This $3B Founder Is The Next Elon Musk

you're like the whole milk version of an elon musk you know what mean you're the midwest version of the of an elon musk but what the hell did you know about building a fucking airplane you know what i mean what did you did you know anything about that no i did not i i do knew nothing i was just like i really wanted to do it yeah i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to all in it like a days off on road alright everyone we have a a really interesting guess his name is brett ad cock i've talked about him on the pod a bunch of times but let me explain why this guy's interesting so he started a recruiting website that he sold for a hundred million dollars which in most everyone's case that's a a massive home run you're you're incredibly successful of which he is but then he par that and invested pretty much one hundred percent of his money into another company called archer which basically makes like unmanned helicopters and then that took went public at like a one point five billion dollar valuation and he started another company called figure which is making humanoid they're basically robots that can work warehouses and do human labor the reason i wanted brett to come on is because i just wanted to think and learn about how someone who's so unique how they think and how they make decisions and so brett really subtle he's a he's a loki guy he he's not crazy high energy he's not one of these guys who we have on who is a a personality where they have a big personality on on youtube or twitter or anything like that he's subtle man the guy's humble and he's quiet and i find that to be incredibly fascinating my opinion in ten years brett is gonna be in the running of however we think of like these like howard hughes elon musk types of crazy folks who build these amazing world changing things brett gonna be that i mean he's already up there but i think he's gonna be like that and no one knows who he is now or at least compared to some of those other folks so what i want you to do is listen to this episode particularly like the last fifteen minutes when we talk about his latest company it's really fascinating and i want you to tweet at me my handles the sam par p a r r so the the word the and then sam and then par tweet at me and let me know what you think about this guy and what makes people like him special because i'm really fascinating with these types of personalities and i'm fascinating with how people can learn so much information so quickly it's just really fascinating to me so let me know give it a listen his name's brett ad hoc let's start the show alright dude let's just get right into it the reason you're interesting to me is because you're incredibly successful i imagine you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars but you you go all in on stuff so you told me with this new company figure you financed it for the first year and you put up most all of your money into it i was like i was like what what what's your asset allocation for your personal portfolio and you're like well i own archer stock which i took public i own a house and then i put some huge amount of money which if you want you could say into the my company figure and i'm going all in on them and i and i just go hard i go all in is that right yeah this has really been out of necessity my career when i started better i couldn't get anybody to invest in the business but the first like almost like three years so i basically put all my savings into the company took no salary for three or four years how much savings did you have year twenty five i think i had like close to two hundred thousand dollars i put into the business and then you know i didn't take any salary for three years i meant like had to pay for my own health care and food rent i was living in manhattan really expensive and twenty fifteen things got so bad that i had to borrow i think it was fifty thousand dollars to pay for rent and survive i had like credit card debt i was yeah i was probably in the red like negative a hundred thousand dollars prior to the the acquisition of battery well what did better exit for a hundred and ten million so that was a that was a windfall right yeah that was great i raised like a little over ten million dollars over like seven years so had a large you know percentage ownership of the company so but yeah overnight success from going from you know seven years of agony and debt to like having capital for the first time in a significant way and then did you i i don't know if you're telling me these stories like when you're if you're goof around or not but you're you said that you put most all of your money into archer right yeah when i i so i started archer in twenty eighteen so our called arch aviation and we build electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft so these are basically aircraft somewhat similar to a helicopter but they're purely electric and their their the goal is to use the aircraft to move people around cities so the traffic just like such a terrible phenomenon nobody's really worked on traffic for a hundred years so we we were basically out there i was out there trying to solve the traffic problem and kinda help help the sustainability the pitch coming out of battery was just it it was bad like it was hey we we need basically probably about a billion dollars maybe more to get the market or we or we don't make it we're designing this new type of transportation system in the air so instead of driving to the airport you would fly and it needs to be fully electric that nobody in history had had ever certified an electric aircraft before and i was coming off a software you know ten years fifteen years in software so that that pitch did not really resonate too well in twenty eighteen you're like we made a joke in the last