$39B founder says his company could 100x in 5 years

19:38It can do every job I'd want it to do. That's what we're working on. We think that's the largest gap in the schedule of what we need to go solve for. It's that. Then beyond that, people generally sometimes confuse consumer electronics manufacturing with car manufacturing. There's no big company in the world that would say, like, I'm scared of manufacturing this consumer electronics at high rate if there's so much demand. Like, this is just possible to go do. I mean, we make a billion phones almost, like, you know, pseudo by hand in the world and with some automation. But cars is a different story.

20:14Cars, like, you will die trying to manufacture cars. There's, like, a lot of companies. Like, you just, like, it's so... And having seen, like, you know, BMW is a commercial customer of us. I haven't been to BMW and a few other groups. like it's gnarly. The reason why cars are so hard is that you can't hold the part in your hand. Phones, you can just like always hold in your hand and go change or whatever, move and hold. Like cars, you can't. You physically can't. So you need robots that like literally pass it to other robots that put things on the chassis. And if any of those break across like thousands or 800 robots, your whole line's down.

20:45And so it's just like huge giant robot you're building that's building the car. And with figure, you can hold any part in your hand. So I think we're like, if we're like between cars and like consumer electronics were like over here. Closer to like, you know, we're like, you know, the 40 % level over here by like cell phones. Like we, you know, we just made our 1000s EVT robot for figure three last week or week before that. When you say you made a thousand, those are a thousand that go to customers like BMW or you're making prototypes internally? What does that mean? We have like two bit like large customers.

21:16We have us as like an engineering and like AI research org that needs like robots like here. Like every engineer needs a robot. We need, like, every lab needs robots. Like, we need, like, to do tons of testing. There's just a lot of work we need to go do internally. We call it, like, maybe, like, engineering fleet we need to go to. And the second one is go to customers. So we haven't been going to both right now. We've actually shipped out robots to our third customer this week. When they go to customers, what do they do? What can the robot do? What, you know, maybe can't it do at this point? We do a lot of, like, logistics stuff right now and packages.

21:49We have other stuff we've done in manufacturing. Mostly just manufacturing and logistics. we've done in the past. But we're also talking to folks about other industries. And at this point, when it goes to a customer and it's doing, I don't know what you said, like packaging work or what is that, like sorting or carrying or what is it doing?

22:04Sam Parr:They just did a live YouTube video and they had hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of views of people watching this robot sort packages off of a conveyor belt. Yeah, I saw that. So is that the type, is that like, give me an example of one of the jobs. Yeah, that's an example of like a very close like one of the works we do. Is that customer like, oh, this is awesome because I can't find the labor to do this. It's too expensive to humans. This is way cheaper. Or is it just like, hey, look, today it's not faster, cheaper or better necessarily, but like it's an investment in the future where two years from now that cost curve is going to work and it will be faster, cheaper, you know, whatever.

22:41No, no, no. It's like, it's the pitches like they come to us and they're saying like, we're dying with labor. It's like, we're like, we have like really high turnover. Some areas have over 100 % turnover per year. It's really expensive to find talent. We have just a large talent shortfall. The talent's really expensive. Wages are going up. And we don't have a solve for this. We can't figure out how to automate all this work. And we need you to come in and help us. We have an ability to make a lot of good money in our contracts. And the customers make really good ROI on this. You've got to think a robot can do multiple shifts per day, work seven days a week.

23:15We can have a lot of uptime. The task you saw on the logistics line that we should livestream, it was actually a real use case for one of our customers. That needs to be done at three seconds a package, and it needs to be done five hours a day. I think it's like five days a week. We did that 200 hours straight at 2.9 seconds a package. So we're already at human speeds. We're already doing this here. Now, they already have an ROI, and we're now in the early stages of getting these out to these customers and scaling it up. So over time, it will just put billions out to these groups. Hey, let's take a quick break.

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24:41Then you get like 1X and they're showing their hand and they're like, look at our hand. Look at this. This is the best hand you've ever seen. And then there's this service in San Francisco where they'll send a robot in to clean your apartment. And they're like, yeah, that works today. So can you help me separate fact from fiction? It seems really hard compared to most categories where I can just try the products quickly online or buy them and test them out. Yeah, 100%. So I think a few things. One is the amount of like noise in the market for Signal, it's just like, it's like, like you mentioned, it's like, it's out of control.

25:12Like the, like there's just so much bullshit out there in the market. It's like really hard to tell what the hell's going on. So let me summarize what I think is like the most important and work backwards. What I think the most important thing to do is to be able to ship robots autonomously at scale and useful work environments. Like they can like, you know, cook you dinner. like clean your dishes, like make your bed, like run the supply chain end to end, work in healthcare, build a building, like do logistics, like that sort of stuff. That stuff requires fundamentally onboard AI that you can run so you can do like autonomous work.

