Digger, we're pushing the robot as a service operating model.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  We think it's the way to get costs down and make it affordable to the masses. And but some of the initial conversations we're having with clients too is that they're, you know, interested in buying them because they've been buying robots for, you know, a decade. So I think we're open to kind of getting out of the world. What we're seeing here is we're seeing the ability to get these robots over time with a high enough volumes cheaper than like a mid-price car. And then if that robot can last four or five years before it's fully depreciated, the cost should be pretty affordable for the, even for the home. We should be able to put robots in the home for, you know, several hundred dollars per month.

• 34:59Sam Parr?

  I was talking to my family members and they're like, who are you talking to tomorrow? I was like, man, it's the guy Brett. He builds a humanoid. It's like, and they're like, what the hell, you know, what the fuck is that? I'm like, well, it's like, you know how like Amazon workers do this stuff? It's gonna do that. And then like inevitably the answer is like, oh, so he's gonna put everyone out of work. All right, that's cool. What's your rebuttal to that? Like, how do you think about that? Like, you know, you seem very like altruistic and you're like, you're like, I want to save the world. So what are these people? What are they gonna do? And when are they gonna lose their jobs?

• 35:28Speaker 01

  So what we're seeing from like a labor perspective is that the, the amount of people in the workforce is starting to shrink. So we have like roughly 3.3 billion humans working in, in the world. A big chunk of that is the baby boomers and they're retiring out of the market. And then from, you know, from the other side, we're basically having roughly a little over one child per household at this point. We're, we're well under the replacement rate for humans, which needs to be like, like about 2.2. Births per household. So we're like, we're not putting more into the bottom, uh, the top of the funnel. We're not putting any more in and the bottom funnel, they're retiring out. So we're basically shrinking the labor force.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  So when we walk into, um, I think the conventional wisdom is what you say. It's like you walk into one of these like big, big companies and they're like, we're worried about you taking our people's jobs. Like, how are we going to message this? Like, what are they going to do? That is complete 180 from what we see with boots in the ground. If you, if you actually do the work of walking into a company, that's big. And you ask them their number one problem, they'll say employee headcount and, and, and retention. So we walk into these warehouses, manufacturing, retail, whatever. And we walk in and they're telling us that 15% of employees don't show up every day to work. They're saying they have two to 3% weekly attrition, 50 to 150% annual turnover.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  The working conditions are harsh. It's really hot in the summers. It's cold in the winters. You have to walk miles per day. You have to pick like a lot of items per hour. It's a lot easier to drive an Uber in this condition than be in these facilities. So when we walk in these clients, they, they have a labor crisis going on. And they need help ASAP and they can't figure out how to automate these more dexterous and human-like tasks. And so, um, you know, our goal is to go in there and do like the dirty and hard work that they can't find humans to do today. And we think there's just prob, I, I've never seen a business like this where we walk in and they're like, we'll buy a million of them if you could do this.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  And so the, the demand is like, I think almost unbounded. I don't even know how to handicap it. It's if you can build the technology, we need millions.

• 37:44Sam Parr?

  When we were hanging out, I was like, why don't you do a software company? And you're like, software is harder. And I was like, what? Why? He goes, well, because I had to make people like want vettery. Like I had to convince them that this was a good idea. And then like I had infinite options on what to build and I had to hope that I was building the right thing. And then he said, With hardware, I can find problems where there's already demand. I know if I'm able to build this, people will want it. And I know that there's a set of laws dictated by physics of which create the rules. And I just have to figure out within that very small set of rules, can I build this? And as of now, you're like, I think I can, but I haven't entirely figured it out. But it's a much simpler puzzle to figure out in order to like build this thing.

• 38:28Sam Parr?

  And if I build it, the business is going to be the biggest thing ever because I know people want that. And I remember like when you said that it changed my perspective on a lot of things. Did I say that right?

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. Like in software, you have a lot of these things that are these emergent properties that happen in like, say, the marketplace or SaaS characteristics that make it really hard to control. You have retention and you have competitive threats and you have like feature build. There's a lot of things you need to do to kind of keep the wheels in the car and keep it running. And in hardware, if there is demand for the product, it really puts the focus on the technology development. So at Archer, we already know people are driving to the airport. There's like in LA, there's 60 million people driving around every day and 6 million of them are taking over an hour going like 10, 15 miles.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  So like, you know, you go to like Pasadena to LAX, if you could fly that in seven minutes, you want to drive that an hour and a half. Like, what do you want to do for your time? We know if you can fly that in seven minutes and it's safe and it's affordable, over time, a good amount of folks will take that service. So it really puts the burden on the technology development of like, can you go build something that is safe and affordable? And like, you know, and gets good performance, like in the reliability side. So that was the Archer case, similar figure. It's the case of can you get robots that can actually do useful work? And this is governed by physics. There are rules, there are equations.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  So like, there is no like, I don't need to have to go out and invent a new physics equation or like aerodynamic equation to make that happen. I understand how an airfoil will behave in a fluid. I understand how battery cells discharge, like we, we understand all those rules. So it really puts the burden on us to like, think about like, what's really important here? And what's really important, if I had like being back the most important thing to myself 20 years ago, I would say Brett. What really matters or what doesn't matter is like marketing, PR, who you raise capital from, the TechCrunch article, like none of that is meaningful. It'll make you feel good as a founder because it's usually extremely shitty for like so

