The Rise of Humanoid Robotics w/ Brett Adcock | EP #57

Goldman Sachs, Predix, robots could generate $154 billion in revenue in the next 15 years. That was their number. That's impressive. It's going to be a big deal. We think it was an opportunity to put up to 10 billion humanoids on the planet. Oh my god, that's amazing. 10 billion humanoids on planet Earth. You'll see humanoids in warehousing, manufacturing, factories. Yeah, so the robot is up and it's working now. It's working today. Call it over. Come on, come on over.

Really trying to build a humanoid to just insert into the economy and hopefully do really useful and good work for humanity. This is the right decade to make that happen. And I think over the next year or two, we'll hopefully demonstrate that. Hey everybody, welcome to Moonshots podcast. My next guest is Brett Adcock. Brett is a serial successful entrepreneur. He was the founder and past CEO of Archer and EBTAL flying car company.

And since then he's been building an extraordinary humanoid robot company called Figure. We're going to jump into the humanoid robot marketplace. How soon you can expect these robots, expect there may be as many as billions more humanoid robots than humans on the planet in the next few decades. We're going to see them. Can you buy them? How much are they? How are they going to impact your life and the world?

Check it out with an extraordinary moonshot entrepreneur Brett Adcock. Let's dive into the episode. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots and mindsets. I'm here with Brett Adcock who is an extraordinary entrepreneur. If you don't know his name, you know his companies and you're going to know his name real soon. So Brett, a pleasure to have you, pal.

Thanks for having me, Alan. Yeah, so first of all, you know, I don't want to go into into much detail, but I love that you took on one of the key challenges that we've talked about since the beginning of tech, which is flying cars or EV tall, and we take off or landing. I love the old saying when Peter Teal said we asked for flying cars and only got 140 characters. Well, we've got Archer delivering vehicles very shortly. So congrats on that.

And when I heard that you were becoming the CEO of a new company called Figure and humanoid robotics, I said, hey, that's the second option when people talk about we're living in the future. Flying cars and humanoid robots are the two sort of signposts that tell you we've arrived. So full disclosure, everybody, my venture fund, both capital is an investor in Brett's newest company called Figure and let's jump in. So what is Figure? Let's begin there.

Yeah, well, first things for having me on. So Figure is an AR robotics company designing an autonomous general purpose humanoid. So humanoid is a robot that has some of the similar characteristics of a human. We have two legs, two arms, hands. And our goal is over time to put as many humanoids as humans on the planet to make physical labor a choice.

I love that. So if I were going to ask your moonshots, since we're talking about moonshots and moonshot entrepreneurs and you're a serial moonshot entrepreneur here, which is pretty cool. Very few of those on the planet. How would you describe your moonshot your target? Yeah, we hope. I mean, we look at the world today and feel like most of the world was designed for humans.

We have like in the physical world like a human operating system. I'm going to leave this door that has a handle. I'm going to grab with my human hands. We have tools, shells that a warehouse are designed for humans interact with. So we feel that if there's a general purpose interface to this physical world, it could be a substantial like or basically substantial benefits to humanity doing all this physical labor is happening in the world.

So we believe that over time, we should be able to solve some of these really important problems in labor force problems in, you know, doing work for companies, helping out at home, careful the elderly. And in our goal over time would be is put, we think there's an opportunity to put up to 10 billion humanoids on the planet. So when do you let's let's go there for a second. If you had to guess how many humanoid robots there will be on planet earth by 2030 or 2040.

What kind of growth we're going to see there? I think over the next couple of decades, we're really going to be volume manufacturing limited and how much supply we can get a humanoid center market. I think if we look at a very long term, you know, three to four or five decades, I think every human's going to want a humanoid.

It's like much like you have a car phone. I think there'll be one in every home. I think there'll be billions in the labor market doing all the work that is dangerous, monotonous and boring for humans to do today. I believe over time will call on space with humanoids will care for the elderly. So I think certainly over the long enough period where we have time to volume manufacture.

I think there'll be billions of humanoids. And then in the near term, we're going to be constrained by how well the performance of the humanoids can be and how reliable they can be in the market. And I think we're really working on that problem now in earnest and with the goal, hopefully with the next 24 months of demonstrating our robot into actual real life applications. I can't wait. I want to. There you go.

So many questions that we'll get into it. You know, in success as the cost of manufacturing these reduces and the volume increases, you know, do you have a vision of what the cost of a fully functional humanoid robot might get down to?

Yeah, I think I think you look back over time if any consumer product or vehicle, the real, there's a really high correlation to price and manufacturing volumes. You really want to get up on the experience curve, which is basically every doubling of manufacturing volumes, your prices can fall or costs can fall by 20 30%. So price really is in a lot of ways, a real function of how much volume you're really going to have to do or.

I think over the long term, you look at this like first order of this, like there's roughly a thousand parts in our humanoid today. A lecture car might have anywhere, like maybe 10,000 parts, be four or five thousand pounds. We have a hundred and fifty pound humanoid with thousand parts. I think the cost of this should be less than like a cheaper electric vehicle in my mind. Mostly dominated by the actuator, basic motor and sensor costs and compute costs on the robot.

So just to throw some numbers out there, like if it costs 30K for a figure robot, and if you were going to lease it versus buy it, you can imagine having a lease payment of 500 bucks a month for your robot. And that's amazing. And imagine a future in which these robots are sitting there on demand, like go run these errands, go do this, go do that. And it's how I'm going to ask one time point and then we'll come back to it. How long do you think before I can buy one and put one in my home?

I think obviously factory settings are going to be the first location, but is that this decade? It certainly feel like as you said, the first use cases will be in areas that are more constrained and lower veritability. So factories, manufacturing, things that basically are just much more structured in nature than the home. That'll help us get a cost down, safety up. We have a whole AIDA pipeline we need to go build out for their manipulation and high level behaviors and perception policies.

But I think we're probably end of decade, early next decade, before we're starting to see early life of humanoids and homes helping out. And I think it's just going to take some time. We need a lot of maturity across the product that we're going to do through the corporate labor market.

Safety as well. I live here in Santa Monica and as I'm walking about on Main Street, I'll see these little cocoa robots that are six-wheeled robots that are rolling down delivering six packs of dyed coke or burgers. At first they're an oddity as you see them and people are taking photos and then you ignore them as they're walking by. And it's going to be interesting to see humanoid robots enter the live-work play universe that we're in.

And they'll be strange oddities and then just like I guess the Star Wars universe where there's just every place of all different shapes and forms. Is that what you see? It's funny you mentioned that because we have a big presence of folks here from Boston Dynamics at the figure team. And by the way, are we looking in the back here so those of you who are watching this on YouTube, is that your factory floor back there? Yeah, so we have basically an office here in South San Francisco Bay.