pod where i'm like if you drink a glass of milk with dinner you're mike have a guy like people were making fun of me from being from midwest you're like like the whole milk version of an elon musk you know what i mean you're the midwest version of the of an elon musk but what the hell did you know about i mean software is easy in a sense like you know like it's just code right like no one's gonna die you're if you if you screw it up or in most cases no one's gonna die and if i talk to a guy who's doing like computer engineering or computer science i'm like what the hell do you know about building a fucking airplane you know what i mean what did you did you know anything about that no i did not i i knew nothing i was just like i really wanted to do it that doesn't make sense to me yeah what do you do that doesn't make sense to me like if i wanted to go learn about how an airplane is built i guess i would like or a or unmanned drone i don't know what you wanna call okay i would go i guess i would well first of all you have to have a high iq to begin with if i don't but i would like what what would i do i guess i would call people who know what they're talking about and ask them what booked do you read and then i'll go and read the books and take lessons and maybe i'll go like a call a few college courses i don't know like it this just seems like an impossible thing to learn and you learned it in how many years so yeah so here's what i did i one is i spent a tremendous amount of time after vet figuring out what i wanted to work on next i kinda fell into the recruiting marketplace space with vet and i really wanted to be very thoughtful about what i wanted to work on so i basically spend a a large amount of time figuring out okay what is the right opportunity i wanna spend my time on and and it was archer i was right clear to me i i wanted to do aviation and build it so the first thing i did is i basically built a spreadsheet and i called to everybody in the i could i could think up in the world so i think i i made think that spreadsheet is but about three hundred people i i connect with whether they're at nasa or professors are working in industry at rotor craft or airplanes or turbo fan development what like what whatever would look like and i just immersed myself and i wanna know every technical book that was on on the market i wanted to understand how to build electric aircraft like what are the components and what what are the physics governed by in the space and i probably spent almost six months in a room just making phone calls like cold calling everybody in the world what's that call look like hey yeah mister conway my name brett yeah yeah you talked to me about helicopters it's it's crazy man like people people will pick up the phone for you like it's just like you just gotta pick up the phone a call and people will talk to you people wanna people wanna help what was the most like breathtaking call you had or meaningful call you had i did a i did a meeting so i i i in in in addition to calling everybody in the world the the parallel track was i was going back to school so i went back and like learned how to do like mechanical and aerospace engineering and you know leading up to that i went to a bit in twenty eighteen i think it was twenty eighteen it's like early twenty eighteen at this point it was at this hyatt like like basically hyatt hotel in atlanta was hosting this like electric aircraft design course so there was a lot of air aerodynamics folks and folks in the industry i really wanted to understand the physics around electric aircraft i went down there and i basically sat for two days being lecture on how to build an aircraft electric air aircraft scratch how to think about the propulsion aerodynamics batteries and you know was it was just like all my heroes today electric aviation and one of the guys there was in a phd at the university of florida and said like me too i'm doing my phd electric aviation and i wanna build e tall aircraft and i go to the university of florida and i said wow i went to i went to undergrad a university of as well he's like you need to come by asap and see our lab we're i'm trying to build electric aircraft and you know smaller scale and we we could help you so i did this course i got on a plane i went down to gainesville and i met the the head of the group there and he's basically the the head of all mechanical aerospace engineering university of florida and he had this like basically twelve person lab building things like ob grade like electric aircraft drones and i and i said i wanna take his flap over and i wanna just build electric aircraft and this lab happened to be off of archer road so i called the business art aviation what percentage of the veterinary windfall did you put into this education poor portion as well as art starting archer i like all of it yeah all of it but what does that actually mean like how are you living well i was living off the cash so i i had just from from better just like pay my bills i took no salary at archer for two years i don't know something like that like just is a zero like cobra insurance type thing and you know i made like i went from like having nothing to like having tens of millions of dollars after tax so it was you know there's was a lot of the money i just didn't need i didn't need almost any of it so i wanted to work on this new new thing and no nobody would like i couldn't even get meetings one at one point i guy introduced like a the guy that runs like general catalyst joel and he called my pitch disrespectful what do you say he was like it was like mid it was like great win covid hit and i got a big introduction from him from like one of my best mark laurie men introduced me joel like this is the best guy you got you gotta talk to him and i gotta call joel and he's just like i gotta