Brett Adcock, CEO of Figure

0:00The meta problem in robotics is to be able to solve a humanoid robot. If you can solve this, it'll build the biggest business in the world by a large factor. A little under half the world's GDP is human labor. You recently went viral for comments on your OpenAI partnership with Fingr. What happened there? So OpenAI led our Series B a couple years ago. They brought in Satya and Microsoft. It got to a point where our team internally that was designing these models were running circles around OpenAI. We were just way better at this, so I fired them. I self-funded the whole company up front. You know, it got to a million a month of burn in four months.

0:29Getting the robots to do the things we showed you today is almost killed me. We had record production in March, and we're gonna try to 3X that by May. We wanna be able to get to a million units a year. You've raised nearly$2 billion publicly, stated at$39 billion. Do you see capital as a risk or a constraint, or the valuation as a risk? We'll just build like enormous of tens of trillions of revenue. We'll build something massive. I mean, what do most companies trade it? Tech companies trade it 10 or 20 times revenue. You're in like$10 trillion or, you know, whatever, or$100 billion to a trillion dollars in revs, like this is going to be a huge business.

1:13Brett, welcome to Sorcery. Thanks for having me. I don't know if this is going to be part one or part two, but this is a series now. I agree. I agree. We did the entire tour, and now we're going to do a sit-down interview. I figured we recently went viral for a lot of these hot takes at Hill and Valley. And so I think it would be great if we just start there. So what is your hottest take right now? On robotics? Yeah. Hot take. I think one thing that we spend a lot of time on is doing things with fully autonomous and end-to-end. And you asked us a few questions here when we walked in of like, is this teleoperated?

1:55we're not teleoperating this stuff. I think our hot take for robotics is just, it's kind of really difficult to see what's really happening in the space without coming on site and really seeing stuff. So I hope you had a good experience here today, seeing everything we're doing. I think my, and I think the hottest take I have is like, we just want humanoid robots to work and like they're working now. It's pretty simple. Like we're seeing robots to do everyday things. Like we saw clean up a living room, do commercial work, it's cool to see it. It's cool to see that this is going to happen in the next few years.

2:30This is a very hotly contested space, and it's becoming more and more competitive. It was funny because we did this interview with Skydio, and he was talking about, Adam was talking about the drone cycles. There are drone cycles where there's hype cycles and that kind of thing. But humanoid robots are certainly at a different scale and pace than before. So how does this feel with the competition?

3:02I think like the, listen, our internal goal is like, how do we get these things to do real stuff and get paid for it? And so we think a lot about how to do autonomous, useful work. That's our bar. And we need to do that with like AI models really well. And we need to do on good hardware. It's like, you know, cost effective. We can make a lot of it. We make a lot of robots. You know, we think we're probably at this point, a few years ahead of everybody globally doing this at this level, which is like, we're kind of early in the humanoid, you know, book. And hopefully the next step is like, how do we get more robots out at scale?

3:40And we want to be first to be able to do that. How do we get, you know, hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of robots in the world that run every day and the space is just early there's a lot of uh we're just like we're like in the first chapter of humanoids coming into society at scale and um yeah i mean what we're pumped about here internally is it's working and it's just chapter one chapter two is like get more out the door and get them working even like a bigger scale and at some point we want to really be able to generalize to do everything a human can how much do you want to produce a year what's the goal We'll make thousands of robots over the, like, here, like, basically as fast as we can this year.

4:21So we're ramping Bocu, like, lines up as fast as we can. We had record production in March, and we're going to try to 3X that by May. And we'll build thousands of robots. We basically have, we already have the parts in-house to do this, and we're ramping up production. And then, you know, from there, we want to build tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. and we want to be able to get to a million units a year. And then we need a commercial progress to also to match that. We have like so much commercial demand. It's like, it's hard to, we have like this overwhelmingly amount of, we could, I think I could like put, you know, I could put so many robots into commercial customers today if they were all ready.

5:02So the big gap is here is like getting the robots ready to do at scale autonomous operations. So the bottleneck right now for commercializing them is? It's having enough of them and making them run to a level of human performance at scale. What we don't want to do is like, we don't want to put like a thousand robots out to market and have like a thousand problems every single like hour. That's like, that's not good for any of us. So we had a small batch of robots that went out to B &W last year and did work every day. We ran for six months every single day. It was phenomenal. We learned a ton.

5:34We refactored our whole approach to how to commercialize the software and AI systems after that. And that kind of led us to Helix 2, which is our second-generation AI model internally that we launched a couple months ago. And now it's like, how do we put these robots into many different customers? We'll probably announce a lot of this in the next 90 days and put them out into those groups at a decent scale this year. And assuming that goes well, we'll just keep compounding that. So we had robots there last year. That went well. We learned a lot. We'll have like a much larger amount of robots going into many different customers this year.