I'll give you a little quick tour. Sure. But we're about 50 people or so. And yeah, we're based here in South San Francisco so we have a facility here. I'm so excited to come visit. Yeah, so I'd be great to have you. Yeah. So we got what I was mentioning before is we have a couple folks from Boston Dynamics here that have I've mentioned, you know, wait till the robots walk around enough and stuff and it's not going to be as exciting.

Because everything that happens now, like, you know, the ankle rolls and we're just like, oh, we're watching it. The robot just took first steps and started walking a few months ago and we're like the whole company is surrounding watching what's going on. And, you know, just it's such a it's such a spectacular thing to see robots in the office doing really useful things that the novelty still surely hasn't worn off with me yet. Are you a dad? Do you have kids?

Yeah, so I have a I have a two and a five year old. So it probably feels a little bit like that early stage of toddler hood. Like, look, look what you just did. Amazing. That is so fun. I used to build robots when I was at MIT as and just having them not smashing to the wall. They were really just roller. They were supposed to map the room out in units of their own length and so forth. But the electromagnetic noise would always hit the circuitry and they go whizzing off in some direction.

It's come a long way. You know, the last few podcasts that I've done have been in the field of AI. And I know that you're developing your own AI there and I'd love to talk about that a little bit. Because I think one of the things that makes humanoid robots possible is the AI capabilities we have now.

But there's another part of the conversation I'd like to go into which is well that having a physical instantiation of AI's inner robot, I think it's going to be an interesting part of AI's evolution. An AI that's in a box or just looking through a camera or a speaker is very different than an AI that's able to actually go and interact with the world. And there's a lot of individuals who feel like it's the embodiment of an AI that's going to make it ultimately sentient or conscious.

I don't know if that conversation takes place there and figure it all. I believe in the limit here, we're going to make a will have the ability to make a hopefully a substantial impact into AI. I think there's this al-Sanin question that we're all debating now in 2023 is if there's enough words on the internet to train next-purpose prediction language models to get us to, you know, like real intelligence.

And if that answer ultimately turns into we're not able to do it, then I think the longer but the surest path is through humanoid robots that can ingest human data online and then use vision language models to basically, yeah, to ultimately interact with the environments and to be an ultimate prog-make progress with the AI friends.

Yeah, I quote poking at the world and seeing what happens and learning through doing, right, there's a very famous and I don't know it well enough to do it justice when Helen Keller was learning language, right, it was through her, through her tactile sense, through interaction with the world and her embodiment in the world that allowed her to, to become sentient in that sense, otherwise she'd be living in a world of devoid of data to a large degree.

And so I definitely see that the word the name figure, I'm curious, was the origin there, you could have had a lot of different names for the company, where do you choose that?

Yeah, so we, so I've been pretty thoughtful over the last like three companies, starting veterinary, archer and figured to really think about the name, the brand and you know, set it up even the basics of around the brand around the mission vision values, but so we, I basically spent the first nine months building the brand as well as a team in the product here.

So, if funny enough when we started, we were, I was like, I just told the lawyers, like put a placeholder in for the C Corp, it ended up being called adcock AI think they can maybe like, you know, 90 days later will change this and nobody will notice, but it happened to be like higher like 40 people with like, you know, you're joining this AI adcock AI, which is really weird.

But we spent a tremendous time on the name, we really wanted something that was easy to say, easy to pronounce, very unique in the category somewhere we could build a lot of brand presence around. And there's something about the human figure that we really, like really aspire to and we thought this name was something we could really own a lot that had a lot of depth to it.

So, we ultimately, you know, we ultimately call the company figure and so far it's been great. We've we've we came out of stealth in March and the feedback so far has been really good and, you know, a lot of the focus we have over the next year to now will be like product development miles on focus. So, hopefully what people see over the next like year or two would be a pretty substantial amount of product development, so try on product north for the humanoid robot.

So, with AI systems like level controls and ultimately show either robot connection to useful real world things. So, you know, I'm going to get into a little bit later your advice for entrepreneurs want to take big mood shots like you did in archer and like you've done in figure because you know, it means raising a bunch of money.

It means getting an extraordinary team and one of the things I commend you for is the team you pulled together and figure it's, you know, when we ran through it, it was like, wow, that's a rock star team. And then it means being willing to run fast fail recover and keep iterating and having enough capital to do that. So, I'll come back to that a little bit and get your advice for entrepreneurs who want to do following your footsteps.

Let's talk about the actual robot one second. I've got the stats in front of me and I am curious, you know, its height is five foot six inches. Yeah, okay, well, I'm about five four and a half so I can almost see eye to eye for but it's like you didn't make it six foot or six five or five foot. Is this like, you know, what's the average height and comfortable to, you know, humans don't find scary can still reach on the top shelf. How do you think about the height?

Yeah, there's a very laborious process we went through to get to the height because there's like two, like there's like kind of almost two divergent things happening here. One is kind of from a physics perspective, you really want the height probably smaller than five six. You want basically you really want the amount of power the robust area to be as low as possible, which means you want the lever arms or the extra.

You should be sure this is possible. Yeah, you don't want like think about you don't want a huge arm holding a bunch of way. It means like there's so much more power needed given the length and distance there of that lever arm. So you really want everything shorter and closer to the ground and also when you're false about abilities much better like little kids are so close to the ground when they fall they're fine.

So I think, you know, that's physics is pushing you one way and then separately the commercial market, which is like, you know, humans are going in and grabbing things and reaching over shelves and reaching up high and down low. They really want like these really long arms, you can reach across and grab the bin and turn around and articulate it so from a commercial side, they want like this inspector gadget type robot that like you know reach really high and have super human strength here there.

So it's really this balance. We think five six is probably plus or minus a few inches of where we'll want to be commercially. I think it was a pretty good. A first order approximation on the robot. I think the next generation robot that we're designing now that'll be out this year is the same almost the same as a kite.

You know, it's interesting because you don't want to make the arms extra long like a because it causes a a candy valley type experience that you want you want these to actually look humanoid. Is that true. I think there's you know, if you look at the uncanny valley and the research around that like as you get really closer to human looks like there's almost like this trust that builds until this like until it's like point really close to a human look that gets really scary and terrifying.

So our view is that we're not trying to look like a human we're not trying to put facial expressions in our chin or noses and ears. We want to just ultimately have the human capabilities in terms of. You know manipulation and locomotion capabilities and things like that because that's what's necessary to interact with the with the human operating system world that we talked about earlier.

I mean, we don't have to change anything if we look at a human we can just go in and do all the warehouse work that nobody wants to do all the manufacturing work. Go to cook home and you're go cook your home. Do the things out any altering of the environment which is really what humanoids are for right or really trying to build a humanoid to this insert into the economy and hopefully do really useful and good work for humanity.