stop you right here man this is the most disrespectful pitch i've ever seen we have people dying because of covid took the hospitals are filled up and you're asking me for money like for like for this like flying car idea like what are you talking about this just not possible like why would you be doing this and i said like i'm running it out of money personally like i need somebody to fund this or we're all like nope i know p i know covid bad but the business is gonna die and this is what you do you fund companies like this is why i'm calling you like this is and yeah it's i would say probably to the stay of the worst phone call i've ever taken so i sold my company three years ago and had the same thing where like i didn't i was i was just barely getting by and then overnight things changed and i was like gonna spend six or twelve months just like seeking planning i'm gonna figure out what because i don't i don't know if you took time off but i took like three months of like kinda normal twenty or forty hour work weeks and low stress and i was like alright cool that's what i needed i i felt recharged i need to get back to it except when i went back to it i was like have heard of a ic guy it's like this like free it's like this japanese like concept where there's like four rings that overlap and one of the rings is like what does the world wanna pay for the other ring is what does the world want the other one is what do i enjoy doing and then what am i great at and like ideally you find something right in the middle because if you find something that you're great at that you have skills at but the world doesn't wanna pay for it that's just like an expensive hobby if you find something the world wants and they're willing to pay for and you're good at but you hate it that's just like a a crappy job so like you wanna find something right in the middle so i was like what am i skill that and basically i i i thought of it like i'm just gonna use my skills and what do i enjoy and i'm just gonna try and do something slightly better and i think that's a pretty rational way to go about doing things like most people are they're like i don't wanna do too hard two outside of my realm what interests me about you is like you're kind of an alien like you like we're you're like alright the software thing this v thing it worked i don't know if it worked as good or as as you wanted it to or not i don't know the full story but you just like took a total one eighty and you're like screw the fifteen years of internet experience that i'm doing i'm going to do aviation hardware i'm gonna do a totally different thing what do you think is is unique about you that makes it so you don't actually want to like go the easy route because i know it vet i think you like built did you build like the email marketing software like that's pretty like it's a very narrow niche and you did something not even within it within that niche not even related to it and you took a totally different route what do you think is inside of you that makes you do that because i find that fascinating you think at the end the day i just wanna wanna wake up it's like a amazing future that's exciting inspiring how are you motivated my money not really no i think if i wanted to make a lot of money i'm probably in the wrong field you know i think like the like there's like a risk reward balance in startups like i think if if it was just about money i think i'd be basically probably back in software so i think going doing this project i'm working on now or just probably the probably the sure path to losing everything when you're starting figure like you know you read about elon musk and he's like well i put everything in and he's like i sleeping on couches and he's like well the couch was like sergey apron you know it was like his couch which probably isn't like a normal couch you know you're it's probably the couch in the living room of the guest house and you just don't wanna go use the king size bed but like when you're starting figure are you ever worried about running out of money and losing everything that you've earned i basically almost went personally bankrupt last year a figure what what what yeah tell me that yeah so what i left archer i had basically you know all my ass all my money tied up into archer like just had like and you you can't sell that as an officer right yeah for as like insider yeah we were like you know i i i made it pretty clear when i started the business and even when i went public that like me as the like i as a founder and ceo i'm not i'm not selling stock we're pre revenue i i told the board this i told of our investors there i even didn't put a million dollars in the in the spa pipe as we went public at ten bucks and so personally i was like i'll put another million dollars in here in a three million dollar valuation to show you guys it's all i got and and what i left i left archer in april of twenty twenty two i had twelve month stock lock up is this is public like there's an sec document for this and so i could i couldn't i couldn't sell majority of all my stock was fully locked up until april of this year so i had some percentage i could sell over over some time series i could sell certain amount of stock limited by certain volumes of the market cap so there it wasn't just that much volumes a year ago so i was selling some stock to fund figure gear and the stock went from like when i left the stock was at five or six bucks it went took a dollar eighty end of last year earlier this year and i i was just like i don't know if i can get to i don't know if can get to twelve month mark which was that twelve month mark was april of twenty twenty three that's like april you know april eighteenth twenty twenty three promised land like i can sell unlimited stock no volume restriction all stock lock up which