25:49You can't solve it with code. You need to do it autonomously. You need to do it over long periods of time and you probably need to move around and use like something in your hands and move stuff through the world. You know what I mean? It's like you got to like do stuff economically, like i'm gonna move like electrons around so i think at a high level like what we care about is not like the best robot that's doing backflips and running the fastest mile or dancing or in a parade or running outside in the woods like you know we don't care about that stuff dude i can't

26:17Sam Parr:wait till i see a figure like on a smoke break at the b &w fact like yeah i could have been a great back in high school but now i'm working at bw factory yeah so like like for us like we really want to show and demonstrate the ability to do like real things over long periods of time autonomously. Who's closest to doing that? Who's kind of most, most bullshit not doing that? Man, there's like so many groups out there. I don't want to name names. They're all teleoperating the robots and all their videos. And it's like, dude, you get accused of that though, all the time. We, we haven't put out a single thing ever.

26:48It's ever teleoperated. I don't think we've ever done it. Like we, we used some teleop internally for like data collection and for like, it's, It's good for like, you can do a lot of testing on some robots sometimes, but like, it's got to be like this bad thing now. It's like the equivalent of a self-driving of like some dude in like Kentucky is driving the car and is driving around that passenger. Everybody's taking a video of it. They're posting on the internet. I'm like, look at this. And it's just like, dude, that's like completely faked.

27:11Sam Parr:But one thing that I've never understood, and I've been wrong many times is how fraud happens. But I'm always like, when you have hundreds of employees and you're doing something fraudulent or you're doing something sketchy or you're doing something that's highly exaggerated, my hope, and I think this happens most of the time, is people are like, hey, I work here. This is bullshit. I can't, I'm not going to do this. I think there's like this, like in somehow in the robotics space, it's become okay. And it's like, for me, I'm just like, this is the worst thing I've ever seen in any industry I've been in as an entrepreneur.

27:42How do you know when you watch those that it's teleoperated? They'll say it's not autonomous. The ones that are like running fully autonomously will like write that in the headline because it's so hard. I remember Tesla put a video out one time of the robot folding. And then in the bottom right was a teleoperation hand glove, you could see in the video. So people get caught doing that. You just know in the industry, people will comment at the company later, like, hey, this wasn't autonomous. So if you're in the industry, you know, you can follow it. It's also really tough. I don't know if there's any other company in the world that we've seen that you can watch do autonomous work with AI on board on useful work with a humanoid.

28:21We haven't really seen it. Maybe there is. I don't. I haven't seen it.

28:25Sam Parr:I've made jokes with you before where I was like, you started with Vetteri, which is just like a job recruitment thing. Now you're on these world-changing things. And you were like, well, Vetteri actually is world-changing. And here's why. And you gave this pitch. It was very good. You're very good at pitching. You're very good at raising money. You're very good at being charismatic and convincing people of stuff. When you're crafting a pitch to recruit and convince people to change their lives, to uproot their lives, and to trust in you and to come and build a company, how do you craft that pitch?

28:52Sam Parr:And what was that pitch for some of your companies? I mean, most of all these are online. I mean, the figure master plan is on the internet, on the site. Arches was up for a long time. I posted about it. I think deep down, I really want to find folks that really care and are obsessed. And I'm like, I think most of my time is not, I know you want to know about the pitch, most of my time is trying to find those folks. I found that even in the Bay Area, where it was probably like the richest AI and engineering folks in the world, 90 % of everybody out here is not good at their jobs. How do you tell who's good and who's not?

29:27I technically assess them, all of them. Yeah. To do that, does that mean you need to be as good or better than them technically to be able to assess somebody? I need to know like a certain guiding principles. Like, for instance, I need to know, like, if A, if you did the work or if you, like, watch somebody do the work. If you've done the work, it's like, it's like, it's like a scar you carry with you. It's like, it's like dug into you. Like, you know all the details. You can talk about it freely. You don't need to think. You'll understand how to, like, reverse engineer everything you've done and discuss it.

29:57The folks that haven't done it can't do that. They just, like, they can't even go, like, they get one layer and they just, like, instantly blow up. They can't talk about it. They don't know why. Out of 100 candidates who sound good, how many, like their resume looks good, the recruiter thinks they're good. Out of 100 candidates, how many would you say actually hit that bar? I'll give you an example. We have a really challenging process to go through to be a mechanical engineer here at FIGURE. You have to be able to build actuators from scratch. There's bearings and motors, and we have a gearbox, we have other sensors inside the system.