Yeah, but you also don't want to make it look so strange right there's there's some comfort in in thinking that it's it looks like humans proportionally looks like humans it doesn't have like a third arm or extra long appendages and so forth. You know it's if we could without diving into it how many humanoid robot companies are out there everybody is heard of optimists and hopefully now it's heard about figure.

What would you guess are like a dozen or few decently funded yeah maybe like half a dozen like pretty serious maybe have funding have a team growth rate of five groups out there that we would like pay to put on our list. I think the vast majority of humanoid projects like last ten years have been all research in R&D so Boston in the mix out less is still an R&D project a lot of really great labs in the US at Caltech and.

Berkley not replaces that I like demonstrating some of these capabilities that are you know under research and then commercially there's probably yeah maybe half a dozen groups out there we kind of look at is are you commercial group are you walking do you have hands and the only groups that we know of that have those three qualities today.

Are also in Tesla optimists yeah I had a run my abundance 360 CEO summit and every year we highlight a different robotics company and we had Mark Raybert here with Boston dynamics and his robots a few years ago and then last year we had a robot called amica from engineered arts out of the UK and amica is. God appendages but it's some call it her special is facial expressions and movements extraordinarily humanoid right in a way that's eerie and amazing and amica is driven by now GPT for.

And obviously I at this is is driven by its own systems and everyone's different you know I don't think when people realize is at this is a robot is really heavy and and it's hydraulic systems are really dangerous. And you take a different approach here with figure right because the robot is a relatively reasonable weight and I think is less likely to injure somebody and so five six what are the other parameters on it yeah so we're.

And our target weight was 60 kilos and we weighed in at 61 right 61 little over 61 kilos which is great I've always been significantly overweight and every hardware program over a film. And it doesn't work with flying fly hardware but this is yeah yeah we can talk about that at one point but like yeah talk about the mass related engineering problems we had to solve at our chair to make that work we're so like so yeah it was so we have.

We have we have a we have a full charge full state of charge before charging target of five hours so we want to be five hours on we want to be off fast charging close to two C and back in operations again. We want to be able to do like kind of like fast walking we don't want to run but we want to be able to do a few basically close to a couple meters a second in terms of walking speed what what is humans do how faster we is a walking speed yeah maybe like one and a half to so.

False walking fast walking yeah we have we have like no intention to do running or spreads and things but we you know there might be times where we need like walk a quarter of a mile down a warehouse and we want to do that in a fast way and then we ultimately have some manipulation in basically speed and reliability and safety targets we also need to hit internally but for the most part we shouldn't be able to do the majority the hardware should be able to do the majority of what humans can do.

Today we will really be limited by software in our ability to do you know where it where it's at today what should be able to do long term is is basically just like a software where we're software update away from being able to do that kind of stuff amazing and I love the idea that that your robots can be our software updated on a regular basis to increase their capabilities the same way your Tesla might be updated regular basis.

You know I know you on and Zucker are planning a wrestling match I'm just wondering what we're going to have the figure versus optimist wrestling match as well but. Yeah I mean listen we're like we're at funny enough for actually right across the street from like on marked Tesla like Tesla facility here in California South Bay.

So yeah maybe if this doesn't work out this whole commercial humanoid thing we can just a pay-per-view yeah we can just figure out how to make money some other way yeah that's funny everybody I want to take a quick break from our episode tell you about a health product that I love and that I use every day in fact I use it twice a day it's called seed health now your microbiome and gut health are one of the most important and modifiable parts of your health plan your microbiome is connected to your brain health your cardiac health your metabolic health.

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So I'm curious the AI so the capabilities of figure five hours runtime good walking speed being able to lift what like 20 kilograms I think is your target lifting mass which is which is good is all of the processing on board or are you doing it on the edge of the cloud.

So all of our like short horizon like low level processing is all done on board so we need a pretty substantial amount of compute and graphics on board the robot to be able to basically run the on board computer is powering like the whole locomotion controller.

Yeah run the perception systems all the things we need for occupancy and stuff like that and there is there is an ability for us to basically like basically talk to the cloud for a certain amount of things in market that are not like that are just much lower bandwidth and latency is not a not as a issue so things like high level behaviors of like what should the robot be doing next things like that those things can be done off board.

There's no reason we have to do that was on board but for the most part we want to we want to be able to in like a you know like 5G denied an environment to be able to do as much on board the robot is possible. The controller is running at such fast frequencies and stuff there's there is just a tremendous amount we have to do on board at very high speeds.

Yeah I I imagine I love to dive into the to the use cases but first the timelines so folks can start I mean I assume that they're going to be businesses built on top of your systems.

Alright people are going to just like I know one of my friends Scott painters is is building a whole Tesla based service where you can rent you can buy and rent testless through him and there are lots of different other approaches from you know what's going on with Uber and electric cars and so forth but when are we going to see the first in commercial use. What's your expected earliest delivery.

I think the earliest we would be able to have a humanoid in one of our clients that are getting we're getting paid for it and doing real work would be next year. So 24 yeah 24 and I think if we missed that we're not going to miss it by five years we're going to miss it by year two.

But I think as of now for the applications we'll be doing the conversation through have a client said certainly seems that next year would be the earliest possible to be able to do we're going to start to see figure robots being demonstrated you know.

Now I'm going to put this Mark Raybert was putting out fun videos of of Atlas and its capabilities before we saw it in any kind of useful commercial business I'm still not sure what commercial businesses other than sort of defense approaches that really have to robots done. But when are we going to see a functioning robot your best guess on video or at you know maybe CES next January.

Yeah so the robot is up in its it's working now it's working today we're walking call it over come on over yeah sorry like yeah so we'll be putting out we're going to try to figure try to build in public as much as possible and keep the basically everybody abrasive what we're doing. It's super important to be fun we want everybody to be ready for us as well I think we'll be putting out videos quite frequently every year and our plan is over the next.

You know two to three months here putting out the first walking videos of our humanoid here in our office and then down the road we want to do more things in perception manipulation and other traditional. Operations but our goal is to be putting out videos to not doing the park whores and showing like the pure performance of like you know here's here's what's here's better than a human box jumper backs flips we really want to do just like boring work.

Yeah yeah yeah yeah it's good to go to the warehouse just to do work over and over again and I think that be pretty groundbreaking we're so we're like we're shooting for that with our clients now is like how do we. You know get it to do work in our lab and as close of representative of what our clients environment with the likes so there's a high transfer ability next year into our clients sites visual systems is it all camera visual or using.

Light are what kind of imaging systems are using a board yeah we're full full vision 100% vision system perception system you're not going to go with any other augmentation so it's what a camera can see is is all you need. Yeah you made the same decision I made with autonomous cars it sounds like we think we don't give in the distances and yeah we we do not think light are necessary here. As of now we're like we're we don't have like a you know the same view as Tesla and like we're not.

We don't have like a don't look at light our kind of policy we've we've evaluated it we've mapped our facility here we've used it for some localization. We think it can be a helpful sensor but that's not what it's that's not really the right answer the right answer is like is is is can you get there sufficiently without light are.