which i'm you know i i have a bunch of stocks though here i'm not selling right now but like but that was the point where i need to get to and the i thought you know i was underwriting seeing that stocks at three four five six seven dollars like no problem i'll be able to get there and we were building a team teams out like was like you know forty or something like that we're building we're spending like million figure hardware figure forty yeah we were like we were within six months we were at seven figure a month bird i figure and i was just like it was like sales stock transferred to bank account transfer it into the company pay payroll it was like how fast can we get that done and it was like a full system of like trying to get the like not hitting the limits every day on stock selling getting the cash into the bank account and putting money to figure and and i wasn't you know this was like there was a recession we were in the banks were going bankrupt it wasn't like it was a pretty market for series a or capital it was the worst market since we've been since the financial crisis from a from a fundraising racing perspective i had a stock like a stocks going down like seventy five percent and i was just like i'm running out of cash so i'm in my sam i'm in my hampton group and i'm like everybody's like what's your you know more most important thing you're doing right now it's you know talk about i'm like i'm right out of money might might not make it what do they say what was their feedback i i think they were i i thought i i think they thought man i think everyone thinks here man i mean like i've talked to a lot of people who know you that's what fa me about you but what fa me about you is that your hand you handle stress differently like i i've toured your factory and you were like smiling and like jumping around like you like it seems like you're like jolly almost i don't know you're showing me the shit i remember go into your factory or your office and you're like check this out we got the knee working and like you see like a knee or ankle i don't know what it was like you see some something of the robot and you and there was like eighteen or ten people just sitting around and it felt like i was hanging out with like buddies in a garage like just watching you guys finally figure out how to work like a remote control car or something like ridiculous and it seemed exciting though like i remember being there and i met like i have to be part of this and it was exciting but i didn't i i know that you go all in on things i didn't realize how close you were to running out of money like i don't understand how you deal with it like what's your wife's saying when you're like hey we might file for bankruptcy personally in the next couple months yeah i think it's even worse like i had i had a second mortgage on my house to go through it no way what did she say yeah so i also in the category of like you know people think about man media my wife's just she's been with me for fifteen years now through all of this like we lived in you know thousand dollar month apartment in new york we had a downsize two to get through the veterinary stuff you know to to now archer and figure she's great like she's she's a warrior she like believes me and she has total faith in what we're doing and i don't take these things lightly like a really these are like planned exercises i i need to go through and been been through many near dust experiences i mean art archer like like what i went through a figure was probably like a tip of the iceberg so what i went through at archer last like like five years like archer was just you know a going public was just like a recipe to get sued and we were going public to us the spa process we you know as soon as we price the back deal the market turned on specs it was it was just a roller coaster so yeah i just i've been through many exercises exercise like this before and i think i can weather them pretty well now i don't know anything about like business finances i remember when we started our company i didn't know the difference between cash flow and revenue which is like a pretty big deal you need to know that i didn't know what that was until like three years into the company and i was like i thought cash flow and revenue were the same thing i don't understand how to read a balance sheet i don't know how to do any of that so i'm just i'm taking classes right now to like figure that out and i was googling stuff and i found this website it's called street of walls dot com so i went to street of walls and there's these amazing articles where you click start training and there's like it looks like a book so if you're on your computer go to street of walls dot com so there's like introduction there's like which is an investment bank do there's like how do you do a discounted cash flow analysis there's all the stuff and i scroll to the bottom and i always click the about page or and there's a link that says file this site and author on twitter and i clicked the twitter and it was you you wrote you made this website and i was like texting this is pretty funny i was texting you ahead of time i go hey i know you took a company public know anything about finances how did you learn how to it and you're like oh i actually taught myself how to do it and then i did most of the preparation work for the ipo and i was like that's amazing and you didn't even tell me you had this site where it was like a whole site of your learning in education i what was the site what is street of balls dot come yeah so i so when i when i went to college i i rolled in like industrial and system engineering and also finance this is like you know not something also talk about a lot but like i basically get a few years in finance after school before like doing the sour life why don't you talk about