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

i think if you google brett ad cock net worth according to fortune you're worth nineteen billion dollars so that's like a pretty good swing how does that make you feel i don't care about that that will give like zero ships about i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel now okay so you brent ad hoc the the short of it is that you are raised in a rural area of illinois you started a company called vet which we sold for over a hundred million dollars then you took a company public called archer which is like unmanned flying planes i guess helicopters and then now you have a company called fig which is worth don't know how much forty something thirty something fifty something billions dollars you have another thing called cover which stops aims to stop school shootings and then i have a new thing called har which you've raised money at in the billions of dollars and you seem more now great it like man so you been on this is your third time on i think you i think you've been on one time each year the last three years you said you're telling a story about how i think it was right when fig started you basically said like i had i was worth i don't know how much tens of millions of dollars i put almost all of it into fig to get started and at one point you're like i have a mortgage on my house and the rest of my money is in figure and some of the money is in archer and that's not doing so great right now and since then i think if you google brett ad cock net worth according to fortune you're worth nineteen billion dollars so that's like a pretty good swing how does that make you feel i don't care about that i will give like zero ships about that you're a super competitive guy i think you said something like i just wanna you said like win a bunch of times last time we hung it was like i wanna win for these reasons i i'm i i'm very competitive i i wanna kick ass i think that like you definitely have to care about this a little bit and you actually have to i think you i care a lot about figure being the biggest company in the world you talk about like you definitely have this like napoleon energy of like i wanna be the best i wanna conquer are you thinking the way i would characterize is like we're just the like we're just now like these companies am minor are just not hitting the inflection point and they're really early like they can be like really big so if it works this will like a hundred x thousand x from here so most of my energy is like how do i make sure that works there is no flat line here it's either like it goes down or goes up right either like it's binary either the robots go out of scale or they don't go out of scale so in like five years time either gonna be a very big thing or very bad and so all my energies going into making this like a thousand or a millionaire from where we're at here and so it's it's like the pressure's on to like really just deliver where where are you now what's the outlook now for the next five years then i think last time you on three years ago we said that i think i said it i was like i you'll probably be in the forty to fifty million dollar valuation range which i think you are now but in terms of like you you're still lacking output robots like you still need we still need that to come when where are you gonna be in five years what's your prediction i think at a high level i think the ai work that we're seeing here now is gonna be so much it's gonna be like a hundred times bigger than internet this just like everything's is just so it's just working so well like the system is working well like deep learning works and everything's happening faster than i would think and my like you know having done like fifteen years of like software internet like it was just like nothing was happening faster on a trend line here is happening like that in ai can you give an example of something that has happened that's blown your away we started at so har i have a new ai called har about a year ago i was like very interested in this idea of like kind of building this ai to human semi digitally it's like figure is gonna be like i think figure is gonna be like the max ceiling of ag of like be able to put that out and then there's gonna be a version of this in the digital world it's gonna be like a human it's gonna have like ai pairing it's gonna have like ultimately maybe your own ai weights your own memories maybe your own hardware and seem like really close and fundamental to that thesis was like you gotta figure out how to get ai to use computers general purpose you would never hire an a system that couldn't use a computer so you gotta be able to like give things out it that can like do everything you can do financial models look flights like or door dash whatever you need to do it needs to be able to do all autonomously but only one in a thousand websites have apis so in most you know like most computers globally is on the on an internet and browser my main main inclination within two or three years you'd have a system that you'd be able to talk to and say go do this or do that and to be able to like go off a go online and like maybe maybe like use internet really well like almost like a robot would where you can like move the mouse and use the keyboard that's what we have to do is solve like general purpose for around a computers you you can't rely on api or mc you have to figure out how like navigate like a human can now at her we've like we just released our first kind of model and research preview last week it's really hard for us to find now something that we tell to go do on internet it can do what did you guys do differently than the other because everyone's trying to do computer use right so like i think elon got macro hard and chat had their computer use thing everybody's doing it you guys feel like you've cracked something would you guys do differently okay there's a couple of things we did a little differently first is like everybody's tackling this from like using apis and mc like the reason we're open cloud got so great it was like it could only it couldn't use the browser it couldn't like go on and use door dash end to end because door dash has no consumer api we try to figure out how to use like a how to look at a screen and one is we spin up a virtual computer for every agent so they don't need like a macbook or anything so you can just spin up as many of these environments as you want in the sandbox and and then you would need to give it ability like look at a screen and use like move the move the cursor and use the keyboard yeah but i used c p's computer and it was doing that i was like hey book a massage and it opened up a browser and i saw the mouse go and i was a trying to type of thing and they would scroll result it was bad it didn't work well but it was it wasn't trying to use a apis or or mc it was trying to use the internet yeah i don't know if i yeah he's gonna work well i mean that's all whole but like if it goes to fu internet like the whole point is like so i that's i was saying what you guys do to make it work well was it like an algorithm breakthrough is it it was in our post training like it was in our we have a reinforcement learning process that we think is maybe nobody else in the world is done well get let let's get some context behind us speaker okay so figure that is shockingly easy to understand humanoid robots and that business is gonna be massive if it works if you can crack the code i think you said there's un bounded demand har i don't entirely understand what that is can you kind of like explain like idiot because sean you should see i got the deck and it was just you talking for like an hour in front of a screen and then there was a list there was a list of a team and it was like a hundred guys who just moved here from china who had like the greatest backgrounds ever and you it seems like you pretty much just raised