You know have a lighter on board like complicates both the supply chain we have to fuse that data in we have to maintain it we have to fix it we have to procure we have to pay for it. It's a bomb cost like you have to maintain it so there's like a lot going on with every single thing that goes in the robots we have a pretty high bar for. Adding things to the robot is there proven to be necessary or sufficient for the robot to do the operations I want to paint a picture of.

Of how humanoid robots can enter society with you. I thought about this you thought about it more just to give a couple of data points here at Goldman Sachs predicts robots could generate 154 billion dollars in revenue in the next 15 years that was their number. That's impressive and these are humanoid robots they're not the robots we're seeing in factories building cars and packing plants and so forth.

And I think the other thing when you and I were speaking early on when I first met you you know you made the point listen half of the global GDP is labor. And that's your total address will market. And that's amazing. Do you do you find people telling you oh my god you're going to displace jobs and you're going to cause you know disruption like a eyes causing a disruption. And do you remind them that we have so many unfilled jobs and labor market is really becoming tough in different places.

So if we look at the like the how I think the business unfolds over the next 10 or 20 years I think it looks very similar to what you saw in self driving cars where the easier stuff will be demonstrated first so like driving on the highway has been demonstrated at higher safety levels than driving and say San Francisco the city.

And it's because in the city it's got a higher safety case it's higher it's like more variability it's less structured it's probably like you know one or two orders and adding to harder from an injury perspectives do that reliably and safely then on a highway.

The same thing exists for humanoids their applications in the world that are easy to do you're moving bins or boxes you know exactly what the bin is you know exactly the payloads you know where you're moving it to you're in a basically a space that you already can map and you already understand you can have communication with the manufacturing or warehouse.

Execution system it's a really like well known or kind of highway driving equivalent and then there are things that are really much harder which are you know cooking somebody food in their home caring for the elderly those are like city driving equivalent to self driving cars.

So my my strong view is that a lot of people have a misconception of humanoids because so many people have been working on the ladder they've been working on this really hard consumer problem if you look at Google's robot with sort of trash it's very difficult. Toad or research to work in the you know and grocery stores and things are really hard problems and I'm glad people are working on them.

But for commercial groups we really need to do the easier stuff that's necessary first that we can start demonstrating and building the aided engine into the harder stuff over time. So almost like almost the opposite of what the research groups are looking at today so I have a strong bias that you'll see humanoids and warehousing manufacturing where the talent shortage is.

Shortage is the most acute and as you hit you know from the macro perspective you know half the world is like GDP is later we've had we're having this huge issue with labor population globally we have the baby boomers are retiring the amount of kids we've had has been in. This is like like it's been been secular client for like a lot of several crazy people don't realize we're in a one of the greatest tragedies is not over population is going to be under population.

It's going to be a big deal and so you're seeing that so we walk into a client site like say a big fortune 100 company. The first thing other mouth is like not you know houses going to like be used with my employees and like that the first thing other mouth is out last year we saw 140% and return over no warehouse.

We we have nobody wants to do these jobs they're dangerous they're hot the summer they're cold in the winter the turn of the service dangerous dull and dirty is the phrase you know just like nobody they can't find anybody that wants to do this and.

You know so we walk in there they're like if you can do these things we will buy your service hand over fist now doing the humanoid thing is nobody's ever done it before so it's a the hill to climb to do that successfully is is extremely challenging and we happen to believe that it's this is the right decade to make that happen and I think over the next year to we'll hopefully demonstrate that here.

So I have to imagine that the large language models that are are feel like they're coming on just in time for the humanoid robot marketplace so that I could speak to the robot and have it understand what I want and and clearly say yes I get it I'll go do that right now and have a conversation that's meaningful.

Are you going to be building your own large language models or you're going to be incorporating other ones and when does that enter your you sort of your build process I think the way we're going to get humanoids say out of the factories and into people's homes like are working with humans is is is going to be through language as you mentioned so we think you're substantial benefit our business has to use you like basic large language models are vision language models.

To basically help us understand like we need like a semantic understanding in the world and language can bring us that in large language models can bring us that so we will be building here over time visual language models to really help from like a high level behavior perspective of letting the humanoids understand what humans are saying and be able to talk to humans but also be able to infer and understand what they're saying to be able to react to it.

And so we will most likely not be building our own language models but being able to train vision language models on the robot system is really the sensor data is coming off of there and to be able to do useful thing with those models is going to be something that we're going to have to do internally in our doing now internally.

It's going to be extremely important to build that a data engine correctly so that data coming off the robot can be trained accurately and the neural disk can be trained correctly to deploy over time and that that's what really drives our interest in getting to market as fast as possible. The more robots we can get into market collecting data the you know the smarter are fleet of robots will become in the future in the more applications the robot will learn how to do.

I mean people realize that these robots because their a eyes are connected their data sets are connected when one robot learns how to do something uniquely or runs into unique situation it isn't that just one robot that learns that they all learn it.

And that's a beautiful a beautiful thing that my it's like my kids right once you learn how to do something they like they fail like a thousand times so I will like reinforce learning policies and once they figure it out they like they really don't forget it.

And then they just said they're keep building on that so yeah once we train a robot how to unload boxes from a pallet successfully every robot the fleet will know how to do that once we train the robot how to unload a truck successfully and to manipulate certain boxes that are damaged or whatever looks like. Then every robot the fleet will understand that and so it's just like it's going to be a huge power curve that we're going to be able to.

Yeah it's going to be a huge power curve for us in the future yeah so there's a huge advantage to get that get out into the real world and get those models learning. I'm going to go back to the the founding of the company so you had an incredibly successful exit early on with with your first company that was in the hiring space.

I'm a veteran and then you start archer and really hard challenge e-v-tall and build it demonstrate the technology take the company public start getting orders and then you decide you're going to take your next moonshot. I want you take me back if you would bread to you've retired out of archer did you know what you wanted to do next at that time or did you start sort of looking around and saying what's the next challenge.

Yeah I so I think you know when I left archer was a really good time for me to kind of really reset and you know what did I really want to work on and I think and I still say I still say I still say I said that I wanted to do that.

I said I said this kind of like off the cuff to somebody yesterday I said if you know if somebody came to me tomorrow wanted to purchase the business for $5 billion I would say no. And you might think that's a little bit crazy but I think you know what are the greatest assets for an entrepreneur is like really loving what you're working on and be able to spend a significant amount of time on a really hard problem and build hopefully really great business long term.

I can't think of a more important business for the world than humanoid robots at scale serving mankind and helping out and I think it's a one a really hard problem be it have as a live inside the largest economy in the planet of human labor. Three we think the technologies necessary to do this are kind of exist today and I've been demonstrated in so much more of like advanced research state and for I think in the limit I think we.