30:30It's very compact. you know uh it's just a very difficult thing to do uh and like really hard requirements we've been doing 10 case studies a week for six months and have not hired anybody that's insane it's insane

30:45Sam Parr:but when you do get someone qualified and their competing offers are companies that are larger or or more liquid than you and the offers are i i i think they're like tens of millions of dollars a year, right? The AI side is certainly like that. The AI side has gotten, and it's mostly all driven from Meta. At Hark, I've never seen, I thought maybe Meta was paying these people for a year ago and it would go away. They've not stopped. So what's a crazy story that you've heard? We gave an offer to somebody that was really senior. They were coming from XDI. XDI completely blew up. Everybody just laughed about six months ago.

31:26It was just like Macroheart got fully disbanded. There was basically a bunch of stuff that happened. We interviewed a pretty senior guy on the AI info side. It was great. I think I gave him a really good package of Series A stock at Hark. And it was, I don't know,$15,$20 million of stock. Over four years? We do five for my companies in the early days. Then we transition to four a little bit later. We're still at five. I think we can 10x Hark here pretty quick. And so I was like, okay, you have like, you know, 15, 20 million. I think 10X, you have a few hundred million dollars. I mean, 10X more time, you have a few billion dollars.

32:02And I think we can do it. I think we like, we have to like, obviously it's gonna be hard, but I think we can do it. And he got an offer for, to go to Meta for 36 million of four years of our shoes. And he was like, it's kind of guaranteed cash. You know, I go there and I have to like weigh this, like maybe like$200 million at Hark or$20 million or maybe like 36 for sure at Meta. And he left them going to Meta. And they've been doing that. Like every candidate we speak to is like making some absurd, absurd thing. They just haven't stopped. They've just been, they've been at it since like for like a year, a year and a half.

32:32They've been buying talent. They've been buying their way into the AI race. What do you think of that strategy? Like, you know, even if you kind of hate it, do you respect it? Do you just think it's a fool's errand? What do you think of that? I really like it. I think like the AI space is what I found is the folks that really understand how to do like language pre-training and mid-training and post-training, especially pre-training. and the infra around supercomputing and data and evals and all the right stuff you need to get put in place to do that right. And the amount of folks that really understand the right kind of like recipes that transformers do well in and, you know, around MOE or whatever you're going to look at, I think it's really hard to find.

33:07It's actually really hard to find the actual folks that know what they're doing. I think there's probably, my rough calculus now is probably like, or rough back of the envelope, is probably like 20 to 30 people in California know how to build really good AI models.

33:19Sam Parr:Wait, so, but is that trickling down? So you said that there was a senior guy, but like are even some of the less than senior, the 20-somethings, the young 30-somethings, are they still getting eight figures a year? No, the like the junior guys, like the guys in their 20s, like the late 20s or something are getting like they're making like a few million total. So they're making like 200, 250 in base. They're making like another million or whatever, like in a year in like our shoes every year. And so they're going to pay like a million to, you know, like$750 to like$2 million or so range per year.

33:53And that's been driven up by meta. But then all the other labs have like followed comp. When I asked you, what do you think of that? You said, I like it. Were you being sarcastic? Or you're saying, no, actually, that is smart given how hard it is to get this talent. I think it was really smart. And I would have done the same thing if I was Mark. I would have bought my way into the race. And I think he's like, he's doing that now. I don't think I would have done that. I want to understand it and I want to like first order, like find the right folks that really care deeply about this and not hire like mercenaries.

34:26And so he hired a bunch of mercenaries. They're just purely money driven. They came over there. Then nobody wants to go to Meta. They just, they're going there because they're getting paid a guaranteed RSU package by sitting around. And what's happening is like, you don't need like a thousand people or 500 or 300 to design AA models. You make a really good team of 20 or 30 or 40 people. and that you can get there without doing this. And those people probably would care more deeply about the mission and where you're at and be more committed than just if you purely throw money at the problem. But I think if I was like, I think it was a really good strategy and it's working.

35:00I think hats off, like really good execution, their recruiting efforts and how they're structuring this stuff. And it's like, I think it's like paying off for them. Jury's still out if they can like actually ship real products. I think like the problem I have with those groups is they've just traditionally have not been able to do things new well. I mean, I think Facebook is probably gonna, Meta's gonna go down and like one of the greatest acquirers in all time with like, you know, Instagram and WhatsApp and different ways. They've like bought their way into those spaces. But like, you know, if you look at like the Ray-Bans and everything they're doing, it's just like, it's just not great work.

35:33And so I think the question really is, how do you really do great work here? I think like we're even talking like, we're using like the Hark system right now and it's so good. It's so much better than anything I use today. You got to send it to us.