that was that embarrassing it just doesn't the pitch doesn't isn't great like i think like people just don't like hearing about finance folks and i also didn't really enjoy it like i think you know i look at those years of say man i wish i was like spending more time doing technology development and i was working full time but building startups and stuff on the side and i just look at that saying like i think it was helpful in some ways but like probably net net like would have been more important just for me to dive in and start building businesses full time so i was at you know in school somebody gave me this book it's called like the fast track to like investment banking management consulting and trading and i read it and it i was like you know people are going to finance like drive ferraris they just like do so well and they make a hundred and fifty thousand after school and i was like i was dead broke in college like thinking out loans that pay for school and i was like man i'm gonna go this is how i'm gonna you know make some money start my career and i i went into like an interview with goldman sachs and i just i just whipped like they asked me like some accretion dilution you know like m and a modeling and l questions or leveraged by questions and i just i didn't know anything and they're like you know i think the guy was nice she was like listen you just you have to have a certain like bar of understanding of find finances he's like such a disrespectful interview yeah this is fine was the second time even you you're disrespect people constantly yeah exactly and it's like you're you're like wasting my time and i was like man like i'm not really learning how to do this stuff in college so i'm gonna have to go alert it and you know i was learning now i just started like writing notes and writing about it and when my brother actually went to finance my brother works at a private equity company now i was like i'm just gonna rep all these notes i'm gonna tell him online and also given to my brother and like what when where am gonna use them again and that was the genesis for ass of balls we've i think i've gotten like thirty million views of that site the last like you know fifteen years which has been which has been great like a lot of folks have been like this has been my primary reason i've got a job and but you know as you can see i've i've haven't been a nickel on it and over a decade do you how do they get traffic i mean according to similar web it's still getting a hundred thousand or so people a month coming to it it's all organic seo that's insane i mean it that's kind of a lot right i mean for why for this would be an expensive term to rank for yeah these are like you know there's a thousands of pages of content there with good original content and it's you know it's just ranking high on google you wrote all these i wrote all those articles yeah were you gonna turn this into a business yeah i saw at one point i was making like five thousand dollars a month selling those interview guides like like like one year out of college it was great i mean it was like a ninety eight percent margin business alright well when you're in that position what's stopping you from going full time on that because if i'm broke and i'm twenty four and i'm making five grand a month i'm like this is the thing yeah i i didn't i i strongly believe like i i i strongly me believe i need to touch like the the mass market and to have like significant impact in technology you need to have like a a either a lot of people using your product or various to you that use it it it really like it a lot and i just felt like the products services i was starting we're just not important enough for my time so on the pod we on this pod we talk a lot about like ideas and like different opportunities in terms of vet what opportunities did you see that you guys weren't able to pounce on that still exists one of the things we did is you know so what what so i started the del at nyu incubator and what what one of the guys there handing me a book one day and it's like it was it was the was the predictable revenue book which is basically like an outbound lead generation marketing playbook and you said hey you need to read this so it'd probably be pretty helpful for better and those guys are it was actually tap commerce so those guys sold like over a hundred million to twitter so is brian the founder there and i i never reading in the book because like this is great we need like replicate the system fully end to end so i started like working on writing this outbound lead generation process and we ultimately gave it to basically person that's here with me today so lee endoscopy gave it to her and said hey can you you go go figure out how to build this so we she brought on an engineer and we basically built this outbound lead generations software system they basically ended up powering all of battery so that was basically like how do we put contact information of people and basically do this cadence of emails out to folks to do like basically drum up leads software you can do this both like customers where'd did you get the emails we had an we built an offshore team of like three hundred people in the philippines and we did it all by scratch which what does that mean going to linkedin or something and just built i'm like you can basically finding the right people based on job titles and then there's a process where you can use to find emails pretty well like there's you know there's a lot on github there's lot of you can get to email through facebook pretty easily there there's a basic process where you can basically back into somebody's personal email address there's also like databases you can use a lot of folks use so we would get emails plug them into this machine and go and we basically built this like huge engine