money because the team was amazing and that that's all the deck was it was just you talking in a video romeo me it's that's kinda all we had of time started so okay what is har i think the best way to become successful is to see how other people did it whether you're gonna copy them or just use it as inspiration because then now you know what's possible so starting at the age of twenty four i did this relentlessly and i was very methodical about it and i created a spreadsheet where i tracked roughly fifty people who were uber successful and i looked at the year that they were born the year that they started their apprenticeship and then the year that they started the first thing that made them successful finally the year that they broke through and i aggregated all this data along with the stories of what they did to be an apprentice and what they did to finally break through and i put it together in a database and hubspot went and found this thing that i frankly even forgot about but it did change my life and they resurfaced it they made it even better and they put it into a thing that you can download for free right now so if you click the link in the description or click the qr code right here you can see this database that i made when i was twenty four and it changed my life and so if you're looking to become successful or you're already successful and just want some more inspiration checking out i strongly believe like will head in two directions like like and then at some point maybe even like maybe like head together like the first is love ai out in the physical world that will like do everything in the in the in the environment for you like laundry dishes cooking like run the supply chain to end be in health the vessel for that is a human robot it's just a human form and it we'll just go out and do like you like want one piece of hardware that can like you know the hardware capable will do doing everything you put like smart eye into it and go off and do everything in the world that's what figure working on stuff than that there's gonna be this like really close like digital like ai to human s that forms you're gonna have like a very special thing that you can like talk to that's with you everywhere you go that will know all your stuff ab access to all your memories ab to all your counts in systems and be able to actually go do things for like a super assistant it'll be like maybe the closest things like jarvis from iron ironman and it will be able to do like it'll be like super in almost every way it'll know everything about your life you'll be able to access it in any moment whenever you need it it'll be in the background helping you out at all times if you're on a like if you're on a fly with like a long layover or fly with like maybe to say a short shortly layover over and you miss it it'll like already have backup plans already help you like figure that out like it'll just be something with you everywhere you go we don't have that we have like really good coding agents we have really good chat bots but we don't have like something that can go off and like be my jarvis in order to get there we need to work on the book model side it's gotta be just better than text chat it's gotta be able to use computers have like busy near perfect memory bill talk to you like just like a human wood back and forth and we have to have vision in the system it's be like look at the world understand what you're seeing with it and i think secondly you need to have you need to fix the the interface to ai you have like ai over here in a human and you have like an old hardware system in between like a we call like a macbook or iphone they were designed twenty years ago they're complete rubbish for ai they're not the right interface so we went out and we are out there designing what we think comes like after the iphone for ai and it's like an upgrade cycle we see this all the time in startups you guys see it right like we're and we're gonna upgrade cycle with the computers and phones so we're just gonna go away gonna be a new ones they're gonna be all ai computers and phones in systems and they're gonna be great they're gonna be all real time you can always access them and you want they'll always be like understanding what's happening and they they'll always be able to reference things with what what's going on you'll be able to abstract away most apps you'll probably not have an app store you're probably having an ai operating system it'll be perfect for you you'll ultimately have your own weights on your own devices that you'll own and have with you ever when you go it'll be like really great perry and we hired a credible team it seems like you know maybe like eighty or ninety now the guy that leads hardware design abs previously designed for last several generations of iphone macbook like pro like he's just like the he's just stud he's great so we're designing what we think are the next generation of ai devices that will kill the phone and computer and then we're designing an next generation of ai models the models need to get a lot more multi model they need to get a lot more expressive like the text and encoding is just not enough for us to like really have a like a like a real ag ai feeling with ai so when we're working on that we have our first ai we did our first research preview or computers and agent that we came out last last week i think we were top on some like the leading like you know browser computers benchmarks in the world and it'll keep getting better this will keep getting better and better like every month we'll just like it'll be better and smarter using a computer and faster we're working on a couple other different types of technologies internally on ai side and then we'll launch the ability to use har on like traditional browser and iphone and android in about a month so you'll be able to start using it and then world hardware coming we're working on now we actually have a hardware in the lab now we're using testing is it's crazy shit like the stuff is like a sci f five movie hardware what do you think those devices look like you know people have been speculating because jam you know got his his his shop got acquired by opening ai and yeah seen the videos of the puck and then the like this little puck and then there's like earring i don't know if that's real or if that's fake there was like a leaked commercial for the super bowl again is that real or is that fake what what's the story of that and then yeah what do you think these devices end up looking like are these watches glasses something else altogether i think i've like really changed my mood on this a lot less like a year or so but we have a really strong opinion here internally our opinion is that we what sits in the middle is devices that could possibly reach a billion units a year in the world the only kind of things that we have like down the world right now are computers and phones they kinda meet that like call it like make call it mega devices and then you have things on the ancillary around it like orbiting this like big thing that are like airpods airpods in you know like a watch or things like this they're like they don't sell a billion units this a year they're like three percent of like apple's revenue and they're like they're they help the ecosystem as a platform what we care about a har is trying to solve what's in the big middle piece to solve that you gotta take down the computer in the phone there's no way around that so you have to rebuild a new computer or new a phone that's better and replaces your existing systems and end and then what's around there is things that like you will have we will even have at har that are like helps with the family of devices that are not a billion a year but important for the ecosystem my understanding right you're you're kinda saying the next the the next device it might b like a phone is just gonna be an ai native first phone right