EXCLUSIVE: $3B Founder Reveals His Next Big Idea

if you had to describe yourself what would you say you are i just wanna go build important things and win that's it i feel like i could rule to word i know i could be what i want to all in like a days we're live with brett ad hoc i wanted to start off with something crisp you told me this story and this is something that's fascinating about you which is about your ability to learn so i think i i don't wanna butcher you the story but you said something like i was reading old i think research papers and you found that i think in the seventies nasa came up with this amazing thing and you c called or cold email nasa and you're like can you actually show me this device is that story right yeah it's pretty close like the first time i've talked about this publicly so so sorry for maybe from like for context i have been kind of following what's happening i k through twelve schools in the us is relates to school shootings and if you look at the charts of like you know how many shootings are actually happening to the schools how many deaths are happening in schools it's it's it's it's like basically you have like a school shooting like basically once per day now in the us and k twelve that's true is that true that's insane i the same we're like i think it was like two hundred over two hundred people like last year were like either shot or wound or or i wounded or killed in the us at k two twelve and the a third of those are all elementary and the the chart if you look like a light graph of the chart it's just like exponential it's we we like five x in twenty eighteen kinda almost like a year over year and then we like took another three x moves so we basically ten the number of school shootings over the last like seven years or so decade and it's just getting more and worse what i found is that most of all the school shootings are not what we're seeing on tv where you know there's like an over assault where something's bringing in like a machine gun planned it out driving a truck in a campus and into shooting people up that's that's that's that's we that happens a few times a year ninety ninety ninety nine ninety eight percent of all the other shootings are from a kid bringing a handgun in every day the school they're getting a fight at some point to escalate space in new shooting so they're just like it's like a it's like a it's like a accessory it's like like bringing a right third brand they have a handgun in their backpack and but from our analysis several hundred thousand guns are being brought in into schools in k twelve every year in the in the us and not found and then a small fraction of those that we see down the statistics are hap are basically getting in like bullied or doing in a fight and they're shooting somebody on school campus so one of my hobbies i i love reading like research papers some as papers in general and the way i think you solve this is you need to be able to see the guns i think gun control some like interested in passionate about but i think it's not gonna fix all school shootings forever there was like last year's seventy nice stabbing and kt told schools so like you know even if you halted the guns are still like nice stabbing happening here so we need to see the weapons so i was reading i came across a research paper from nasa jet propulsion lab where they were doing work where they were trying to detect bomb vest and weapons underneath like garments and clothes and jackets for like afghanistan and iraq and they developed some really interesting like weapons imaging technology and i flew to jp like nasa proposal lab in pasadena and i was talking to the the guy that ran it did you just cold cold email or something oh yeah cold called them for sure yeah and what did you say oh i said hey i i i need a i need to learn more about this i read richard paper can we have a conversation you know most people in general will get on a phone with you at this point like if you're passionate about some work they did for years and years that they're no longer doing like somebody's gonna take a phone call i think i think most people could could could knock on that door and get that person to react i yeah i don't think that's a hard thing to do called them and i flew in and the high level was that they developed a high frequency radar so similar like your wifi or phone like like it's like it like lies in le electromagnetic spectrum so like radio waves basically that were really high frequency so i think about like your phone or wifi but really suit up to a much higher frequency level and they were able to start penetrating clothing and see start like imaging or building or reconstruct images of what's happening inside of bags i mean it's clothing and stuff and if you like read the research papers when you look at it it's like it's like a it's like a airport security cam like airport security but like you can do it fifty meters away and you can do it like a camera and you can take like almost like camera frame rate images which means you could just like point this at an interest of the school in this example and you can see every gun and knife and bomb and it doesn't need to be metallic it doesn't need metal it could be plastic it could be any material is it radio waves it's radio waves is that dangerous if you have ion electromagnetic ways like you would say like x rate yes these are not ion rays like almost like your cell phone and wifi so these are not yeah i mean listen we worked on it from like for like years and years and i think at the end of it was like twenty thirteen or so so it was like when i got there i was like we were talking and chatting and didn't even think to ask to see the machine and at the end of the conversation he's like you wanna come see it and i'm like of course and we like walk down like four flights of stairs of the basement he you know takes the cover off it's dusty it's like a huge like compact computer at the bottom and all those old stuff like all all electronics and all the systems and stuff for are like very dated he turns it on and demos for me he we have like a mannequin