I hope we can make some progress towards a GI here at figure so so from a founding company perspective I looked at this and said that this is somewhere where I could probably for the next 30 plus years my back a little bit more did you have this in the back of your mind while you are at archer has this been something like from the childhood you saw Rosie the robot or you saw lost in space or and robots have always been a fascination for you mean autonomous cars and flying cars are robots of the type.

But when did you say you know I know when I'm building my companies I have this moment time or work things and crystallizes that would be a next cool chapter to work on.

Do you remember that moment growing up I was I've always happened a huge sci-fi fan so I've read all Isaac as mouth books and kind of in my high school period I really realized that I wanted to spend basically some of my life building companies and a couple of the areas that are really power important were robotics AI the internet and yeah I think from a like I think for a long time I've always felt that robotics were extremely important industry they were really

far like there's a lot of entrepreneurs like tax on this problem it's not they're not they're not just like they're never used to be a lot going in and building the space industry right there was just the government that did it or in this G.M. made giant robots for building cars.

Yeah do you come from a family of entrepreneurs what was it that gave you that entrepreneurial bug and was this like high school years college years. Yeah so my fair I started actually grew up on a third generation agriculture farm in the middle of the way.

Yeah so never really been an insider my whole life my parents yeah entrepreneurs for many generations I remember growing up my parents were like a some point you want to control your own destiny you need to do it yourself and you need to go out and build stuff for the world.

That's really real way to impact and I think you know my awakening was I thought technology was probably the greatest lever arm of my generation it's the area that I can spend a lot of time in and make the greatest impact so I've been you know now building companies for 20 years I did. You know 13 14 years of that and software and Internet last like you know six or seven years have been in advance hardware in AI areas and do you know to be honest be able to.

To work on these things and I know he's been in so much time in these areas like it's like what a blessing right it is our problems and they're just so fun and. We're like almost inventing the future and so we are we're predicting the future by inventing in ourselves I want to quote you I love this quote I don't know if you remember saying it but you said we have the potential to alter the course of history and fundamentally improve millions of lives it's time to build.

I couldn't agree more right and like when I tell people when you're setting your massive transformative purpose and taking your moonshot like stop building another photo sharing app and go do something that's a hard problem that is going to change the world and make the world a better place.

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And so you retire from archer you hopefully I'm sure you did do financially well because you've been personally investing in figure a sizeable amount of your own net wealth and using that and recruiting some of the best people and I went over whenever I'm looking at investments through my venture fund or co investing as an individual I'm like okay how much are you putting into the deal and until you

you you're putting a significant amount to the company and because you believe in it and you built an amazing team what was how did it begin what was the first thing you did I mean this is this is sort of a one-on-one training for the entrepreneurs out there that want to take on a moonshot and I don't know if you want to go back to the days of archer beginning or figure beginning but what's your advice to entrepreneurs who want to take a shot at the gold ring here.

The first year of building companies is like one of the it's like one of the best experiences that I never wanted to do it. You know it's like it's they're just so hard and I remember for like for nine months here a figure I was like living in this like really cramped we work phone booth in Palo Alto just like cold calling everybody in the space like talking to every human or robotics person anywhere in the world. Were you educating yourself or recruiting or both.

Like trying to get answers trying to understand trying to find the best people in the world trying to get referrals trying to find this you know off shoe small lab that nobody's ever heard of where I can understand actuators better or you know local motion controls better. Trying to find the rare book here there that could help educate me on you know whole body and burst dynamics or NPC controllers or whatever would look like.

So I just bit enormous time same story archer for the first year when I started archer I was in a room just making phone calls reading anything I get my hands on and trying to figure out how to how do I get this built. I think as a early founder the most important thing is to show that you have a product or even a minimally viable product and the making that's like what we're all here to ship product or services like that's it.

And so the most important thing you could be doing is getting to that point in a lot of places a lot of companies could be like you know raising capital hire and some people in my case for both archer figure was putting my money where my mouth was. So I put millions in both companies the first year and I went deep into bringing a team together and also deep into under like getting myself up to speed on how this works so at archer I basically move back down.

I was temporarily to University of Florida where I started undergrad engineering I partnered with the aerospace and mechanical engineering lab at archer at University of Florida that lab that was building drugs the time was off of archer road so I call the business archer aviation.

And I basically built a you know 4000 square foot archer aviation eb tell lab at the University of Florida which is still there today and I basically built three four generations of electric aircraft down there with a small team of PhDs. And that was that really helped me understand the technology understand certification decisions we had to make decisions Peter unlike do we put a pilot in the aircraft or make an autonomous.

These were like you know business decisions that affected timelines and certification all this. And so yeah the early first year at archer was really me. Self funding getting the initial team set set up and then also building small like basically sub scale versions of what we have now which you know we have I built now 6,000 pound five passenger eb tell aircraft and you know that's like you know four years before that we're building 20 foot aircraft that were.

Cut kind of more hobby grade than what we have now yeah so and then you know maybe fast forward to figure ice bit the large percentage of my time understand the technologies. Basically designing out and architecting with the first generation robot will look like and then building the team up. And I did that self funding the whole way so I basically felt like I didn't have to answer anybody and I could just move at lightning speed and the decisions really quick.

You know how you describe this is exactly you know I've known Elon for 23 years from the early days of SpaceX and it it sounds exactly like his early days at SpaceX where it was like find the textbook read the chapter learn the stuff interview people begin building. And one of the things I think that's interesting early in the early days of a startup is understanding the highest value trades and what the limiting parameters are right.

To help you decide you know what so for figure what have been the limiting parameters that drove you make one decision over another has it been. Battery life material weights AI yeah so we spent a considerable amount of time understanding the requirements were very like we have a very strong actually matter to design process here I have a very strong philosophy for it.

And then we do a lot of like what you call a trade studies like basically like what are the right decisions we need to make I would see. At the highest level the battery in actuator side is our very mature like we need we have enough energy empowered and city out of the actuators in the batteries to do what we need to do and with humanoids I think the locomotion controls of like balancing and walking robots are really mature for folks that know what they're doing.

And I think a lot of the bigger trades came down to the availability of either software or hardware off the shelf that we could purchase to make us work. I think the the limitations in actuators middleware operating systems batteries control software some of some cases of perception that were that I thought would be easier to secure out the shelf and put into a robot.

We're really not the case I think I got most of that stuff wrong I think there are no good actuator solutions in the market they're really not any good battery solutions there's no good control solutions there's no good middleware of pretty system solutions sensors there's some off the shelf cost sensors that are fine. And the lich I almost all the electronics for the next generation robot rebuilding ourselves else and that that's not because we want to is because we're being forced to.

So so that's a fascinating so is it fair to say you were a little bit naive getting in and then you discovered the realities the difficulties and had to solve them because you were ready getting in that direction. I think if I knew how hard. Archer was and how figure was you know who knows of an entrepreneur would have started those businesses you know like there's certainly extremely hard.