you're not not gonna try to change the form factor no i'm not saying that at all you're gonna wanna like really radically everything everything the like the first version hardware we have now on our lab is like like anything i've ever seen in my whole life okay what lives outside of here on the edge or like like glasses and pendants and wearable and things they're not they're not the main show in fact that the meta glasses are probably one of the worst products i've ever bought they're just horrible they're horrible i could you i i can't even like figure out how to use it it doesn't have its own network it piggyback on the iphone network means your app needs to be open on your phone and the pairing long like it doesn't work well like i can't think of any reason why i would need this thing strapped to my head for fourteen hours a day like it's just like the wrong device it's it's not like what what with the end insta is bc in the brain and we're gonna have like ai language devices for the next ten years before that and that like that's that's the path and it's not classes classes i think i don't even know if classes will make our top like ten list of devices when you're when you're and your team are like brainstorming do you have a framework on how you can think outside of pre existing norms because when you're talking about like i i literally can't imagine at all what you're talking about let's let's get down like the substrate level here like first order what what has changed the what's changed is we have like a new type of computer which is a like ai i think of ai is a new type of computer new type of automation it's here the automation can do a few things that are like like and when we're designing this we wanna design around like key principles that it could be like ten x better if it's like one or two times better in your phone or degree you're not gonna use it if you're like literally ten x better what are things now that like a deep learning brings that are like ten x better there's a few of them i one is ai can like basically now like think and use computers and systems for you just like a human can it can like talk to you it can like see as like visual understanding it can has a real time speech to speech it can it can use computers and systems for you as fast a close to as fast around as fast of a human can over time it'll be just as good as a human and faster in terms of success rate see the system that's like almost like human like in capabilities it also can like have memory meaning you can put memory into it like won't it won't it won't forget anything i mean near perfect over time so you a system that's almost like a human in a box that has the same like afford is a human house and it's almost like the ability of like you almost like if you could bring out a little human around with a computer on your on your shoulder everywhere you went that'd be insane like we're just like it was only for sam though only sam could see it and only sam could talk to you and only was like there to help with sam and that was like your whole life and was gonna be smarter and better along the way and had perfect memory and could use computers and talk to you and see you'd be like damn that thing would be like it'd be like be able to do anything you do on a computer okay so your first step where your team is like just like let's just get rid of like any constraint ever what would be the coolest magical thing if we had like a little guy in our shoulder that was ai all knowing and could see in here everything and we see in here i think give advice to us like like what is the thing that's gonna bring that's gonna fundamentally reshape all this okay and then from there like we gotta like we gotta design around that system the competitive advantages is here or that it is human like and capabilities and it has almost near perfect memory you can go back in reference over time my phone does it have that like i put a contact in my phone like last week and i like i was like busy when i was like putting the phone number in and like a day later somebody like hey dude you did you call that person like i even know the name forgot it can't me asked my phone like it's just like it's so stupid like the whole system is and then i go in there like order door like a monkey like every day now i'm pushing things like i don't do any of that now with har it does it end to end for me on my drive to work i just like say you order me coffee and it's just done it does it all for me in the background don't have to touch anything it's all obstructed away and it's like if you had to humor with you everywhere you go you would just say like could even predict probably brett you want coffee today and i'm like yeah yeah i do like just get let's order but you know what make it a double shot today and you know i gratitude of the har office instead a figure like i can like i was just in done i got it let me take care it i say a monkey on my phone for next like three minutes like trying to do checkout door it it's almost like the phone is like a tool in the it's like a hammer right if you want the hammer to do anything functional you have to pick up the hammer and start swinging it whereas the next generation is basically like having a handyman man next you at all times and so you just tell them hey could you fix that window just go fix the window you don't have to pick up the hammer and start figuring how to use start start there and then from there you gotta a rapidly prototype so when you come over like we have like we've we've designed everything you could possibly think be three d printed it what were the designs that didn't work but we're kinda cool what we're designs that didn't work that were kinda cool the thing is we're building like many different devices now they cover like a pretty wide area of this we have some pretty crazy stuff we were like designing so like it's not like you look at that you're like that looks like a that looks like this and it that does over well over here so it's like it's not as easy as drawing on those parallels it's like pretty quite radical but we we rapidly prototype all this we have like a fabrication facility that does this stuff we like we have a whole design studio where we work on this i like you like use this stuff like over the coming like weeks and months i'll like either cared it around with me wear it whatever we're end up doing it and we'll kinda down selection i we had like one of the biggest telecom ceos in in the world here that actually helped with with the work with like steve jobs on iphone one and he was here two weeks ago and he just come from meeting tim cook you know tim cooks on his way out of his apple but he's like was over there at apple and came over here and we he saw our stuff and he's just like holy shit man this is the first time i've ever seen anybody that could possibly take out like take out the big guys it well is it true to say that with like archer figure and har the the hard problem seems like can i just mass produce this the hard problem is not that we think we believe now the most important constraint really solve is like good building in a really intelligent robot something out of the world like there's a bunch of robots you can go by now you can buy some from china and you get them and they're complete crap they can't do anything thinking like you can enjoy stick around that's all you can do and you hit a button in a waves he's got no hands it's got knobs and you're like what do i do with this a toy like like it's like like earlier when i bought i bought a gi drone like years ago and i was like playing her out then and then got day i like what do i do with this thing yeah and i was like it was like car setup up it didn't really work well like you know whatever it's just like i floated a bunch of trees like this didn't i was like this is what am i doing with this thing robots are like that now like where you can we can