camera with a gun underneath the shirt and he shows me and it was like it was unbelievable it was like it was like it was like a camera picture of the gun but then we also had like you also with radio frequency we get the we get a three d year reconstruction so you're mostly like a camera point cloud of the products was this be before you were gonna do figure where you're like this is like my number one or number two or number three idea or something like that this was a while ago and i've been mostly curious about the space and then what happened from like twenty eighteen to now we've seen like a five x spike in the number of school shootings so like the the charter school shootings is like looking like a like an nvidia stock price well we talk about an m m we talk about one chart businesses where you like you see some crazy chart and you're like oh well there's like an opportunity and it's like well if you just there's a tidal wave if you just sort of catch that wave and you aren't even that good like the market's like pulling it out of you like everyone just wants this thing yeah so that was like your one you're kinda one chart where it's like oh well this is obvious so came in to figure at one point in twenty twenty three it was an investor and he was looking at solutions for school shootings like just coincidentally and they were basically at the time looking at a startup that was using like cctv like basically the cameras that are as a school to find guns the problem is like all the guns are hidden so whenever you like brandi a weapon or pull out and wave it around you're at you're at a point where like a second later you're shooting it so you can't stop the shootings you can just get more prepared about how to get there faster maybe get to the right location maybe stop like save some lies if the shooting us for a long period of time you're not like you're not stopping weapons from getting the school you're not theoretically if you've even been stopping being real shootings so i was telling him about my experience here and the the guy like with me dead in the face and he's like listen as somebody has kids like how how are you not like trying this and seeing if you can make this really work and yeah so i at that time i said i i gotta figure out how to spend some time and money making this useful and so is that what you're gonna do you're launching this as a a startup are you gonna have someone else run what are you gonna do yeah so we haven't announced this yet but like it is we have about twelve people in the project and we own all the intellectual property from nasa's jet propulsion lab a licensed all of it and we will have our first system brought up just start imaging weapons in thirty days are you gonna run it who's gonna run it we have a team from gp that's running the system running there right now i i don't think that business can be as big as figure but i feel like that's a monster business let's talk about this for a minute this is not a school thing this is stadiums churches anywhere it's like a lot of like hospitals everything so so my view of this is over long enough period of time as longevity improves for humans the the the writ the severity to having an accident and dying is gonna be higher and higher meaning we're not gonna wanna do more risk or things as we you live longer it's why in the movies if somebody is immortal they're like living in their home it'll leave because if you die you're die you're deaf forever and if you don't die you're like a life forever right now we have like a some finite period of time where we won't we won't be alive anymore so humans take a lot of risk we drive cars that are extremely dangerous and motorcycles we deal this you do motorcycles we do all this like stupid stuff that like has pretty high i would say you know pretty high risk but it if that do you really it forever like you you wouldn't be doing that stuff i would say it long enough period of time i don't think you'll really move through the world without imaging systems like this for safety you're really good at like telling a story so you've you've did this before when i hung out with you about humanoid and robots and you just like you tell these stories that are so grand i just get bought into and i'm like well that makes perfect sense but you do at a much larger scale so you went with like the longevity angle which is like well we're gonna live much i mean it that's a that's just such like a challenging way to think for a lot of people myself included and it's just such an ease like when i hear that pitch i think yeah of course that makes wonderful sense it and it makes me it makes me think going big and having these grand visions is almost easier than not than not than doing the alternative of something smaller do you what i mean it's a hundred percent easier you could hire better people because they're more ambitious and they're interested in working out harder things they're generally larger we could be larger outcomes we're you're talking about like you know building like new industries that maybe never haven't been built before with huge tam investors want like very high risk reward trades where they can make you know fifty hundred times of their money you know most investors from vcs fail so they really need like the hundred back in their portfolio big grand things offer that risk reward opportunity for investors yeah i have this philosophy i think the harder things are easier and i think it it it really depends what industry and what market you're going to but relatively speaking i think it's there's some there's some truth in that yeah because v was you sold battery for a hundred million dollars that's a big outcome that's a big outcome for virtually everyone they're like that's a life changing thing but it doesn't have an inspirational angle to it necessarily i mean no i think like listen at outside of spending time with loved ones where work most of our lives as humans most people we are most people don't like where they work if you've ever look for a job it's like the worst process we saw about bad like bad products looking