Yeah I would say definitely did not understand the maturity of the supply chain there I don't think a lot of people really understood that though too I think a lot of robotics startups think that hardware is just like easily to procure and it's really a software issue it's really not the case you really in order for good software to work you really need good hardware and good hardware is like I think harder to find the good software.

I think the hardware in the spaces especially for e-v-tile aircraft and I think you're for figure the hardware is is really hard and I think a lot of folks think that the hardware is there and it's just an AI software game and I think that could be it couldn't be further for the truth.

Yeah I've heard this so many times for entrepreneurs I know it's been true for myself where you know everything looks rosy from a distance and you think all of those solutions are there you just have to cobble them together and it'll work. But you find out no there's a ton of work to be done but you've spent so much time and money already you can't turn back and you've got to dissolve them and you have to work you know when you're going through hell keep going as you old saying.

So that is fascinating and then I just did a podcast with Palmer Lucky do you know Palmer that creator of Oculus and he's building a and rural you know $10 billion defense company which is amazing. And you might look at all of the hardware you know I laughingly call him you know the real Tony Stark and it's amazing what he's been building there.

But there are 60% software 40% hardware but from the outside they looked just like a hardware company but they've had to build both together what ratio do you see internally now. We're probably a little bit bigger overall all software for include controls middleware autonomy than we are hardware. Our hardware teams may be 15 or so. So yeah definitely software would be a little bit bigger software will definitely be as the biggest part of the company long term.

In the limit we think of figures in AI business so we'll have a large autonomy team and there's a very significant AI to engine that we need to build here long term. But the hardware stuff can't be overlooked like if you really want to play in human race today you're going to need to develop your own actuators electronics battery.

And then almost all the software there's really not a cuts are commercial off the shelf solution for this if you want to play in the if you want to do a high performance high reliability high safety.

And low cost there's no other way to say I mean we have a term here which is like the only way out is through yeah we use it a lot because like you know it and hardware it's like death by a thousand cuts it's like bring up the robot just like problem after problem after problem it's like things look good and there's like mountain more problems and yeah it's just it's brutal I mean being in software for so long.

And then getting to hardware hardware is just hardware is just hard it's a takes a long time to get stuff it's a long iteration cycles it's it's really the tack time of iteration cycles that kill you here yeah yeah no it's I like to joke it's overnight success after 11 years of hard work yeah totally yeah.

So let's allow people to live in the future a little bit here we're going to see these robots there is a ton of capital going in and you know I put my bet on figure and I'm excited and hopefully will massively be successful but there are a few other companies as well.

I think obviously as you've said going into the labor space of warehouses and environments that are dull dangerous and dirty so if you were going to be I'm not holding you to this and hopefully willing to tell me but like what kind of robot production rate are you hoping to achieve in the next few years and will

they all be going into warehouse settings packing unpacking trucking logistics is that the first sort of circle of capabilities you're circling up yeah we're really spending most of our time now on like logistics fulfillment and we spend a decent amount of time now at the larger car

OEMs in the world interesting what do you do for them just tremendous amount of people at these facilities we just went to a facility a large OEM that you would know in the US last week they had you know close to 10,000 people on site there were I mean a lot of stuff that we could do to help them out they were there having a lot of problems

in not find enough people that a lot of these were dangerous they were working next to other machines they're doing like tons of spot welding so you can like smell the fumes. You know so yeah there's like there's different things of large fulfillment and logistics areas of these facilities because they need to do just in time inventory they need to have this facility we saw you know had you know roughly you know four to five million parts that were touched by humans every day in one facility

yeah it's a lot so I think about the amount of fulfillment you have to do a lot of touches or human touches that need to happen there so it was for fulfillment areas also a lot of overall just like sheet metal being moved around right like a lot of sheet metal being moved different machines so it's being spot welded and that being repeated over and over again at hundreds of stations

and they better deal with I mean are they operating 24 seven or they operating eight hours a day no they're operating almost like 21 22 hours a day 2 10 hours shifts yeah so I mean the robots can in fact work you know lights out meaning they don't they can operate on 24 seven basis there's no drug testing there's no vacations there's no you know ensuring I mean it's in one sense for the type of job if there's a good product market fit there they are

ideal laborers in that regard going back to the production rate you see hundreds of figures being produced in the next few years would you hope to get up to by the 2030 time frame yeah we think about the businesses like we need certain stages of maturity to unlock like the next like kind of almost the next phase I think the big stage where it now is can we show a robot humanoid robot can be useful

in a in a in a client scenario in a real way like in it get the performance can to be safe can to be reliable is it going down all the time you need tons of human interventions that's not help anything so it needs to take R.I. sense and it needs to be safe and reliable ultimately if we can prove that then even in these very specific class of problems like of moving boxes and bins we think there's an ability to ship tens of millions of humanoids

by there's I would say would take us decades to do that like it took what it take Tesla and Ford like a little over decade for each company to put a million cars in the road so if you want to put a million robots into the world like it takes you know no sooner than five years maybe no no longer than 10 or 12 years to do that you know based on historical precedent now I think the manufacturing processes for this will be very different and I would say

less complex there's roughly maybe 10,000 parts in a model three car we have about a thousand in our robot here and it's like you know like we mentioned earlier a lot less weight and mass so I think we can manufacture at pretty high volumes as we lace later in the decade but the next like two or three or four years Peter is going to be figured out can we make a useful humanoid sure and I think it's we really got to get there yeah and I'm very confidence knowing you and the team that you have

built that you will get there and I imagine the same way that AI is going to code AI I assume that you're going to use robots to help build robots to there's got to be some feedback cycle there. Yeah we we I left this big auto group last week and I was like we are going to for anything a human is involved with in the in the manufacturing process just substantial like the facility we saw had you know giant robotic arms

every word hundreds of them and it was as bad as automated place have ever been in my whole life and then there was like another 10,000 humans at the facility so I think you know we we want to have only humanoid we wanted to design a manufacturing process for only humanoids are building humanoids.

I love that a fun no even machine that it's best so what's what's next you hit logistics hit warehouses you hit delivery services what imagine the next big market would be we'll start to see these human robots I think you're going to scale into the commercial labor market for well over decade before even try to touch some other things in there we have like health care areas real estate areas construction.

There's other areas of like retail that we look at I think are extremely large markets and then there's all these other markets that would like don't exist chef or humanoid robots are human like that we could basically go into like. Yeah I think you know like what why do the major tech real estate brokerage like real estate places like so stuff not you know have any human brokers on their platform is because their multiples get killed.

I think it'd be pretty cool I think it'd be pretty cool going to a website booking a house visit and then and then having the humanoid greet you by a luck in the door and in a stage house and basically selling that whole house digitally.