that would power like millions of emails we were doing per month and then i think it was like an early twenty thirteen twenty fourteen there was like this start up emerging which is outreach and we demoed it we're like this is the same exact thing we just built internally you know outreach now is like a four or five billion dollar company and we're like watching outreach scale up we have a product that this is literally both that t ourselves that we're just using ourselves at the time we thought it was a little bit better so we didn't use outreach that was more customized for what we're doing and everything else but it was really funny to see us you know me go out and building like a hundred billion dollar company when internally we had a four billion dollar company sitting internally so there was there was a few of those that happened through the life of battery that were it it was just interesting to see and i think that goes back to by same theme which is like be very thoughtful like so so my my time now is haunted by am i working on the right things do you think that was the wrong thing i i think better it was the right thing for me at the right time but it was definitely not the right thing to do it was definitely the right call to get into archer next and the figure and i use it as a learning lesson to say what happened with better reason i i fell into it i fell into it from street of walls i fell into it because i built out this huge database of traffic from like from from content and then i used that to help build and boost bootstrap the marketplace with vet it it wasn't asked if like i was in college when i kinda the stuff started and said i wanna go do recruiting and this is where i'm gonna spend the rest of my life in it just i just fell into it and happened to work out really well and i think i wouldn't have been able to start archer that wasn't for the better acquisition so you know i think think looking back it was something i would have done again but i used that less i use that as a lesson to say i do have a choice and want to spend my time on and everybody does and it's the most press asset you have because we don't have that much time left what was the math that you saw or like the graph or whatever that made you wanna start figure like what was there a signal where you're like oh ma'am this gonna be the biggest company in the world because i i think you saw that to me you go we're we we'll either go screw up and go bankrupt up or we'll have a very small exit or it it's gonna be a hundred billion dollar company or you said something like that where it was like this is either gonna be the biggest thing ever or total failure but what did you see that gave you the idea that this could be the biggest thing so so what what what we're doing to here figure is we're building humanoid robots these are robots when we say see humanoid way i mean it just it looks like the human form so it has legs arms hands we're not trying to look like a human we're trying do everything a human can do and when you look at the world today if you like go out in the world and look at everything you're doing it requires a human interface in the physical world so the equivalent to i i always make analogy is when you use the internet using a keyboard and mouse and you can interact all the internet you can use a keyboard to your little your fingers are like a little little keyboard mice you can basically in interact with all the digital world the physical world lasts several hundred years we built interact with the human body so we have like door handles we have tools we have stairs everything around us was built for a human interface and so when you look at what we're doing here is we're trying to build an automation solution to do physical labor how do we get into the world and do human like tasks and when you look at the market for human human like tasks it's half from gdp so like you know gdp is roughly seventy eighty trillion half a that is goes to human labor to pay wages every single year in the world and it's roughly half or so for you know for if you go to any company or any country in the world it's roughly half of gdp and what we've seen now is we've seen this like we we seem like these emergent properties happen in in in the kind of the space we operate here that are allowing us to build and do this this decade we have hardware from like that are that is that is capable of being built to do human like tasks and and then from a software perspective separately we have software today and we have ai systems today that can basically understand like semantic what's going on in the world and do human like applications from a software perspective so here at figure what's so so at a at a high level the biggest company the next ten fifteen years in the world will be human like ai powered humanoid that like that's for sure gonna happen the question is like what groups are gonna do that well i think elon musk let me find this quote i have this quote here i think he said tesla has a robot i think it's called optimus so elon says it'll will probably cost less than twenty thousand dollars to build and it will be a bigger business than cars so like it's gonna be huge and so you you just looked at that math and you're like i have to go all in on this but what's the business model like you you rent them out to people or you sell them to people what do you do yeah you can do either yeah i mean this there's a there's definitely a a a similar capex model that is very similar to how we like buy in buy cars today where you would wanna you know buy the asset it would have a certain amount of d life you'd have to like pay for service maintenance and then there's another model which is like operating model which is we're calling like robots and service which is a leasing model so you basically be able