for a job is is embarrassing it's it's like soul crushing so what we try to do a better is like if we can get all the world's employers together with all the candidates in the world we can use ai to make matches at scale and find the best opportunity for you with machine learning and if you can solve that you could put people in much better places for employment much happier places like they can find jobs they really love yeah i mean you just i would pitched it as a a sick job board and you just totally like make it to be some really inspirational thing but that even as good as you are at pitching that that pale in comparison to i think like when you pitch this this this x ray machine whatever you're gonna call it and so it's just it's cool to see like this evolution though even though you're actually quite good at pitching something like v and i again buy into it what what's the name of this thing gonna be yeah the name is is cover c o v e r and what what's your philosophy on names i think names need i i i i think people i had thought i a sort philosophy towards it but i think i rule like names that are at the very basic level are really easy to say and spell and pronounce and i think most company names like violate one of those first three rules most names are just like too hard to spell and remember and pronounce in my mind and yeah i really want something that over time we can build like a real iconic brand in the space and that just takes a lot of time i would say there too but this the branding around the name and the way you think about the like you know the icon the fall everything for me is like this like almost like you when you build a house you take a really good foundation pour a lot of concrete it's that concrete it's that foundation and you do in the early days hopefully do it right you know i've definitely done it wrong before or done name changes before and and you know these names really unique to my my perspective of how i want my businesses to look and feel i like whatever her better or archer figuring cover but like i think yeah we i we just i just been a decent amount of time thinking through that in the early days to build a good foundation for the brand are you adamant on a certain url or domain name because covered dot com is it looks like an insurance company i assume that's a huge insurance company i don't know but based off of the fact that they have that url i imagine they're quite large do care about the domain we own cover dot ai and i own like obviously cover or our figure dot ai and i bought archer dot com a month before going public so not really so it was like fly archer dot com for a while that was like you know nine dollars and then i spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying archer dot com you know a year later or two years later we bought figure dot ai for hundred grand and then we bought cover for few tens of thousands of dollars so i what i own the dot com's dot ais in these these cases if possible i know you don't care about money but when you are pitching to investors when you're thinking about how big cover is gonna be what's your pitch we're not pitching investors now i'm as finding it's more like a passion project to be honest the the pictures are gonna be really unique because if we end up do raising capital outside i i don't know there might be a path where we never raise capital here they'll also path with acknowledge is very it's very difficult so i mean hopefully we make it work is the the biggest market is not in school schools is like the worst market to go into it's just a bad pitch the the schools have very low budgets they don't have systems like this exactly at the schools right now you know like sure the severity high was shootings but like the the money making opportunities like relatively small comparatively like stadiums and concerts and hospitals and areas have big budgets like most big stadiums you go through now like go you go through like in some metal detector and stuff tsa pre check like the homeland security there's like there's real security applications for this outside of schools that could pay a lot more the schools is like the the worst pitch for like fundraising for me i don't give a shit i really wanna solve the k through twelve school problem i wouldn't be doing this if i if it wasn't for that and we're going straight rate to schools to help solve like i i wanna see if i can help prevent school shootings over time and that's what i that's that's the only reason i'm working on this like you know like funding this project i'm trying to work on it if i had to bet you're sorta of like me where like you have a document where you just like jot down interesting ideas and you probably aren't ever gonna get to them maybe you would if you had an additional twenty four hours in your day some more time in your week what would you be spending it on what ideas is interest you i think i do a few things i think there's areas on like genetics i'm interested in a bit that i you know when i have time i'm doing a lot of research i think there's areas of like electric supersonic that are really interesting i'm really interested in supersonic travel and i'm really interested in electric and there's areas of my experience at you know building e tile aircraft that i'm like pretty excited about i have like a couple like ideas about how to design an aircraft that could like work through these very diver like parts of the mission very like high altitude and high speeds i i really like the industry like synthetic foods there's been a lot of like controversy recently is this synthetic meat is that like impossible or is that like the people who are like literally growing like a cow that like they're growing meat that you're you can eat it's not then possible those are all plant based it's you're basically taking these are like these are like cultured cells you're you're growing you're growing real meats in a lab why does that interest you does that interest you because you're an animal lover does that interest you because cows create a lot of pollution where's does the interest come from it seems