It's a it's a trillion dollar market it's nothing that the tech guys want to touch because it's just so manual today but there are just many industries like that that can be done through tell operation or other things that could that'll be born out of this technology one of the markets I look forward to.

That is so desperately needed is supporting our our aging population right when you've got a mother or father and rather than you know one of the things that's terrible is when you take your aging parents. Out of their home and put them into an old age home right there's a very rapid fall off there they disoriented they don't have feel comfortable they don't have privacy. But there is a vision where these robots are taking fantastic care of of of humans as the age.

What's the what's the breakthroughs that are required to enable that to happen. Yeah so this is an area that's pretty close to my heart my family's actually involved and dependent and assist living facilities. Beautiful yeah one of the hardest issues you mentioned is like nobody really wants to leave their home for you know the personal home they've been in for decades.

For for one of these just a really tough process and we're having you know like we're basically having this huge amount of people getting to like leadership retirement. And you know being able to do at home care would be like a very substantial life benefit to let people age in place at home. You know this is really just a maturity of the technology itself to be able to make this the reliability and the safety and the cost to a point where we can do these things.

On the whole like the robot from a hardware perspective will be able to do like almost all this work that would be would be needed somebody's home. There will be a maturity here of trust of the product and somebody's other aspects I mentioned that'll be important for us to mature in the commercial market.

So mature in these with these big corporate groups that have this big labor areas making the robot more intelligent more dexterous higher reliability and then ultimately doing higher volume manufacturing to get cost down will be important to enter this like elderly area let people age in place.

So I think of this very similar to the consumer conversation we had earlier it's going to happen like a decade from now it's going to be very substantial maybe even a bigger business some in some ways then you know the consumer side of things. It's just going to be the second chapter in the book with the first chapter being the commercial market.

Yeah I believe that when you get into the home and you get into the elderly do you imagine that future so you're the first robot called figure zero one. Yes so you can just keep the generations figure out to you and like iPhone three and iPhone 27. We made room to go to 99. That's good. Yeah I got that much. So as you get to figure five six seven do you imagine there may be a humanoid facial personality that you add for comfort and because I mean there is a value.

There is a value in having a robot who's got facial emotional expressions that you can feel they connect with you and so forth and I think as the AI becomes as we head towards AGI that ability to recognize the person you're serving their emotional situation and to convey emotional response thoughts on that.

Maybe no reason why we couldn't do that like we are head today has basically a full wrap screen in the front that can convey information like what the robot is doing maybe a prompt things like that. And then we have sensors we have basically camera sensors and other things in the head. So there shouldn't be no reason we can't display the right information back to the end user to make them feel comfortable whether we're caretaker or actually do work on site a big corporate fortune 500.

So certainly today language and natural language processing is going enough to basically have a conversational understanding with a robot getting that that you know the visuals in a place where it's comforting is certainly possible. We have a lot of time on it is going to be an hour early we are in the business but I don't see any reason why we can't give the consumer that experience everybody is Peter a quick break from the episode.

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backslash blog and learn more now back to the episode on hit on my third favorite market and use case so actually I ask you what your favorite third market so we talked about the industrial logistics manufacturing and we talked about health care is another as a broad brush what's your third next big market that you're excited about and I'll show you mine.

And I think that's such important business long term I think everybody will have a humanoid as an assistant to do things and I think another one that really doesn't get a lot of tension is I think planets will be colonized by human and I think that's why it's not your hitting the one I can say I think like on this yeah just like so excited about we're in this like such a great time for space exploration.

And rocket launches and I think yeah I think humanoid will be a really great tool for humanity to help colonize and set up colonization facilities and place like the moon in Mars and when I land there I want the peanut colladas ready I want you know bad pre heated I want all the resources dug out on one to do the hard labor there I want to pre done.

We'll be ready for you Peter. It's interesting years ago one of the companies one of the moonshots I took swung and missed was the company called planetary resources we were going after asteroid mining and you know is warned it was too early and maybe it was but what was wrong was I didn't have enough personal capital to see it all the way through and when we missed a financing it really

it tumbled and we had to launch failures and I couldn't survive all three of those and I'll take a I'll take a swing at it again but with $200 million of disposable capital to spend on that and not have to wait for someone else to decide because as you know there's a huge advantage of being able to just fund it in the beginning

yourself and not have to convince everybody is a lot of much on entrepreneurs will spend 70 80% of their time raising money trying to convince person after person versus doing the hard work and in the asteroid business having humanoid I mean space exploration is so enabled by able to send robots out there to do the work and prep materials and it's a massive multi trillion dollar marketplace so excited

excited for that part of your business yeah I'm excited for you to get out there and and do around two here yeah me too I am curious I am a space and tech geek I know you are too so let's I'd love to review what are your favorite robots what what did they get

right and what did they get wrong in on in the TV and in movie world oh like not like the sci-fi world yeah the sci-fi world yeah let's think it let's take it science fiction like you know you want to go to you want to go to star Trek with commander data when you're a star you want to go to lost in space you want to go to you know the Jetsons what are the robots that like yeah man they got so close or that was really stupid it's it's like so funny that like it's almost like the last couple

decades it's like the next couple decades is like making all these sci-fi movies that we grew up with and novels real it's like it's like you look at like you car is coming we have rockets going on some planets we we have home robots hopefully coming we're extending healthy life spans we're going longevity yeah except I were almost like predicting the future like you know 50 years ago and I don't know just like so funny how this is like open

in so many ways coming true today and I think if you're just like you know even a harvest if we're going out of the world we're seeing humanoids out there doing work it's going to which I think it happened in like the near term in our lifetime so I think it's going to feel like 50 100 years is pulled forward

into the present it's just going to feel crazy and it's going to be so hopefully spectacular I think so so I'm going to I'm going to hold your feet to the fire here commander data star Trek do you like commander data is a robot I wasn't the biggest star track guy growing up I was more in you know I was a gas moth side of things and few others but yeah I mean community is great okay a positronic brain is a useful thing to have and so we'll see that run figure 0 7 probably yeah all right how about

how about RTD 2 and C3PO would they get right would they get wrong yeah what's your view of this you know I like C3PO but you know that sort of lever arm on little you know actuator sticking out of their arm that I didn't like that very much and and R2 D2 I just I don't think you're going to build that shape and form and find it very useful I guess back of a speeder it might be useful yeah I remember one of the robots that really influenced my life early on was in

space in the original TV series you're probably too young to remember that but they came out of the recent one that look pretty cool so any other robots from the visual like the R2 D2 story it's like I feel like everybody is like coming at me now and saying like what you got to put some wheels on this robot like why are you walking walk why are you dealing with that complexity of wheels and you mentioned

the four factors probably not right I just see you know we have a hard time seeing a fixed wheel base which is even like manipulators working extremely well in the market there's a lot of people that have chased this for for quite a long time I mean if you go into warehouse that that robot that needs to have like a Z axis needs to have like an elevator moving up and down need to pitch it forward like in the back so we should