go manufacture a ton of them but like if they're not really smart like it's not really gonna be that helpful we're trying to crack like the true human level intelligence have figure like we really wanna tackle like how do we make it so can put into any home it can do every every every job i wanted to do that's what we're working on we think that's the largest like like you know thinking about the largest like gap in the schedule of what we need to go solve for like it's that then beyond that like you know people generally sometimes confuse like consumer electronics manufacturing with car manufacturing there's no company big company in the world that would look like 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 you can make a you make 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 cars like you will die trying to manufacture cars there's like there's like a lot of like you just like it's so and haven't seen like you know bmw nobody's is a commercial customer of us i i haven't been bmw and if you're other groups like it's gnarly the reason why cars is so hard is that you can't hold the partner in your hand phones you can just like always hold your hand and go change whatever move and hold like cars you can't you physically can't 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 eight hundred robots your debt is your your whole lines down and so it's just like 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 we're like over here closer to like you know like you know the forty percent level over here by like cell phones like we you know we just made a one thousand e t 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 we have a us as a 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 like maybe like engineering fleet we need to go to and then second one is go to customer so we haven't to go into both right now we've actually shipped out robots to our third customer this this this week when they go to customers what do they do what what what what can the robot do what and maybe can't it do at at this time need a lot of like logistics stuff right now in packages we have other stuff we've done in manufacturing mostly just manufacturing and logistics is stuff we've done in past but like we're also talking to folks about other industries and at this point when it goes to a customer and it's doing you i don't know what you said like packaging work or what what is that like sorting or caring or what is it doing 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 just saw that so is is that the type is that like would that give me an example of one of the jobs it just like that's an example of like guess like a very a very close like one of the 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 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 gonna work and it will be faster cheaper you know whatever 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 a hundred percent turnover per year it's really expensive to find talent we have like a just a large talent shortfall the talents are really expensive like wages are going up and we like 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 like really good roi on this like you gotta think like a robot can be like multiple shifts per day work seven days a week like it we can like have a lot of of uptime the task you saw like on the on the on the like logistics line that we used should live stream it was actually a real use case it's one of our customers that needs to be done in three seconds of package and it initially to be done five hours a day so like i think it's like five days a week we do that two hundred hours straight at two point nine seconds a package so we're already at human speeds we're already doing this year now they're already having an roi and we're now in the early stages of like getting these out to these customers and scaling it up over time it will just put billions out to these groups hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses can you help me with like the kind of truth first fiction because one of the weird things is as an ent or a lay person who's who's excited about this future you can't really it's a really expensive or hard to test this right so i'll see like a a chinese robot and it's twenty grand if i wanna buy this robot i have no idea really what it can do i see a you know elon will go out there and say we're gonna we're gonna build a million of these things in the next year we're gonna ship them then you get like one x and they're showing their hand and they're like look at our hand like look at this is the this is the best hand you've ever seen yeah and then this is surface san francisco where they'll send a robot to clean your apartment they're 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 and and test them out yeah a hundred percent so i think a few things one is the amount of like noise in the market for a signal it's just like it's like like you mentioned is like it's like it's it's out of control like the i think there's just so much bullshit out there in the market it's like really hard to tell what the hell going on so let me summarize what i think is like the most important and work backwards okay 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 cookie your dinner like like clean your dishes like like make your bed like run the supply chain end to end work in health care build a building like your logistics like that sort of stuff that stuff requires fundamentally onboard ai you can run so you can do like autonomous work you can't solve it with code you need to do it autonomously you need do over a long periods of time and you probably need to move around and use like something in your hands and move move move stuff through the world you know i mean it's like really gotta like do do stuff economically like a move get 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 back flips 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 wait till to see a figure like on a smoke break at the bmw and fact like we're good i could've have been a great back in high school when my i blew it now market gonna b factory i've made jokes with you before where i was like you started with vet which is just like a job recruitment thing now you're on these world changing things and you were like v 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 and what was that pitch for some of your companies i mean most of all these are all online i mean the figure of master plan is long i'm internet on the site archer was up for a long time like posted about it like i think like deep down i really wanna find folks that really care and are obsessed and i'm like i think most of my time is not i know you wanna know about the pitch most of my time is trying to find those folks i found that even in the bay area it was probably the richest ai and engineering like folks in the world ninety percent if everybody out here is not good if for jobs how do you tell who's good and who's not i 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're 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 like reverse engineer everything you've done and discuss it the folks that haven't done it can't do that they're just like they can't even go like they get one layer and they just like insulin blow up they can't talk about it they don't know why out of a hundred candidates who sound good how many like their resume looks good the recruiter thinks they're good out of a hundred candidates how many do do you would you say actually hit that bar i'll give you an example we have like a really challenging process to go through to be a mechanical engineer here at a figure you have to be able to build like act some scratch there's bearings and motors and you know we have a we have a we have a gear box we have like other sensors inside the system it's a really it's very compact you know it's just a very difficult thing to do and like really hard requirements