super unnecessary to like like raise animals and butcher them and eat them it just seems like super like for for many reasons like if you if you could choose to eat a steak and it was just as good as like as a steak you have today and it is real stake like real muscle muscle tissue and fats and it wasn't come from a cow and it came from a lab but it had all the same you know same the chemical properties what what would you say well i think that i'm a little bit an early adopter on weird things and i would say that sounds awesome i'm in you you understand how that's weird for like your average person like dude do you remember well me your kids do you remember when green catch up came out i remember eating green ketchup up and i was like i know this is the exact same thing but for some reason because it looks different i don't want to touch it yeah but like tv and radio and lights and electricity where those are all weird for folks at some point like those are all like yeah it takes time cars were weird right like everybody's like why would you have a car would you have a horse like all of these are just like really radical in the moment yeah like if we think about the civilization a thousand years from now we've been around for like thousands of years if you like ten thousand more years and we're on mars in the moon you're gonna be grow like having cows and bubbles on mars and then butchering that like i have a room for that like it just seems unrealistic i don't think you understand how unique some of the things you think are and i like to think that because of where i'm from which oddly you are too but i don't know if you like totally grasp but the way that you think is quite unique and a little bit larger than the average person and so yeah what you're saying makes sense but there's just a lot of emotional baggage that comes with that to overcome but i do agree with you i think that that interests you or that interests me as well and i would do it if you had to describe your yourself as an entrepreneur in one word what would you say you are what word best describes your philosophy i don't know i don't really reflect like that too often i i just i i just wanna go build important things and win that's it what percentage of your philosophy based on winning versus the excitement of making stuff all of its winning i don't wanna do something exciting in a lab that does it have the ability to have commercial applications and build a big business that has implications for the masses like that's just i'm not a i'm not a research scientist like i i don't have passion for that i like thinking about how we've evolved as species the last like even like several hundred years and how technology is like been probably the biggest lever arm for our consciousness and understanding of the world and the only way to really do that is on a on a mass level like you know like electricity a lab that wasn't brought to all of civilization is marginally helpful marginally but the orders of magnitude improvements we've had and he may have come from like releasing that to the world as like a an ubiquitous utility and for me winning is the most important thing here because you know let's call it like we we have a certain finite time to say i'm like to to do this kind of stuff at some point we'll be just too old or incapable of doing it and it's on the next generation so i think we have a certain amount of time to go win and go do things useful with our time because i use just devastating to spend like twenty thirty years working on something that doesn't work it's like that's that's the worst case scenario for an entrepreneur as you're dev debating all your time away from friends and family or whatever you could be spending time on as an opportunity cost into this business like if it doesn't win it's just like a terrible story yeah i think that when new when i talk to people who are just starting stuff it's often what i'll say is like the biggest issues that you spend ten years on this and it's just a mediocre thing it's better to to for just suck right away oh great i i actually do like all these calls sometimes like early entrepreneurs that are just getting going and i i'm like so intense about like the idea and the direction and the wise and they're just like yeah yeah i i like whatever how do we hire i you get the first engineer here i need to raise a safe note like how do i do that i was just like dude like if i had a reverse time i would spend like a month on these questions and then like most early guys just don't wanna it like don't wanna hear it they would wanna get move in and get go build and i think you know we talked about here on last time i on m like i kinda fell into veterinary and i kind of like i really built archer and figure with a lot of purpose and intense it's the one thing i would pass down to like the the newer generation that's coming up building stuff like like we have a choice on what to go build what's your criteria that you tell them is is your checklist for if something is worth my time like you you can't just get the one thing right like you just can't get the idea right or the commercial plan right or the fundraising like you're can easily fund raise this because it's a hot topic and get that right i i think it's like really about you have to build this you know i mean you call it a business plan or something but like you have to come up with like an idea of like how you're actually gonna get this thing done in in the face of like ninety five percent of all companies that go try to do this and start plan failing and i would say it's not just about the idea and how you're gonna it how you're gonna balance like moving fast and for slower and product quality and what you're gonna build is feature sets first or or later and who you're gonna be your first clients the enterprise with they like smb and how are you gonna actually get distribution is it you know is it organically is it through social is it outbound or inbound sales like i think he's like putting that whole thing together and having a good clear direction of where the ship sailing is most