• 40:45Speaker 01

  many years building companies. What really matters is the technology development that you make, which means how often you're iterating and then you can measure that by how much progress you're making between those iteration cycles. That's basically the game that we're playing at Figure and we played at Archer.

• 41:01Sam Parr?

  It feels like you're like playing with connects or something. You know what I mean? It felt like play when I was at your office. I remember people were chilling. I think I came on a Friday and people were just sitting around and they weren't drinking beer or anything, but it was like that same like vibe of like we're just sitting around like, and they like giggled when like the knee moved. You know what I mean? It felt like you're like, it was almost like a glorified Lego set a little bit. It felt pretty exciting.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it feels like the, I would say it probably feels like the most cutting edge R and D lab you could walk into with a focus to move fast and ship product.

• 41:36Sam Parr?

  How big, how big is Figure going to be in 10 years?

• 41:40Speaker 01

  I think the space is, it's the, it's the world's largest TAM. It's, I think it's probably most similar to like autonomous vehicles in terms of like the technology development, the risk to developing and deploying the technology. But I think it's easier to scale. We don't have the same safety hurdles that a self-driving car would have to have to drive safely within on, on, you know, on city streets and not harm any, not harm anybody at those speeds. And so I think it's, I think it's bigger than a self-driving industry and I think it's easier to scale it once it's working. So I think if we can demonstrate our robots in commercial opportunities and we're learning,

• 42:21Speaker 01

  like we're, we're, we're in commercial work, doing useful work and we're like training our neural nets with real world data and, and getting better, recursively getting better. I happen to think this, this business is probably valued bigger than Cruise and Waymo, which are like, these are $30 billion free revenue companies. And I think we can do those over the next like 24 months. We'll have robots in commercial. Applications with like some of the world's biggest brands.

• 42:47Sam Parr?

  In five years, you think figures in the in the

• 42:52Sam Parr?

  forty fifty billion dollar value range.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  I just think like this is a really big industry and we're we're we're so five years from deploying robots into commercial opportunities that are making money. It'll be in very low volumes, but you'll be able to see the robots doing useful work and you'll be able to see the robots getting better over time. I have to think that'd be a really large market cap. Who knows what it'll what it'll look like. I think it'll be significant to where even where we stand now. And then hopefully, within ten fifteen twenty years, we're like we're seeing. We're seeing robots at scale and commercial opportunities really help fill that void with the labor force that we talked about earlier.

• 43:28Sam Parr?

  I wish I would have invested more. I think I invested twenty five thousand dollars. I should have done more.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's it's risky stuff, so I don't. Yeah, it'd be twenty five thousand makes me feel good. I don't want to lose too much of your money, so.

• 43:41Sam Parr?

  Oh, I wish I would have done more. But dude, I appreciate you doing this. You inspire me. I think I'm. I think that like I'm you and I are not the same. And I appreciate that people like you exist in the world. You are significantly bolder than I am, but I hope that the takeaway for people listening is like.

• 44:03Sam Parr?

  That shit wears off on you. So like whenever I hang out with you, like I feel. I feel bad about myself in a really great way. Like where I'm like, you know, it's like when you hang out with like a really fit athlete. You're like, oh, man, I thought I was fit. I'm nothing. I could totally step it up like I can push this thing way harder. I can I can I could go way I could push myself way more than I thought I could. That's how that's how I feel like when I'm around you. You know, you are. You're a really special person, and I'm very thankful that I get to like hear some of your wisdom. I think that I'm. One of the things on this pod and in my life, we try to find people early. And I have a feeling that we are very early in your journey and that you're going to be a very, very big deal, a bigger deal than you already are in the next five or 10 years. And I'm very thankful that we're able to like.

• 44:48Sam Parr?

  You know, we bought your stock early.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks, Sam.

• 44:51Sam Parr?

  That's the pod. All right, now show me the robot.