6:14And then six in that goes well, we'll just we'll keep scaling like crazy. Are you worried about Optimus? In my mind, this is not a manufacturing problem. This is an intelligence problem. You're almost four years old. How did you scale up this fast? What was the process like? Yeah, I've been building companies for like about 20 years now. uh scaled a software company up pretty fast sold it scaled archer up pretty fast took it public and so um you know every time you know i'm scale i'm doing i'm in this phase i get to sit back and say how do what did i learn from past experiences and how do i do it better and um you know at figure we took a very differentiated approach to basically vertically design everything i don't think there's any group in the world that i wouldn't think on the robotic side that makes it designs more parts than we do on the robot.

7:07We design the motors, basically every part within there, the rotor, stator, everything. The sensors, the structure, the kinematics, the joints, the batteries that you saw today, the battery packs. That, I think, has really enabled us to control our destiny. We get to build our own supply chain. And without that, you're left at the mercy of some vendor. And then if that has an issue, how are you going to go solve it? If it's got a code problem, do you understand it? Can you QA it? Can you fix it? Can you patch it? So we understand the whole stack from top to bottom. There was an enormous lift up front to get the right people here that could do that.

7:44And then we've now been iterating through, as you can see behind us, to a point where we have decently reliable systems now that run really well. But head on, I self-funded the whole company up front. We got to a million a month of burn in four months. It was like a no joke. We had the 40-person team in four or five months. They were very good. and then just here, you know, 100 hours a week, just trying to make it work with the team. And we've made some mistakes. We've learned a lot. We've done some things well and just recursively getting better. Why'd you leave Archer? The meta problem in robotics is be able to solve a humanoid robot.

8:20It's if you can solve this, it'll build the biggest business in the world by like a large factor. Half the world's GDP, a little under half the world's GDP is human labor. I wanted to go work on building this, like this holy grail of robotics. At Archer, I, you know, I led design for every aircraft we have there. And I feel, I feel like this is now the decade we're going to bring humanoid robots to the masses. It's the, probably the most important, maybe one of the most important businesses of our lifetime. And so while I'm like a, you know, yeah, so I basically get, I get to, I get to spend time, I get to work now on what I think is probably one of the more important areas of my whole career.

9:05In Archer, I built the whole team up, led all the engineering design for all the aircraft, and led the company through a public offering. So we're now in a good spot to certify the aircraft and enter federal airspace. And FIGURE is also in a good spot here to really scale up physical intelligence to the world. I recently had Michelle Del Buono from A16C Perennial. It's Mark and Ben's multifamily office. And we were talking through liquidity events and what you do as a founder for your first liquidity event or second or third. Why did you decide after the IPO to start another company and fund it?

9:48Yeah. I started a few other companies actually since then as well. um i think the short story is i feel that i've been watching the humanoid space for like a couple decades like these we've been like seeing humanoids for a long time they've just been like the wrong we're on the wrong vector like we're building the wrong stuff or we're doing it in a hobby it's great or you know um the engineering decisions were like i think we're not maybe correct and i just i felt there was a need to uh advance the space much more rapidly and i'm doing the same with Hark and Cover. I have a couple other companies I'm doing where I also feel this similar situation there where I feel like if left to the world to go do it, I'm unclear if like we would head to the right direction.

10:32And I think for humanoids, like, you know, the best we had four years ago was like a, you know, Boston Dynamics had a hydraulic humanoid called Atlas. It like dripped oils everywhere. It lasts like 20 minutes. It was like very big, very unsafe. You could never put it on extra humans. Classical controls methodology there. And it was just like, man, you need to like, it's like a, you know, Bostonomics is really a large heritage around research, not commercialization or not as much commercialization. So I just felt that there was a need for a group to come in to really like send this thing to the masses.

11:05And I felt without my intervention in the space, I don't, I don't know if we would have gotten there or maybe we will, we'll find out. But I think figure has really shown that we've been able to kind of push the timelines left now in this chapter book to get to get to get into the real world and um and like i said i think it's a significant business sorcery is brought to you by brex the financial stack trusted by more than 30 000 companies including one in three venture-backed startups in the u.s nearly 40 of startups fail because they run out of cash brex is literally built to help founders avoid that unlike traditional banks that let your money sit idle shipping away at it with fees Brex's designs help you spend smarter and move faster.

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12:32That's why companies like NVIDIA, Anthropic, Salesforce, and Gemini partner with Turing. Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces, the kind of infrastructure Frontier Labs need to train superintelligence. Visit Turing.com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. How do you have time to also work on Harkin Cover? The trick is just not sleep. Oh. Do you have an eight sleep or you just don't sleep? You just don't sleep. Okay, listen, I like... Also explain what those companies do for people. Okay, so, um, so, Cover is basically designing, uh, like, detection systems for K-12 schools.