important i have like a little chart i always draw people of like north south west so like you wanna go north you wanna get this cone going north right you wanna be in this direction you're not gonna be straight dead north but you wanna be like not heading south for too long or you'll die and those are a factor of like all those kind of like you know curious i talked about earlier which is like just commercialization plan how you're gonna make money are gonna fund are you're you're gonna fund the business whether it's like organically or you're gonna raise capital and team you're gonna bring on the culture go build and execution of the product like all those have to be like very thoughtful and driven in the right direction and you know we have us to figure right like we're going to bmw we're going these industrial settings but we wanna be in the home like we if we could be in the home today like home robots we would do that we are using the commercialization industrial commercialization industry as a way to get us ready and more prepared for putting a robot in every home in the world which is a common way of going about it you know you think i think tesla did this where they started more expensive even though he was like i i would like it to be the model t or everyone could have one but i'm just gonna start with high end because that will give us more profits to fund more stuff sure but why then then why has like f failed twice in a row while tesla has just been dominating what's the answer what's your what's your answer for that they they didn't get the product in some of the other stuff right same way tesla did they didn't get speed right and the product quality and the the way they introduced in the world like all that was it balanced well enough and the company's all fell twice in a row you're on sixty minutes the other day and on sixty minutes i think you had like a plate and an apple in a banana like sitting in front of the robot and you said like hey hand me the apple or hem me the orange or something like that and it did a good job where it like it reached it found the right fruit and i think it made a mistake once or twice but then it like corrected itself and you're like hey that's that's the wrong one and it was like i'm sorry and it pick up the right one what's crazy to me is that you're two years old the company's is two years old i've seen that you've been able to do this so quickly and i think when i talk to someone they go everything's late with tech and and and in hardware but somehow brett hasn't been late fig has been lightning fast what have you guys done to be so fast so when i started figure and and also archer i did this at archer too i i started the company before was even incorporating with an idea of like how to move extremely fast so like listen it's like it's like a whole company was billed just for speed we have our company mission statement which like we wanna go this direction as a company then everything else as we like built out the chart and thought about how we're gonna do that the high the values that we think about hiring people for or fire hire people for everything we about compensation everything we think about how do we build schedules how do we plan for schedules like we we don't have we're a hundred and twenty engineers here we have zero program managers zero and we have a certain philosophy around like what to do and and how to build hardware and software that or i think we're kinda the anti silicon valley company in silicon valley as it relates to this we really care about getting things brought up quicker and iterating faster and doing that over a very long period of time like decades and building a company that can do that is extremely hard like there's really no good precedent maybe outside of like tesla and spacex that have done this well at scale like tesla has you know what well over a hundred thousand people like arguably tens of thousands of you know product design engineers and they're moving out of speeds of a small start up and generally when you're adding head cal the companies are all slowing down they it it's almost every company slowing down with more head count they're you're just getting slower over time you don't notice that you don't care the board is art is like giving you indication that you should slow out and be safer and everything's just slowing to a halt in the limit so you have to basically fight this and you have to like the best way you can fight it is like design the whole word from the ground up to to do this or do what landed did with twitter and walk in a fire eighty percent of people and restructure it at the start at that point in time to to go faster and ship product and it's too labor here to say like okay we move fast like what one thing it's like it's the whole company was built just to move fast but what are you asking your recruits the your potential app or your applicant your job applicants to figure out if they do have that ability there's a lot of things happening here a lot of times people haven't been in that environment so when they get in there when they move a fast and a much quicker pace environment it just becomes overwhelming meaning to just too hard and too stressful to handle so if you're like a phd surgeon for ten years where you know sweat pants and like moving slow and you come in here it's like a real culture shock coming the figure and we've had it happened several times where they're like people are just like you know they're coming in late they're moving slow and it's just like it's just it's frustrating for them having to move much faster and it's like probably a lot of anxiety there there are other folks that believe the longer that you take to build something the safer it is and the better job you'll do at it so if you give me you know two years on a robot it will be that robot will be safer for at a i know the two years and better design like folks feel like that it's for sure wrong people think that the longer you spend designing something to safer it'll be in the better it'll be it's for sure wrong because in that ten year period of time without one