we've been doing ten case studies a week for six months and have not hired anybody that's insane it's insane 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 i think there like tens of millions of dollars a year right the ai side is certainly like that but the ai side has gotten and it's it's mostly all driven from meta like a har like i've never seen i thought maybe like meta was like paying these people for like like a year ago and it was like it would go away they've not stopped so what are they like what's the crazy story that you've heard we keep an offer to somebody that was really senior that was like they were coming from x ai like x completely blew up like everybody's laughed and about it six months ago which just like every it was just like macro heart like i fully dis distorted like there's a basically a bunch of stuff that happened we ended interviewed a pretty senior guy on that ai side it was grades i think i gave him like a really good package like of series a stock at har and it was i don't know fifteen twenty million dollars of stock over four years over we do five like for okay my company is in the early days and we transitioned to for a little bit later we're still a five and you know i was like i think we're like i think we can like ten x har here pretty quick and so i was like okay you have like you know fifteen twenty million i think ten if you have a few hundred million dollars and we takes one more time you have a few billion dollars and 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 thirty six million four years of our shoes and he's just like it's kinda guaranteed cash you know i go there and i have like wait this maybe like two hundred million dollars at har or twenty million dollars or maybe like thirty six for sure at meta and he left them go to meta and they've been doing that like every candidate that we spot to speak to is like making some absurd absurd thing is that a stop they just been not they've been at it since like for like a year year and they've been buying talent it they've been buying the way into the ira race what what do you think of that strategy like you know even if you kinda hate it do respect it do you just think it fool their end 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 in the and info around super computing and data and eval 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 gonna look at i think it's really hard to find it's actually really hard to find the actual folks in what we're doing i there's probably my rough calculus now is probably like a rough back envelope was probably like twenty to thirty people in california know how to build really good ai models 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 twenty somethings the young thirty somethings are they still getting eight figures of a year no the like the junior guys like the guys in like their twenties you're like the like late late twenties or something they're getting like a they're making like a few million total so they're making like two hundred two fifty in base they're making like another million or whatever like in in a year in like our shoes every year and so they're gonna pay like a million to like you we're like seven fifty to like two million or so range per year and that's that's been driven up by meta and but then all of other labs have have like have cuff like followed comp when when i asked you what do you think of he said i like it you being sarcastic or you're 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 i was i was mark i would bought my way into the race and i think he's like he's doing that now i i don't think i would have done that i wanna understand it and i wanna like first order like find the right folks that really care deeply about this and not hire like like mercenaries mh and he so he hired a bunch of mercenaries so they're just purely bunny tri he they came over there then no other nobody wants to go to med they just said they're going there because they're getting paid a guaranteed rs package by sitting around and what's happening is like you don't need like a thousand people or five hundred or three hundred to design am models you make a really good team of twenty or thirty or forty people and that you can get there without doing this and those people probably would care more deeply about the mission where you're at and be more committed than just to be purely throw money at the problem but i think if i was like i i think was a really good strategy and it's working i think hats off like really good execution they're recruiting efforts and how they're structuring this stuff and it's like i think it's i i think it's like paying off for them jury still out of thinking like actually ship real products i think like the call my have with those groups is they've just traditionally have not been able to do things new well i mean i think facebook because probably gonna meta is gonna go down in one of the greatest acquire in all time with like you know instagram and whatsapp and different way they like bother their way into those spaces but like you know if you look at like the gray bands and everything i doing is was just like it's it's just not great work and 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 we're using like the har system right now and it's so good it's so much better than anything i used today you gotta send it to us yeah can we use it well yeah we get you guys early on that yeah like research preview there's like five hundred phds and then man sam yeah because like no well like like i really platform park what's the weather outside i can answer yeah no problem but they're like i i i whatever say is like every week there's like five or ten like junk ai swap startups ups or like things 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 this stuff in coding is probably really excellent right now but everything beyond that it's like just kinda like not great on january first of this year you've made four predictions for the year i wanna check in and see how 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 to how are we doing on that one on track off track are done on track on track yeah four months yeah i like i see every day like what we're doing like we're on track the hard part here is we already do pixels the tours it just means like we're taking camera feeds and we output like where to put the mode i put the like you know we wanna put we wanna like tell the motor like what the what to do to get to the hand and the right spot or the joints so ready to do that get into a new house that ever seen to do work that's the hard part of this problem we're working on that i'm working on that every day it's where i spend about three four hours a day every single day seventy days a week on this problem so if a fig robot showed up in my house what would it what's the par 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 full laundry like as an example but then going to a new place where we're folded in 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 it's like the models like out of distribution it doesn't know what to do it's like if you removed all the pyramid data from the the pre training of l they wouldn't know how to talk about pyramids right 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 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 an good example hey stupid question why do all the robot companies care about folding clothes and and doing laundry what gonna it be course to better just to say hey we're gonna build like the best warehouse worker because there's already twenty million of those in the world and that represents this much billy and of course that buys us the runway to like get the robot folding you know robot done but like why do i care about that at all today why not just industrial work that people don't wanna do companies need done they're we'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 oh we didn't