35:44Sam Parr:Yeah, can we use it? Well, yeah, we used you guys early on that. Yeah, for sure. It's like research preview. There's like 500 PhDs and then me and Sam. Yeah, exactly. No, well, like every other platform. Hark, what's the weather outside? I can answer that. Yeah, no problem. What I'm trying to say is like every week, there's like five or 10 like junk AI slop startups or like things that are coming out. They're just like not very good. Like this whole space has gotten to a point where like there's just not great things coming out the door. I think the stuff in coding is probably really excellent right now, but everything beyond that is just kind of like not great.

36:15On January 1st of this year, you've made four predictions for the year. I want to check in and see how you think they're going. First one. Number one, humanoid robots will perform unsupervised multi-day tasks in homes they've never seen before, driven entirely by neural networks, long time horizons going straight from pixels to torques. How are we doing on that one? On track, off track, or done? On track. On track? Yeah, four months. Yeah, I see every day what we're doing. Like we're on track. The hard part here is we already do pixels to Torx. It just means like we're taking camera feeds and we output like where to put the motor, like put the, you know, we want to put a, we want to like tell the motor like what to do to get to the hand in the right spot or the joints.

36:58So we already do that. Getting into a new house that's never seen to do work, that's the hard part of this problem. We're working on that, I'm working on that every day. This is where I spend about three, four hours a day, every single day, seven days a week on this problem. So if a figure robot showed up in my house, what would it, what's the bottleneck right now? Like it wouldn't know what to do. It wouldn't know where to go. It wouldn't be able to, you know, fine tune, handle my dishes. Where would it suck for me? We can fold laundry, like as an example, but then going to a new place where we're folding in a different location with different lighting and maybe different like table height and different types of laundry and different like types of scenarios it's never seen before.

37:33It's like the model's like out of distribution. It doesn't know what to do. It's like if you removed all the pyramid data from the pre-training of LLMs, they wouldn't know how to talk about pyramids. And we just like, we don't have enough of that data out there. It's not on the internet, so you have to go out and collect it. So what we need to know is like how much of that data we have to go sample in the world to be able to train the model, to be able to go into your house and say fold clothes is a good example. Hey, stupid question. Why do all the robot companies care about folding clothes and doing laundry?

38:03Wouldn't it be commercially better just to say, hey, we're going to build like the best warehouse worker because there's already 20 million of those in the world and that represents this much billions. And of course, that buys us the runway to get the robot folding robot done. But why do you care about that at all today? Why not just industrial work that people don't want to do, companies need done, they're ready to pay, and it's not like my home where there's all these other sensitivities. Why do you guys care about that right now? We didn't care about it in the past. When we first launched, we're like, we're going to basically do the commercial side to pay for the home long-term.

38:36and that was the strategy. It made a lot of sense. Like there's like, we can charge a lot more in the commercial market. It's like much easier to do. It's like lower veritability. We're in like a little work site. You just work 24 seven, just so much simpler. What I've learned now is that the home is super solvable today. So like we can like not go work on that problem and just like sit here and work in a warehouse. But me or none of my guys want to solve that problem. We want to solve a robot that can go into any environment just through language and do work. We want to be the first to do that.

39:04You can probably do that with 100 robots and a 50-person team. So that company overnight would be a trillion-dollar market cap.

39:10Sam Parr:That sounds good. Do that. We're doing that. That's what we're doing. Like, we're going to solve that. I think we'll be the first. We call it, like, solving general robotics. And iRobot, don't they attack the humans? I don't remember this movie very well. Yeah, don't worry about that. Okay, not that part of iRobot. Who could win in a fight right now? Can a human still win? Yeah, a human can still win. Okay. What are the other predictions? All right, other prediction. one you had on here daily AI usage will shift people will move beyond text to highly multimodal voice agents with persistent memory will become common which will push AI closer to the synthetic human intelligence we've imagined in sci-fi we're doing that at Hark we'll ship that in a month and our first version of it it'll get better and better I think we're on track for that have the labs ever like has ChatGPT or Claude have they ever released the data on this like I use a ton of the voice things Sam do you use the voice stuff a lot?

40:01yeah I don't type really at all Yeah, I wonder, it's probably already a huge percentage.

40:05Sam Parr:It's gotten to the point where offices need to change. Like these open-air offices that are popular in startups, they're kind of whack right now because I want to talk in private. Yeah, a lot of engineers have microphones now where they're whispering. They're just in hushed tones whispering to their computers. Yeah, I was talking last night and I was like, Claude, why am I so indecisive? And then my wife was like, Like, she was like, damn, dude, she can hear everything I'm talking to Claude about now. Yeah, no, I talk all the time, but it's embarrassing. Yeah, like, even speech still, like, sucks.