back up a shelf or something like that then you're basically getting roughly to the same complexity and actuation and degrees of freedom and you would a humanoid and so yeah it's funny the R2 D2 ever I feel like everybody's trying the skeptics are all trying to force me into an R2 D2 for a factor which is kind of funny yeah I'm glad you know there's there's a level of purity in actually going after the human form exactly

so I am curious but one other thing actuators for muscles because I when I was a kid I remember reading about actin and my son and muscle contraction and so forth and always hoping and wondering would they come up with a material that when you apply electric current it contracts like a muscle does right and that that would be the ideal actuator to replicate a robot with versus a rotary function and a screw function and so forth did you

look at that are we are we getting any kind of a electro mechanical muscle tech coming our way the human body is just so spectacular like the way that our muscles work even the joints like our you know balmsack it like you know I say shoulder has like three degrees of freedom so we you know for for figure we have you know pitch on roll here we have to do through three different actuators that are almost like you know activated

serially across the kinematics so you know imitating and getting to where the human is at in terms of degrees of freedom and efficiency is just a word is extremely hard like we're going to be off by a decent amount for a while we've looked at a lot of different technologies including a lot of hydraulics and other applications outside of just like rotary or linear electro mechanical actuators and really have a hard time hitting any of our requirements for maybe packaging or mass

or anything like that it's almost like this debate of people like what about this or that it's like we have no problem hitting any of these with lecture mechanical actuators like though we have enough energy and power on board we have enough degrees of freedom we have right speeds and torques out of the actuators to make this happen there's just like there's it's just sufficient to make it work and high volumes we get the cost down quite a

lot there are some areas that were spending a decent amount of time on on more of the academic research side that we think are really interesting but we think they're just a little bit far far enough out where they're not applicable to be able to put on to a humanoid and to do useful work the next few years as we wrap this up I I want to ask you again to serve our entrepreneur listeners here you started company what are the most important things that you did in starting this company in terms of

creating culture or hiring the right people like lessons learned this is your third really big major success and you know a lot of people hopefully one out of ten might be a success not you know three in a row hopefully but you had to learn some lessons and like like I'm not going to screw that up next time or I'm going to make sure that this is page one line one of the company so what's your mentorship for entrepreneurs for doing something like this?

Yeah I really don't have these like heuristics of like hey you just got to do this and it's going to work I think you know this is like problem solving and it's finest it's being extremely robust with these decision making processes I definitely have like the playbooks that I've been operating for a long time that have seemed to be successful here a figure in our shirt in my past companies you know first is really identifying a really useful idea

that I you know can work can can work and be like it satisfies the person of goals why you set out to do it and for my case it's really not about the money it's about making a much larger impact as I can while I'm alive and I think this is an industry where I can make a extremely large contributions to humanity and it's just going to be a really spectacular future this works well so I think it really lies well with like what I'm trying to do is on a personal perspective and on a mission

two is I think getting the right team in place is probably really important if you work backwards like what is the goal of the company it's the ship a useful product or service there's like you need a team to go do that it's generally not like you know especially stuff that's harder

it's not one person sitting around it's you know a bunch of like maybe the best minds in the world working here really hard and like together to make this really happen so the very strong proponent like building the right team from the from the get go

I'm a very strong in terms of like finding a separate direction for the company you really have at a company especially at least age really have like two lovers you have a compass and you have a speed so you really want the compass to be dialed the right way

and you really want to hit the gas as hard as you can so I can all the time in that in that order yeah you have to you don't hit the gas the wrong way it's like really tough it's really like you know you're early enough it's fine but when you get bigger

it's like a big ship at the small rudder it's really tough to change directions so I figure in both archer but a figure I wrote the master plan which was online it's like a 10 year vision document we have a culture doc which I also wrote in terms of like

defining our culture and like what you should expect if you come over here and I just thought I want to pause there yes those two things are what I wanted to call out of you I think having a vision document right that is clear and defining that aligns the organization

from the beginning your master plan and a lot of times if an entrepreneur is a founding CEO if you're not clear about that and if there isn't that compass heading and you are hiring high horse power individuals they can start tearing you in different directions

and that alignment is so critical and then the second thing you said which is equally important defining and creating the culture you want from day zero so it's probably the most important thing I think you said here yeah I think like it's funny

I'll have a little bit to another side of this what I just said which is a little countertuitive but I remember like you know 15 years ago I'd read so much literature about like you know blitz scaling and like how to maintain a good culture and like you know as a young entrepreneur

you look at this and say most of everybody dies they don't make it two years and I'm sitting here reading how to blitz scale and how to set a right culture 10 years from now and how to set the right direction and like I can't feed myself let alone like make the company work and so a little bit of this is like having done it before it is important at the end of the day what is like you know maybe like the last thing I'll add to this section would be we got to get out and ship product

and I think at the very core of what I love about you know building figure and archer and veterans we had a strong mission belief that we need to ship product and ship it fast and I think if you come here one of the big shocks somebody might have from the big corporate

somewhere else is that we move incredibly fast and we want to ship product as quick as possible and recursively make it better and I think the rest of the stuff is almost like these guardrails to help that out like the culture the master plan the people everything is supporting this like middle like like almost like river that's flowing and it's flowing fast so we can control the where it flows to but we really want to ship product really quick

so I think my advice to a lot of entrepreneurs in the early days like the most important thing we could be doing as an organization is focusing on product and shipping product not working on PR not working in some ways like getting the brand perfect or getting the right article and tech crunch

and it's really about you know getting the useful product or service out the door and so I think my overwhelming advice for everybody is get out there and ship product and that'll be like the biggest the most important thing you could be doing as a founder or entrepreneur yeah it's hard hardware walks bullshit yeah hardware talks bullshit walks right it's the ratio of something to nothing is infinite gotta get out there and build it right yeah for sure

Brett where do people find you on social media tell us where they can learn more about you as an entrepreneur and CEO yeah personally I am I am basically trying to build in public with figure in my life as much as possible in Twitter so you can find me there and then you're handled your handle it your handle it Twitter is what it's my it's adcock underscore Brett okay perfect thank you yep and then professionally like you know figure dot a i as the website

and then my last company archer dot com our good ways to kind of like get you know like a better understanding of the company so I built and yeah and if you're you know looking to try to make an impact here I'd really like put a plug out to apply

apply to come to figure we're trying to look for the best and brightest and I hired the best town the world's always a top priority for us yeah and you've done that again congratulations so blown away by the team you put and really excited to come and play and see and touch and and yeah and maybe

we can do this podcast again from your facility with one of your robots playing in the background next time we're ready so let's get you out here and see some robots awesome everybody Brett adcock figure thank you buddy pleasure to have you on this picture happy