care about it in the past we like when we first launched we're like we're gonna basically do the commercial side to pay for the home long term and that was a strategy that made a lot of sense like there's was like we can charge a lot more in the commercial market it's like much easier to do it's like lower variability ability we're in like a little work second can it's just work twenty four seven just so much simpler what i've learned now is that the home is super sol 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 wanna solve that problem we wanna solve a robot that can go into any environment just through language and do work we wanna be the first to do that you can probably do that with a hundred robots and a fifty person team so that that company overnight would be a trillion dollar market cap that sounds good do that we're doing that forward like we're gonna solve that i think will be the first we call it like solving your robotics an high robot don't they attack the humans i don't remember this movie very well just yeah don't worry about it not that part who could win it who could win in the who can win in a fight right now can can a humans still win yeah humans is still win okay yeah what are the other predictions other prediction one new you had on your daily ai usage will shift people will move beyond text to highly multi notable voice agents with perm perm persistent memory will become common which will push ai closer to the synthetic human intelligence we've imagined in sci we're doing that at har 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 has the labs like has chad or claude have they ever released the data on this like i use a ton of the voice thing sam do you use the the voice stuff a lot yeah i don't type really at all yeah i wonder it's probably already a huge percentage scott to the point where like offices need to change like these open air offices that are like popular startups they're kinda whack right now because like i wanna talk in private yep yeah a lot of engineers have microphones now where they're whispering and they're just like in hush tones whispering to their computers yeah like i didn't i was like talking last night i was like claude why am i so indecisive and then my wife was like good like she was like it's not like babe dude chicken to hear everything i was talking to claude about now yeah no i i i i talk all the time but it's embarrassing yeah like even a speech still like sucks it's still not great like it's it's like almost you set up you have to go there it to like turn on like it doesn't like really remember what you just talked to it about like it can do tool calling and computers very well like it's just like limited and these like you have to use it for a certain session i don't know if we hit it this year but certainly in twenty twenty seven 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 in a robot call you and i don't think you guys be a total difference that's that's a twenty twenty seven event i feel pretty strong about thanks 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 used mercury all 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 in 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 so like it 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 definitely mercury i will fist fight anybody who disagrees me on that go to mercury dot com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services are provided through choice financial group and call them an a members fdic alright what's the third and fourth you had over the past ten years school shootings have increased by ten in twenty twenty six the first full scanning system capable of detecting weapons from a twenty foot standoff will be built and beta tested in a k twelve school man we're gonna be we'll well 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 the year i don't know if we'll be out of educate toll schools so we might miss this one by a quarter do you have separate ceo running that one or you're their ceo also of that company i have a chief engineer from jp and nasa that's like really good and it's mostly a pure engineering project project there's like really not much to do on the business side like there's you know we have like some supply chain stuff and other things but most of it 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 an like deep in deep tact deep engineering problem to solve and my whole team is just all of they're really good we make actually made a pretty big change of cover we would already be in market by now and i like i pivoted the whole technology system about a year ago we were building this like we basically i i found a way to do everything very cheaply in in silicon in ships and reduced the price by like ninety percent make it much more scalable and make it work better and we pivoted the problem was that the fabrication times for designing your own chips and get mouth 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 now we need to make more and is another six monthly lead time to make you even more of so we're just like we're like dealing with like real silk long fabrication of very difficult chips lead times now we'll be out of this at some point but it's not like chips you can go and buy it you know off a shelf these are like custom design coverage chips that like nobody's really ever designed before that we had a special fabric cater in europe that had to go make up and it took about a year hey you are firing on all cylinders right now professionally it seems and i'm and i'm and i i actually would like to know like what's the trade off it's 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 in the companies i had an issue where like i i i think my life is like three pockets i like work took care deeply about my family i'm like three kids they're pretty young right now and then i have like the call the other stuff where it's like a friends in town or you can go to annual golf trip or like it's a bachelor party or like you know so wedding and like europe or whatever it is like in this bucket over here and i felt like i needed to make a decision like i i didn't need to like if i wanna do use any of these well i kinda like i can't do all three and what i wanted to do really well is family and i wanna do like business stuff i wanted just like i wanna be like a plus in those areas and so i basically stopped the third bucket i don't like i don't like do anything anymore over here so like a i a friend in town from a college it was like my like freshman roommate and he was like i'm in town for ten days in the bay area wanna meet up i just seen him like you know for a long time it would be great to get a coffee i was like man i'm gonna be i don't have it any time i can't i can't meet you he's like i'll make myself available to come to you was like i literally have no time every minute i'm away from one of these two is a minute away with either with my family or work and there's almost a limited amount of time i put in both those buckets 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 your what's on the home screen of your phone what what what's your app set up what do you got all that people well you gotta open it up oh what's my oh see my so you have just tons of text like this is like my those are all i think slacks and texts i mean i you use slack i i can't get through it during the day have heart going through it and then they're heart text me i guess important i need to look at with a link so what's your setup up like what's your like day when you're do you use a laptop at or you only on phone use a laptop yes laptop a lot laptop and phone i would say i use har 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 tracks it says my it's in my email to my myself what about your to do list that's all in har har made saw that what about before har i would my to do list was done the google doc i had like a doctor called rep planning and it would