to put robots into say you know warehousing or manufacturing related applications and you would charge basically a monthly fee for that work and that would be a kinda a lower price per year that you would pay but ongoing and so we you know here at figure we're we're pushing the robots and service operating model we think it's the way to get cost down and make it affordable to the masses and but some of the initial conversations we're having with clients do is that they're you know interested in buying them because they've been buying robots for you know a decade so i think we're open to kinda getting out of the world what we're seeing here is we're seeing the ability to get these robots over time with high enough volumes cheaper than like a mid price car and then if that robot can last four or five years before it's fully depreciate the cost should be pretty affordable for the even even for the home we should be able to put robots in the home for you know several hundred dollars per month i was talking to my family members i you they're like keep talking to tomorrow i was like man guy brett he builds a humanoid it's like and they're like what the hell you know what the fuck is that i'm like well it's i'm like you know how like amazon workers do this stuff it's gonna do that and then like inevitably the answer is like oh so he's gonna put everyone out of work alright that's cool what's your rebuttal to that like how do you think about that like you know you seem very like altruistic and you're like you're like i wanna save the world so what are these people what what are they gonna do and when are they gonna lose their jobs so what we're seeing from like a labor perspective is that the the amount of people in the workforce is starting to shrink so we have like roughly three point three billion humans working in in the world a big chunk of that is the baby boomers and the retiring out of the market and then from you know from the other side we're basically having roughly a little over one child per household at this point we're we're well under the replacement rate for humans which needs to be like like about two point two burst per household so we're like we're we're not putting more into the bot the top of the funnel we're not putting in more in and the bottom funnel we're retiring now so we're basically shrinking the labor force so when we walk into if the the conventional wisdom is what you say it's like you walk into one of these like big big companies and they're like we're worried about you taking our people's jobs like how are we gonna message this like what are they gonna do that is complete one hundred eighty from what we see with boots in the ground if you if you actually do the work of walking into a company that's big and you ask them their number one problem they'll say employee head count in in a in retention so we walk into these warehouse warehouses manufacturing retail whatever and we walk in and they're telling us that fifteen percent of employees don't show up every day to work they're saying they have two to three percent weekly attrition fifty to a hundred fifty percent annual turnover the working conditions are harsh it's really hot the summers it's cold in the winters if to walk miles per day if to pick like a lot of items per hour it's a lot easier to drive uber in this condition than be in these facilities so when we walk in these clients they they have a labor crisis going on and they need help asap and they can't figure out how to automate these more dexter and human like tasks and so you know our goal is to go in there and do like the dirty and hard work that they can't find humans to do today and we think there's just probably i i've never seen a business like this where we walk in and they're like we'll buy a million of them if you could do this and so the the demand is like i would thinking you're almost un undo it i don't even know how to handicap it it's if you can build the technology we need millions when we were hanging out i was like want don't you to a software company and you're like software is harder and i was like what why he goes well because i had to make people like want vet like i had to convince them that this was a good idea and then like i had infinite options on what to build and i had to hope that i was building the right thing and then he said with hardware i can find problems where there's already demand i know if i if if i'm able to build this people will want it and i know that there's a set of laws dictated by physics of which create the rules and i just have to figure out within that very small set of rules can i build this and as of now you're like i think i can but i haven't entirely figured it out but it's a much simpler puzzle to figure out in order to like build this thing and if i build it the business is is gonna be the biggest thing ever because i know people want that and i remember like when you said that it kinda it changed my perspective on on a lot of things that did i say that right yeah i think that's pretty accurate like in software you have lot of lot of these things that are like these emergent properties that happen in like say the marketplace or saas characteristics that make it really hard to control you have retention and you have con competitive threats and you have like feature build there's a lot of things you need to do to kinda keep the the wheels in the car and get keep it running and in hardware if if there is demand for the product it's it really puts the focus on the technology development so at our at archer we already know people are driving to the airport there's like in la there's sixty million people driving around every day and six million of them are taking over an hour going like ten fifteen miles so so like you know you go like pasadena into lax if you could fly that in seven minutes