40:40It's still not great. Like, it's, like, almost like you set up, you have to go there, you have to, like, turn on. Like, it doesn't, like, really remember what you just talked to it about. Like, it can't do tool calling and computer use very well. Like, it's just, like, limited in these, like, you have to use it for a certain session. I don't know if we'll hit it this year, but certainly in 2027, you will hit, like, a full human Turing test with speech. You'll be able to take a phone call from an AI system on your phone, and I'll be able to fool you guys. I'll be able to have a human call you and a robot call you, and I don't think you guys will be able to tell the difference.

41:08That's a 2027 event. I feel pretty strong about it. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have.

41:36So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA, members FDIC. All right, what's the third and fourth? You had over the past 10 years, school shootings have increased by 10x.

42:07In 2026, the first full scanning system capable of detecting weapons from a 20-foot standoff will be built and beta tested in a K-12 school. Ah, man, we're going to be—we'll have our first—we're building our full-scale system starting in October. And I think it'll—well, I think we'll bring it up before end of the year. I don't know if it'll be at a K-12 school. So we might miss this one by a quarter. Do you have separate CEO running that one or are you the CEO also of that company? I have a chief engineer from JPL at NASA that's like really good. And it's mostly a pure engineering project. There's like really not much to do on the business side.

42:41Like there's, you know, we have like some supply chain stuff and other things, but most of it's just like purely can you build a system that can detect weapons well? It's partly like a hardware problem. It's probably an AI problem. It's like roughly like a large scale. It's like a deep tech, deep engineering problem to solve. and my whole team is just all of engineers. They're really good. We actually made a pretty big change of cover. We would already be in market by now, and I pivoted the whole technology system about a year ago. We were building this like, we basically, I found a way to do everything very cheaply in silicon, in chips, and reduce the price by like 90%, make it much more scalable, make it work better, and we pivoted.

43:21The problem was that the fabrication times for designing our own chips and getting them out took about a year so we just got those chips in like a couple months ago and we're testing them and they're awesome uh now we need to make more and there's another six month lead time to make even more of them so it's just like we're like dealing with like real silicon long fabrication of very difficult chips lead times now um we'll be out of this at some point but uh it's not like chips you can go off and buy it you know off a shelf these are like custom design cover chips that like nobody's really ever designed before that we had a special fabricator in europe that had to go make them.

43:54And it took about a year.

43:56Sam Parr:Hey, you are firing on all cylinders right now, professionally, it seems. And I actually would like to know, like, what's the trade-off for the life that you're living right now? Because you're very optimistic. You seem excited. But what are all the trade-offs? Yeah, about five years ago, I had like a, like, you know, like having kids and the companies. I had an issue where like, I think of my life is like three pockets i have like work to care deeply about my family i'm like three kids they're pretty young right now and then i have like the call like the other stuff was like a friends in town or you need to go the annual golf trip or like it's a bachelor party or like you know it's a wedding in like europe or whatever it is like in this bucket over here and i felt like i needed to make a decision like i didn't need to do like if i want to do any of these well i kind of like i can't do all three and what i wanted to do really well is like family and i want to do like business stuff i want to I want to be A-plus in those areas.

44:53So I basically stopped the third bucket. I don't do anything anymore over here. So I had a friend in town from a college. It was my freshman roommate. And he was like, I'm in town for 10 days. I'm in the Bay Area. I want to meet up. I haven't seen him for a long time. It would be great to get a coffee. I was just like, oh, man, I'm going to be real. I don't have any time. I can't meet you. He's like, I'll make myself available. I'll come to you. I was like, I literally have no time. Every minute I'm away from one of these two is the minute I'm away from my family or work. and there's almost a limited amount of time I can put in both those buckets.

45:23Sam Parr:Can I ask you about your workflow? You made a joke. You're like, I don't use Slack. If you're comfortable, could you just like hold up your phone right now? What's on the home screen of your phone? What's your app set up? What do you got? All notifications. Oh, well, you got to open it up. Oh, what's my? Oh, so you have just tons of text. This is like my, those are all, I think, Slacks and texts. I mean, I use Slack. I just can't get through it during the day. I have Hark going through it, and then Hark texts me, I think it's important I need to look at it with a link so what's your setup like what's your like day to day when you're do you use a laptop at all or are you only on the phone I use a laptop yes laptop a lot laptop and phone I would say I use Hark now for all my AI stuff end to end even like tracking like stuff I'm doing on engineering projects recruiting all of it I do a track it's in my email it's in my Slack what about your to-do list that's all in Hark Hark may install that so what about before Hark I would My to-do list was done in a Google Doc.