constantly keep updating every week i had coming on sundays usually and update my plans for the week and i updated there and what about health are you doing anything for health yeah i do like i've got i've gotten like access to some special doctors and things now or they basically sending you through like the quarterly blood status and like the the whole body scans and like the if 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 then met thorough of all this like like for instance like like you know if you get a you can get a ct scan of your heart for like hundred bucks i think you can basically prevent heart attacks you can get a full body mri and think you can like have early cancer infection a lot of blood work can find some anomalies you can go fix and better for your health so and there's like maybe like a dozen of those yeah yeah 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 e right like i've i've like i eat pretty well now yeah i mean listen like someone's gotta give i can't sit here all day yeah mean it like i gotta go work i like i love i i like you know i wanna go crush these businesses when you you wrote in a 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 can 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 the entrepreneurial strategy you have when you kinda hit those lows yeah i i basically almost for like fifteen years was like always rented out of money you know at vet we we had a couple pivot early on we ended up brace like a five hundred thousand dollar convertible note in twenty fifteen i at that point i think i took out like a fifty or a hundred thousand hour loan i was not paying myself a salary as in new york city i was like so broke i was in the negative we raised the convertible note it did not look great and i think it was like six months later we launched the marketplace at veteran and it just like completely took off and then a year later we sold for a hundred ten million and i think that period from twenty twelve to twenty seventeen which just like was like i like i had like basically like debt things weren't working and it's hard and what's what's the inter monologue what do you tell yourself the inter monologue like this really sucks super painful i think at that point you just gotta go like day four day you just gotta make it like day you gotta make when things get really bad like that you gotta build a punch list and just gotta get through it like there's only way out us through so you need to build a punch list and you need to get to day to day you gotta go day to day you can't go week to week that two days you can look at friday you look you gotta go every every year get to the next day 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 kinda helped me and he was like just all you gotta do is like pick something like it doesn't matter if it's a hundred feet or half a mile in the distance even though you have forty nine 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 two hundred yards away you're like okay i'll consider quitting when get to that no it was like great i think it's exactly how i thought about it but it was like it's like okay so then i sold valerie and then i was doing archer i was like man i made a hundred and ten million and we like twelve acts all the adventure guys and then i was like we're gonna raise money be before i'll be raised money be fine and like everybody's is like what do we what are you doing for archer yeah everybody's like what are you we're not gonna find this what are you talking about how do you fight that inner monologue where everyone says you're stupid and wrong in the a silly just go do software it's coming from police conviction like i i know right i've in i've done the work i understand it i'm on the floor but the odds are still against you right but that's that's that's that's the game that's when you play this game it's like you like sign up in like ninety five percent of everybody around you will fail like i remember what veteran we like we we started the nyu incubator i was so excited we got in like the one of the like the the semester and there was like i think i like fifty companies that were there we started soho it was great we had a great time the i think if you look back like i think like five years later me and one other guy are the only two people that made greater than zero dollars we're our our team forty eight companies went to zero and i was just like holy shit if you're around this game for long enough like everybody dies and that's everywhere it's been like that since for twenty years not i've been washing around you're like you see all the tech crush stuff and things on x about people raising money else and just like over time that all just kinda fades away and it's just really brutal so i had to like i had to like i you know i had like i bought a house and like had to put all the rest of the money into archer and then i had like a stock lock up so even while i coming over to figure like the the stock was like unlocking i was funding figure with stock from archer and i no other cash stock was coming down and the stock was just like literally like a falling knife when at that point it was just like you i think if from like ten bucks to like two and since like gone up a lot but like i had to take a second mortgage on my house that even fund 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 give you spine like everybody's trying to do easy things when you work on harder things yeah like less generally like overall probably there's like first order like less competition you have probably like a hard thing probably means like it could be a like really big tam really big access if it works you like just like you know risk reward trade you have folks that probably wanna work on hard things but like the best over achieve in the world that kinda wanna wants the work there generally like you know hard things have like binary payoff for investment say like really wanna fund those things because we could have like a hundred x return for the portfolio and i think there's like a nonlinear curve to scaling like here i mean like of of the difficulty here meaning mean like i think a lot of the hard things are not like ten or hundred times harder i think the hard thing sometimes are like two or three or four times harder five times harder but they're not a hundred times harder so you might have a hundred times better payoff off but it might be like three or four times harder i'll give you an example in a robotics i think like largely building in like quad robots like four legged dog robots versus humanoid like probably humanoid are probably three times harder if not maybe four that's it but like there's really no i don't think there's was like really a real market for cute for humanoid like 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 you to anybody really at this point like really wants to go on time on that so like you do human though was like okay three times harder but it's probably like a a million times higher payoff probably like a million x or billionaire x higher for that you know what i mean for investors for humans i wanna work there get stock and put upside and for everything else like what why would you ever like wanna work on like like four legged dogs well what economic value you can know like a robot dog bring that at scale like if you really understand it like i think there's everybody's trying to do the easy work and just becomes really difficult you like look look at all the ai swap like open call harness is out there today it's all crap it's all not good they're all gonna i i don't think any of them will make it long term you might have some consolidation here and there for aqua hires and stuff but like that's gonna go all the way did you talk in so many absolute that has that not gotten you in trouble ever i don't know i mean mark my words like like you think like like i have you guys even use open call since then