13:17So, school shootings in the U.S. have gone up 10x in the last 10 years. And just, like, this is, like, actual, like, a weapon's been fired. And, um, it's, like, it's, it just, like, basically got fully out of hand. Uh, my view is that it's a perception problem. We need to see if people have guns, like, kids or students have guns on them when they're entering schools. If they do, like, it's get them off the students. If they don't let those students go in. There's a technology that was designed at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab about a decade ago that it can detect weapons underneath clothes and in backpacks and bags from like, 10, 20, like, you know, 5, 10, 20 meters away.

13:53And they built it for the Iraq-Afghanistan war to find like bomb vests and other explosives and stuff on folks from a standoff distance. So think about this like a technology similar to the L3 scanning systems at an airport, but you can only do that from a few feet away. But if you do that 10x further away, you can just basically scan everybody as they're coming in schools. And it's not just a school thing. You can use it at every public venue in the world. And it's been all my passion. I've been following the space in here. The nerdy topic here is called terahertz imaging radar. And that's what we do here at Cover.

14:28and so I have a team most of which are from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab so one is I own the IP from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab I spun it out two years ago and I'm funding this project oh yeah how did you get it? I bought it oh they'll sell it to you yeah so they sold it to me 100 % you own it 100 %? I own it yeah okay and then Caltech which is like you know NASA basically JPL has a small very small minority interest in the business yeah and then a lot of the core team that did that is on my team now on cover. And it's awesome. Like the images we get, it's like a hardware and AI problem. It's like a vision problem that you have to solve with AI.

15:05And we have prototypes now that are running now. And we will deploy, hopefully, to our first schools in beta by end of year. And we want to deploy, and there's 130 ,000 K-12 schools. There's like a huge amount we have to manufacture and get out the door. So I've been self-funding that company for two years. We're making incredible progress. And I have a team in Pasadena right next to Jet Propulsion Lab in LA, and we're funding that. And then I have a separate company called Hark. It's an AI lab I started about seven, eight months ago. It's trying to design really highly personalized intelligence.

15:37So we're designing next-generation AI models and also the next generation of AI devices to interact with AI. Right now, we interact with AI through 20-year-old computers, like phones and MacBooks and stuff like that. And they're not the ideal intermediary and interfaced AI. So we just came out of stealth like two weeks ago, and we have a team of 50, and we're building really awesome, magical AI models, and we're building really magical hardware. You recently went viral for comments on your OpenAI partnership with Figure. What happened there? Yeah. So OpenAI led my series B a couple years ago. And as a part of that, we did a collaboration agreement to work on next-generation AI models together.

16:27And it was great. I got to know the team really well over there, Sam and the rest of the group. And they led our round. They brought in Satya and Microsoft. They co-led it. and um and then we spent basically a year like collaborating together on like how do we get ai models to work on a humanoid or how do we get like language models to work on a humanoid and um they were very interested in robotics and uh we were very interested in like like understanding uh better about how do we get like language like like language models on robots like what like what part do they play or do they play a part in robotics and so we spent a year working with them.

17:03But nice folks. I was working with them for almost every day or every week. And it got to a point where we were just like, our team internally that was designing these models were running circles around OpenAI. We were just way better at this. And we were better about testing on the robots, training the models, like all of it. My team had come from robot learning backgrounds for over a decade. And I think there was also some interest as OpenAIM was watching us get into robotics. And so I fired him. Why did you let them invest in the first place? I got to know Sam well and the team. And I thought there could be a lot of potential strategic interests from both of us, like how to develop some of these systems and learn from each other.

17:56And it turned out I was kind of wrong on that. Is that when or even before that, when you started to become more secure here? Because even coming in, my phone is covered. There's restricted areas. It's very close on IP. We've always been pretty secure. I think what we're doing is a very high IP risk. So we really think carefully about our engineering CAD and software, making sure it's very secure from a cybersecurity perspective and internal security perspective. And then our office is really open. You can see a lot of stuff when you're coming here. Yeah, so we used to have people come in and just snap photos randomly.

18:33They're like, whoa, that's not okay. I'm like hardware or something in front of the person. We used to go in the Bay Area and there's a lot of honeypots and spines. One day we're looking up and we're like, it was in this office. We look out the corner of the window at the top and there's a drone sitting there. Looking in the office, right over here, the main area. Yeah, we're like, oh my gosh, we've got to change some things here. Did you find out who that was? We didn't find out who it was, but we tinted all the glass. We have a really strict security, both physical and digital now. We're designing some crazy stuff, so we want to protect it at all costs here.