46:20I had a doc called Replanning, and it would constantly keep updating every week. I would come in on Sundays usually and update my plans for the week, and I updated there.

46:29Sam Parr:And what about health? Are you doing anything for health? Yeah, I do. I've gotten access to some special doctors and things now, where they basically send you through the quarterly blood tests and the whole body scans and the CT scans of the heart, everything. And it's been honestly pretty unbelievable. What was unbelievable about it? The amount of data you get back and the thoroughness of all this. Like, for instance, like, you know, if you get a— you can get a CT scan of your heart for, like, 100 bucks. I think you can basically prevent heart attacks. You can get a full-body MRI, and I think you can, like, have early cancer detection.

47:04A lot of blood work can find some anomalies that you can go fix and better for your health. And there's, like, maybe, like, a dozen of those.

47:10Sam Parr:Yeah, but the solution to all those things are probably things you're unwilling to do. It's like, you're probably willing to eat whole foods, but like it's like get up go for walks exercise and that was outside of your buckets of of of focus yeah unfortunately i haven't been able to have enough time to exercise enough but you know eat right like i've i've like uh i eat pretty well now yeah i mean listen like someone's got to give i can't sit here all day yeah i mean it like i gotta go work i like i love i like you know i want to go crush these businesses when you uh you wrote in like our prep doc you said i went all in on my first three startups and I pretty much hit rock bottom every year.

47:48Can you describe what you mean by rock bottom and what is your method of dealing with rock bottom? What's the conversation you have with yourself or kind of the entrepreneurial strategy you have when you kind of hit those lows? Yeah. I basically almost for like 15 years was like always running out of money. You know, at Vetteri, we had a couple of pivots early on. We ended up raising like a$500 ,000 our convertible note in 2015. At that point, I think I took out like a$50 ,000 or$100 ,000 loan. I was not paying myself a salary. I was in New York City. I was like so broke. I was in the negative.

48:28We raised the convertible note. It did not look great. And I think it was like six months later, we launched the marketplace at Vetteri, and it just like completely took off. And then a year later, we sold for$110 million. and I think that period from 2012 to 2017 was just like, was like, I had like basically like debt, things weren't working and it's hard. And what's the inner monologue? What do you tell yourself? The inner monologue is like, this really sucks, super painful. I think at that point, you just got to go like day for day. You just got to make it like day, you got to make, when things get really bad like that, you got to build a punch list and you just got to get through it.

49:04Like there's only way out is through. So you need to build a punch list and you need to get to day to day. You got to go day to day. You can't go week to week, two days, can't look at Friday. You got to go every day you get to the next day.

49:16Sam Parr:Pile through it. I was training for this ultra marathon and I hate like really long distance running. And I read this story about this guy who kind of helped me. And he was like, just all you got to do is like pick something. Like it doesn't matter if it's 100 feet or half a mile in the distance, even though you have 49 miles left to go in the race. Just pick something half a mile away and tell yourself once you get there, then you'll consider quitting. And then you get there and you're like, okay, maybe I have a little bit more. And you pick another thing just like only 200 yards away. You're like, okay, I'll consider quitting when I get to that.

49:45No, it was great. I think it's exactly how I thought about it. But it was like, it's like, okay, so then I sold Vetteri. And then I was doing Archer. I was like, oh man, I just made$110 million. I mean like 12x all the adventure guys. And then I was like, we're going to raise money. I'll be raising money. It'll be fine. And like, everybody's like, what are you doing? For Archer? Yeah. Everybody's like, what are you doing? We're not going to fund this. What are you talking about?

50:03Sam Parr:How do you fight that inner monologue where everyone says you're stupid and wrong and this is silly, just go do software? It's coming from a place of conviction. Like I know I'm right because I've done the work. I understand it. I'm on the floor. Yeah, but the odds are still against you, right? But that's the game. That's when you play this game, it's like you sign up and like 95 % of everybody around you will fail. Like, remember what Vetteri, we started at the NYU Incubator. I was so excited. We got in one of the semesters. I think it was like 50 companies that were there. We started in Soho.

50:36It was great. We had a great time. I think if you look back, I think like five years later, me and one other guy are the only two people that made greater than zero dollars. One other team. 48 companies went to zero. And I was just like, holy shit. If you're around this game for long enough, everybody dies. And that's everywhere. It's been like that for 20 years now. I've been watching around. you like you see all the tech crunch stuff and things on x about people raising money and all this and just like over time that all just kind of fades away and it's just really brutal um so i had to like i had to like i you know i had to like i bought a house and like i had to put all the rest of the money into archer and then i had like a stock lock up so even while i was coming over to figure like the like the stock was like unlocking i was funding figure with stock from archer because I had no other cash.