no i don't know how to cloud you use open call i i never never trusted open call to set it up i was use it i don't use anymore it's not very good like this the waves over i don't know just i'm just trying to say like i think it's like i think the most important thing you can do is a founder is a think through what you're gonna actually go do because you're gonna spend the next ten fifteen years doing it and it'll it'll like it'll map the whole course the probability course it's like a probability way decision and of like our probability of like of like a potential outcomes well but you're you're you're you're talking about a a very particular game like like for example you're as you've said you're like we're gonna be a trillion dollar company or we're gonna go bankrupt like it's it's binary most business is not binary you're you know 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 ten million dollar year business that's a massive home run is it we're like if like things can do that well and you look back when you're seven year eighty with they would you asked the same person hey you built took really cool five ten million dollar business you did it for thirty years you didn't do anything else you didn't try anything else while you're were doing it you just took work on that business would you have gone back thirty years ago and try to take a bigger swing right what would you have taken a different swing than v was like that better is my bridge i started inside of veterinary 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 dot 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 happened and 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 sort like i think it is kinda of binary even guys that gets a ten million dollars there's probably like another ninety percent of those folks that just didn't make it when they're out there trying so i think it's just i think it's just hard and i think dude kudos the guys getting like five or ten million in business those it's hard especially doing that if we maybe look a little bit of capital or no capital coming that be asking you real quick about your 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 and at you know unrelated spaces and not humanoid robots but equally cool interesting peek at the future i think you've probably seen more of the future than than us and definitely more more than most of the listeners can you give us anything that you've seen or heard or read about i founder you've met that's doing something that's like oh yeah you you you guys you guys realize right the future is actually gonna look like this and we're just you know not it's not evenly distributed for all the rest of us yet i like i like looking at like i like trying to think through this problem of what was the world gonna look like in thirty years or is there where everything's headed i think we have an energy problem like not an energy consumption like like a generation problem so how do we me both but like oh ultimately how do we like generate more energy as like a species i think there's like there's like a there's like a secular trend here that you wanna go ride and really help and i think there's a lot of work done cor this to like like standards a living for humans so i think there's a lot of work here like what is that next generation there's it solar or is it when is it nuclear like and then there's a bunch of different traits inside of here for fusion and fusion and the rest like i think it's a really exciting area i think it's take a long time but you like they you need like really great entrepreneurs like they're solving that stuff i think ai is just gonna dominate a a lot of stuff in the next ten or twenty years for all of us here i think it's gonna be like a hundred are we all live to the internet like i think it's gonna a hundred times bigger than internet i think gives be so so big i it's gonna is it's gonna ai is gonna eat the whole internet skinny it all up and i think it's gonna be a extremely like large trend both physically initially 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 horror configure it's unclear we're still in the spot where we're like it's really not clear who's gonna do well here in the stuff but we're in this like foggy area for a lot of these stuff of there's no been no breakout here there's been early wins in really breakouts but there's like a next leg here that we're gonna go through and we're like we're in it now i think we'll know more the next year or two what without what it looks like but 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 been like you know been like man this is like a crazy great product i like the small stuff like i like whisper whisper flow has like pretty meaningfully changed i communicate yeah that's been pretty cool i think that's been my big stand the last six months what about last question what about people who inspire you because you're 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 attributes similar to the attribute this person has i think i really admire the folks that are like fully dedicated in their craft really like watching the like or jordan documentary he's just like he's just like i just wanted be like the best in the world at this i think for like first starters have the same thing too and i think first and foremost like you know what i can read i ever met steve jobs but like my lord like stories heard and everything else the guy was just like a an un unbelievable operator and product i founder her i've also got the note jeff bass pretty well he invested in figure and he's been here in a lot of times and i think i i think jeff is has been a really good sound board for a lot of things we've gone through i jensen in here last week again like we're fairly close and i think jensen there's some un unbelievable operator as well he's very hands on and has a very unique way of managing nvidia in his organization last thirty years and it's i i think he's like i he's doing a lot of really good things 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 like you figured out how to do this somehow in the next year or two they're gonna figure out how to break through and really get this like working in a bigger way or you won't and like this is like your it's game time for you now and you gotta just get wired in and like figure out how to break it out and make a thing work and scale it and it's a really interesting point 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 like your next you know you're on the big field now and your next big push is gonna like make or break it so i think he's largely right like i think we're like we got robots not doing this stuff autonomously with ai throttle which is crazy i think four years ago you've been like i've been like no way like no way you could 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 it always was a knee you had like there was five engineers you're like this guy just got done building the tesla acts or cyber truck or something this guy did this amazing thing this guy shared cancer look how the knee moves and the ankle has door selection and we were just sitting around looking at this knee and that was like the coolest thing i 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 an inference on board it's out pretty well the joints go if you know it's it's it's unbelievable and it's crazy it works and and you know the next leg up is just like making that work at higher scale so i don't know has been great i think it's i don't know i think those are kinda some like i think really good folks to look up to that really like 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 i was good to see you again thank you so dude alright that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about marketing school it is a podcast that's part of the hubspot podcast network and it is run by neil patel and air two 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 podcast