robot got out i'm gonna have my third gen robot out and i'll have have run it like an order of magnitude longer i will have found all the problems ten times sooner i will have had times to go fix it recur and make it better it'll it'll just be a worse product how do you measure and how how do other people measure if someone's fast enough oh you look at how many iterations somebody is doing and how much progress they made between those iteration cycles and what is what do you what are your expectations a car could be like how many car versions you've gotten out over the last decade and how much progress you've made between those a rocket could be similar viewed a robot could be how many robot iterations are we doing like what version of robot are we on iphone could be you know what how many versions of iphone you'd be got now the last fifteen years how much progress do you made between each one of those that will ultimately set the slope of the curve for speed that that will ultimately be correlated at a high level to how much risk there is of failure in the business long term as we wrap up here i wanna wanna ask something that i've been thinking about with you a lot so you've mentioned some type of genetically engineered food you've mentioned planes you've mentioned fig humanoid these machines that detect guns you have like a pretty wide range of knowledge but unlike a lot of people who have a wide range of knowledge you i've been to your home i've seen like textbooks at your house on a variety of topics and and you have a really unique way of learning you're you're basically like a human ai do you have a framework for learning new things learning stuff is always like really challenging for me i think like i have to first i think everything like a tree i have to first build this like trunk of like first order understanding about the topic before i can ever comprehend and remember the limbs and the leaves and so i have to have like a really fundamentally sound understanding of the tree trunk as i look at certain topics what do you turn to for that you just gotta like you know find this stuff whether it's wikipedia papers like google searches you can use gp four like can you clearly communicate this topic whether it's an engineering topic or or not to a twelve year old sitting on a bar stool and most people can't do that it's like the skill that most people can't do like even people i work with i have a hard time sometimes understanding what's the update on the on the on the you know this this thing or that thing and it's a skill like you have to learn how to do that same way of like understanding something it's a skill to really boil things out really truly understand the basic characterization of what's really happening some of the smartest people i know are also the most clear worded folks about about a topic that's a really good insight and it probably comes because you're an outsider that got into this stuff when you're older maybe or there's so many different multi disciplinary areas of like software and hardware and like electromagnetic and everything else that needs to be done here that you really need to be able to communicate clearly across several groups and it's important even here like we try not to use acronyms and a software purpose person writes firmware an electro electromagnetic person that builds like a rotor s for electric motor like those those folks don't understand those other disciplines generally so they need to communicate with each other as well and they can't be using inside baseball terms and much electromagnetic work when like a firm engineer hasn't been any time to like you know standard and rotor design for electric rotor so like i think this topic of be able to like communicate really well and understand things really well it's just like super important you have like a pretty strong outlook on life it seems like you you you have strong beliefs on what you want the outcome of your life to be how you wanna spend your time which people who have you read about has had the biggest influence on that philosophy or influence you the most i think there's like there's been like really great entrepreneurs over time to show a path that this all can be done like steve jobs elon musk these guys are the best of what they do have been able to show the world like really incredible things can be done on the back of like persistence and focus and i think it's just like really incredible like every time i watch like a spacex launch or holding an apple product in my hands i the you know every company in the world is started i was a start up at some point so i think it's just i don't know i think it's very en to think that you know somebody with with enough willpower can actually go out and do really incredible things for the world and i think that gives me energy every day we got and says you know eager to here figure we have like we haven't done really anything noteworthy today over two years it's been interesting we have robots and stuff but people have built robots we need to go out now and like prove that we can actually ship really high quality product which is gonna take us you know several more years from here but like that's just like a really exciting challenge for us now and it's really hard and everybody has attempted that at least in human robotics commercially it's failed in history so but that should be doable and there are people that have gone over this hump in other industries of other very difficult things maybe less difficult or more difficult here in history and that's just that should be very en digitizing for for us here figure in other entrepreneurs out there trying to do hard things you're a man i have this joke i'm like corn rose are cool but not for me and that's kinda how i feel about the way you think where i'm like i don't know if i can do what you do but i am really excited and happy that people like you exist so thank you for doing everything you're doing i feel great after talking to you yeah thanks for having me on alright that's the pod i feel like i could rule 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