51:27Stock was coming down. The stock was just like literally like a falling knife. Well, at that point, it was just like, I think it went from like 10 bucks to like two. And it's since like gone up a lot. But like I had to take a second mortgage on my house to do even fun figure. We asked you one of your philosophies and you said, I believe that doing hard things is easier in many ways than doing easier things. Can you explain? Like everybody's trying to do easy things. When you work on harder things, you have less, generally overall, probably there's first order, less competition. You have probably a hard thing probably means it could be a potential really big TAM, really big exit if it works.

52:07You have just risk-reward trade. You have folks that probably want to work on hard things. You probably want the best overachievers in the world that wants to work there. Generally, hard things have this binary payoff for investors. They really want to fund those things because they could have a 100x return for the portfolio. know and i think there's like a non-linear curve to scaling like here i mean of the difficulty here meaning like i think a lot of the hard things are not like 10 or 100 times harder i think the hard things sometimes are like two or three or four times harder maybe five times harder but they're not 100 times harder so you might have 100 times better payoff but it might be like three or four times harder i'll give you an example in robotics i think like largely building like quadruped robots like four-legged dog robots versus humanoids like probably humanoids are probably like three times harder than that.

52:52Maybe four. That's it. But like there is really no, I don't think it's like really a real market for humanoid like those dogs. I think it's just like a niche thing. I don't think it's a real business for it. And I don't know anybody really at this point like really wants to spend a lot of time on that. So like you do humanoids, it's like okay three times harder but it's probably like a million times higher payoff. Probably like a million X or a billion X. Higher ROI for that. You know what I mean? For investors, for humans that want to work there and get stock and participate in the upside and for everything else.

53:20Like why would you ever like want to work on like four-legged dogs. What economic value can a robot dog bring at scale? Like if you really understand it, like I think there's everybody's trying to do the easy work and it just becomes really difficult. You know, look at all the AI slop like open claw harnesses out there today. It's all crap. It's all not good. They're all going to go. I don't think any of them will make it long term. You might have some consolidation here and there for acquihires and stuff, but like that's going to go all the way.

53:49Sam Parr:Dude, you're talking so many absolutes. has that not gotten you in trouble ever? I don't know. I mean, mark my words. Like, you think, like, have you guys even used OpenClaw since then? No, I don't know how to. Oh, did you use OpenClaw? I never trusted OpenClaw to set it up. I mean, I used to use it. I don't use it anymore. It's not very good. Like, the wave's over. I don't know. I'm just trying to say, like, I think it's like, I think the most important thing you can do as a founder is to think through what you're going to actually go do. Because you're going to spend the next 10, 15 years doing it.

54:20and it'll map the whole course, the probability course, it's like a probability weighted decision of like our probability of like potential outcomes.

54:29Sam Parr:Well, but you're talking about a very particular game. Like for example, as you've said, you're like, we're going to be a trillion dollar company or we're going to go bankrupt. Like it's binary. Most business is not binary. You're playing the game where binary is the outcome and that's what you like. But it's not like that for a lot of people. like for a lot of people, if they can build a really cool$10 million a year business, that's a massive home run. Is it? If they can do that well, and you look back when you're 70 or 80, would you have asked the same person, hey, you built a really cool$5 or$10 million business.

55:03You did it for 30 years. You didn't do anything else. You didn't try anything else while you were doing it. You just work on that business. Would you have gone back 30 years ago and tried to take a bigger swing? Would you have taken a different swing than Vetteri? Vetteri was like that. Vetteri is my bridge. I sat inside of Vetteri for like seven years. Like we literally built like a marketing automation tool for us internally. And then like a year later, I was like, oh man, look at this. It's outreach.io. And it was like a billion dollar company. We built that internally a year or two prior. And then like watching all this different stuff happen.

55:33And I was like, man, we like, we actually did some of this work internally. It's like value less than some other groups out there. Like this whole decision of like what you spend time on is like super critical for startups. Assuming like there's a, and I do think startups are like, I think it is kind of binary. Even guys that get the$10 million, there's probably like another 90 % of those folks that just didn't make it when they're out there trying. So I think it's just hard. And I think, dude, kudos to guys getting like$5 or$10 million in business. That's hard, especially doing that if we maybe look a little bit of capital or no capital coming in.

56:04Hey, let me ask you real quick about your other stuff you've seen. So I'm sure because you're doing really interesting work, you meet other founders that are doing interesting things in unrelated spaces. So not humanoid robots, but equally cool, interesting, peek at the future. I think you've probably seen more of the future than us and definitely more than most of the listeners. Can you give us anything that you've seen or heard or read about, a founder you've met that's doing something that's like, oh, yeah, you guys realize, right? The future is actually going to look like this. And we're just, you know, it's not evenly distributed for all the rest of us yet.