19:09But no, we've always been like this. A little paranoid, which always helps. It's a typical founder trait. Yeah, exactly. Speaking of that, one of our sponsors is Brex, and they're about performance, spending, smart and moving faster. I'm curious from your standpoint, As a leader, how do you maintain your performance, whether it's mental or team leadership-wise? You asked before, how do I have time to do all this stuff? I always have these three pockets of time in my life. I feel like I have my family, I have work, and you have things you do with friends and people you know. Whatever, annual trip with friends or golf or whatever else it is from college.

19:54about like, you know, when I was at Archer, I got to a point where I was like, man, I don't really have time to do all three anymore. So I decided like five years ago to like stop doing like the annual golf trip and stop doing like this person's in town. I haven't seen in 10 years. We need to go out to dinner. I just don't do that anymore. I spend all my time with family or my companies. That's all I do. And it's, it's, it's kind of nice. It's like the stuff I really care about and I get to kind of go all in on it and do a really good job. So here I'm like, I was at the office last night till like midnight, but like I, I, I come home every night to have dinner with my kids.

20:26Um, so I'm at home by six and I do dinner and do bedtime and then come back in if I need to, or stay home depending on what's going on, but usually it's back to work. Um, and just make sure I get the, like, make sure I unblock the most pernicious problems of these companies and help, help scale. Um, so anyway, I think from a time, uh, perspective, uh, yeah, I kind of have to be very thoughtful about, about what I do when I'm even in the office now, So I had to be really thoughtful about spending my time on. So what I've learned over the time, you asked when you came here, it's like, do you have like the corner office or do you have like a, you're in the, you know.

20:59The bullpen. The bullpen. Man, I have like a, so I, you know, one day after we took the, I took Archer Public, I woke up one day and I was like, I feel like it was in this Groundhog movie where I was like in this conference room with all my C-suite and was in there like every day. and you know usually i'm like on the floor with product engineering helping to build build aircraft design and i was just like stuck i was stuck in like two day quarter board meetings and analyst callbacks and talking about you know my chro or gc and all these different things and i was like this is just something's wrong here i'm in this like elite office over here like looking down on everybody, like not doing real work on the ground.

21:43And, you know, I made a decision kind of around that time to like just basically remove everything on my plate to spend time on like product engineering. So I do a few things like you're like the first person that's actually seen the whole office like this. Wow. Which is cool. We don't do a lot of these and I love your show. So it's like great to have you here and kind of give a sneak peek to the world on like what we're doing. Thank you. Yeah. And then the rest of my time is on like, how do I like work on product engineering? How do I advance the humanoid to do better things? Or how do I make cover system out to the world when you start testing it and getting feedback?

22:13And how do we get Hark models and devices out to the world at scale? Like, those are the things I think really matter. Matters less about, like, doing traditional PR and, you know, like, going to, like, trade shows and, you know, sitting on, like, these, like, panels and stuff. None of this matters. Yeah. It's not real. So I try to spend my time in the bullpen, and then I try to maximize my time both when I'm in or out of the office on things that are important.

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24:17Visit deal.com slash sorcery. That's D E L.com slash sorcery. You mentioned a bit of inspiration on ideas around coming from sci-fi, but on the leadership standpoint, like who are people that you admire or have looked up to that like help carry you forward and keep you motivated? Yeah, I was, I mean, kind of like a generation behind like Steve Jobs and that whole, you know, crew like jeff bezos which is a big investor for us a figure and you know i get i get to basically have access to and talk with and um you know for me like i want to play the game like 11 out of 10 i want to go really hard at this like so we're really serious i'm pretty competitive a person so if i'm going to do this and like sacrifice my life to do this and my time i i just want to nail it i want to win and i want to do uh i want to do everything to the most hardcore level possible and um so i think the folks i looked up to of the world are the folks that have done that have been successful but have like really devoted their time to being um kind of best athlete in those situations um so uh yeah and i'm looking at myself here like how do i make these companies work there's just nothing worse than like 10 15 20 years from now these things aren't working like well i should i like i missed all my golf trips you know what i mean i've missed like time with the family it's just like i just missed all the stuff in my life and i at this point I have plenty of money.

25:41So it's like I'm doing this because I love it and I better be getting better at it and, you know, recursively improving. And I think I look up to the folks like that that have done that through their time. If you look at like Steve and Jeff and some of these groups that are kind of a generation above me, they've been good at many things in their life across many different areas. And they've also too devoted their life to doing this and have been a good source of inspiration. And it's been hard and they've done it over decades. the stuff is like not the stuff doesn't happen overnight i mean i've been doing like 20 years now doing all this stuff and i feel like i'm just starting what are the biggest risks to the business the humanoid thing is just so hard um i can't like even explain it very well it's uh getting the robots to do the things we showed you today it was been like has almost killed me and we have such a uphill battle to go do that same with archer we have to fly aircraft every day above cities and make it really safe.

26:43And that's like one of the safest, worst transportations you have. So the stuff I'm working through is just like,