so you wanna drive that an hour and a half like what do you wanna do for your time we know if you can fly that in seven minutes and it's safe and it's affordable over time a good amount of folks would take that service so it really puts the burden on the technology development of like can you go build something that is safe and affordable and like you know and gives good performance like in the reliability side so that was the that's the archer case a similar figure it's the case of can you get robots that can actually do useful work and this is governed by physics there are rules there are equations so like there is no like i don't need to have to go out and invent a new physics equation or like aerodynamic equation to make that happen i understand how an air airflow will will behave in a fluid i understand how battery cells discharge like we we understand all those rules so it really puts the burden on us to like think about like what's really important here and what's really important if i had like being back the most important thing to myself twenty years ago i would say brett what really matters or what doesn't matter is like marketing p r who you raised capital from the tech french article like none of that is meaningful it'll make you feel good as a founder because it's usually extremely shitty for like so many years building companies what really matters is the technology development that you make which means how often you're iterating and then you can measure that by how much progress you're making between those iteration cycles that's space to the game that were playing a figure and we played it archer so it feels like you're like playing with connects or something you know what i mean it felt like play when i was at your office i remember people were chilling i think i came on a friday and people were just sitting around and i they weren't drink a beer or anything but it was like that same like vibe of like were just sitting around like and they like giggle with like the knee moved you know what i mean they felt like you're like it was almost like a glorified lego set a little bit it felt pretty exciting yeah i think it feels like the i i'd would say it probably feels like the most cutting edge r and d lab you could walk into with a focus to move fast and shit product how big how big is bigger gonna be in ten years i think the space is it's the it's the world's largest tam it's i think it's probably most similar to like autonomous vehicles in terms of like the technology development the risk to developing and deploying the technology but i think it's easier to scale i we don't have the same safety hurdles that self driving car would have to have to drive safely with in on on you know on city streets and not harmony not harmony anybody at those speeds but and so i think it's i think it's bigger than a self driving industry and i think it's easier to scale it once it's working so i think if we can demonstrate our robots in commercial opportunities and we're learning like we're we're we're we're in commercial work doing useful work and we're like training neural nets with real world data and and getting better recur getting better i happen to think this this business is probably valued bigger than cruise and way though which are like these are thirty billion dollar free revenue new companies and i think we can do those over the next like twenty four months we'll have robots in commercial applications with like some of the world's biggest brands in five years you think figures in the in the forty fifty billion dollar value range i just think like this is a really big industry and we're we're we're so five years some deploying robots into commercial opportunities that are making money it'll be in very low volumes but you'll be able to see the robots doing useful work and you'll be able to see the robots getting better over time i have to think that'd i'd be a really large market cap who knows what it what to look like i think it'll be significant where even where we stand now and then hopefully within ten fifteen twenty years we're like we're seeing we're seeing robots at scale and commercial opportunities really helped build about void into labor for us that we talked about earlier i wish i would have invested more i think i i invested twenty five thousand dollars i should have done more yeah it's it's risky stuff so i don't yeah it'd be twenty five thousand makes sure you feel good i i don't wanna lose too much of your money so oh i wish i would have done more but dude i appreciate you doing this you inspired me i think i think that like i'm you and i are not the same and i appreciate that people like you exist in the world you are significantly bolder than i am but i i hope that the takeaway for people listening is like that shit wears off on you so like whenever i hang out with you like i feel i feel bad about myself in a really great way like where i'm like you know it's like when you hang out with like a really fit athlete you're like oh man i thought i was fit i'm nothing i can totally step it up like i can push this thing way harder i can i can i could go way i could push myself way more than i thought i could that's how that's how i feel like when i'm around you you know you are you're a really special person and i'm very thankful that i get to like here some of your wisdom i think that one of the things on this pod and in my life we try to find people early and i have a feeling that we are very early in your journey and that you're gonna be a very very big deal a bigger deal than you already are in the next five or ten years and i'm very thankful that we're able to like you know we bought your stock early yeah thanks sam that's the pod alright now show me the robot yeah i feel like i could rule to word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back