56:38I like looking at, I like trying to think through this problem of what was the world going to look like in 30 years? Where is everything's headed? I think we have an energy problem. Not an energy consumption, like a generation problem. So how we, well, maybe both, but ultimately, how do we generate more energy as a species? I think there's a secular trend here that you want to go ride and really help. And I think there's a lot of work done correlating this to standards of living for humans. So I think there's a lot of work here. What is the next generation? Is it solar? Is it wind? Is it nuclear?

57:14and then there's a bunch of different traits inside of here for fusion and fission and the rest. I think it's a really exciting area. I think it would take a long time, but you need really great entrepreneurs there solving that stuff. I think AI is just going to dominate a lot of stuff in the next 10 or 20 years for all of us here. I think it's going to be like 100... We all live through the internet. I think it's going to be 100 times bigger than the internet. I think it's going to be so, so big. AI is going to eat the whole internet. It's going to eat it all up. and I think it's going to be an extremely large trend, both physically and digitally.

57:46Sam Parr:What are there any products that you're looking at or companies that you're looking at now that are not already the mainstream that you think are good examples of what you're talking about? I mean, we're working on this stuff at Harder Configure. It's unclear. We're still in this spot where it's really not clear who's going to do well here in this stuff. We're in this foggy area for a lot of these stuff. There's been no breakout here. there's been early wins and early breakouts, but there's like a next leg here that we're going to go through. And we're like, we're in it now. I think we'll know more in the next year or two what that really looks like.

58:19But I mean, I've used like every AI device out there. Haven't been super thrilled. I don't know if you guys are seeing stuff in the market for these type of things, but like, I haven't like, you know, been like, man, this is like a crazy great product.

58:32Sam Parr:I like the small stuff. Like Whisper, Whisper Flow has pretty meaningfully changed how I communicate. That's been pretty cool. I think that's been my big standout the last six months. What about, last question, what about people who inspire you? Because you have very high standards. Who or what type of entrepreneur or who are they, dead or alive, that you lay in bed and you're like, how would this person react to this situation? Or how do I have an attribute similar to the attribute this person has? I think I really admire the folks that are fully dedicated in their craft. You really watch the Michael Jordan documentary, he's just like, I just want to be the best in the world at this.

59:13I think for startups, have that same thing too. And I think first and foremost, what I can read, I'd never met Steve Jobs, but my Lord, stories I've heard and everything else, the guy was just an unbelievable operator and product-led founder. I've also gotten to know Jeff Bates was pretty well. He invested in Figure, and he's been here a lot of times. And I think Jeff has been a really good soundboard for a lot of things we've gone through. I had Jensen in here last week again. We are fairly close. And I think Jensen's just an unbelievable operator as well. He's very hands-on. He has a very unique way of managing NVIDIA and his organization the last 30 years.

59:49And I think he's done a lot of really good things.

59:53Sam Parr:What advice did Jeff give you that was meaningful? Jeff said the last time he was here, he's like, listen, you're at a really interesting period because you've figured out how to do this somehow. In the next year or two, you're either going to figure out how to break through and really get this working in a bigger way, or you won't, and it's game time for you now. And you've got to just get wired in and figure out how to break out and make this thing work and scale it. And it's a really interesting point. I don't know how you got here, and I don't know why you got here, but you're here, and you need to figure out how to...

1:00:20You're on the big field now, and your next big push is going to make or break it. So I think he's largely right. I think we're like... We've got robots now doing this stuff autonomously with AI models, which is crazy. I think four years ago, you've been like, I've been like, no way.

1:00:34Sam Parr:Dude, four years ago, I came to your office and you just had a knee working. And I was like, oh, that's a knee. That's cool. All it was was a knee. You had like, there was five engineers. You're like, this guy just got done building the Tesla X or Cybertruck or something. This guy did this amazing thing. This guy cured cancer. Look how the knee moves and the ankle has dorsal flexion. And we were just sitting around looking at this knee. And that was like the coolest thing. I don't know, man. It's like, and then now we have like AI that's working on a humanoid robot. We're taking in cameras. It's doing inference on board.

1:01:04It's outputting where all the joints go. You know, it's unbelievable. And it's crazy it works. And, you know, the next leg up is just like making that work at higher scale. So I don't know, it's been great. I think it's, I don't know, I think those are kind of some like, I think really good folks to look up to that really like love their craft deeply and really care. Well, Brett, I think it's time for you to get back to work, my friend. Great. Thanks, guys.

1:01:29Sam Parr:It was good to see you again. Thank you so much, dude. All right. That's it. That's the pod.

1:01:44All right. Let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Su. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.