Figure

Brett Adcock had already proven himself as a serial founder twice over. In 2015, after seven years of grinding on his recruiting marketplace Vettery with almost no outside funding—living in a $1,000/month apartment in Manhattan, taking no salary, going into debt, and eventually borrowing $50,000 just to survive—he finally sold the company for $110 million. The windfall was life-changing. He immediately plowed nearly all of it into Archer Aviation, his next moonshot: building electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft to solve urban traffic.

But Archer's path was brutal. When he pitched the idea in 2018, the response was hostile. A prominent VC told him his pitch was "disrespectful"—here was a software guy asking for ~$1 billion to build aircraft certified for all-electric flight, something no one in history had done. For two years, Brett took no salary at Archer either, living off the Vettery windfall while building teams and buying aerospace talent. Archer eventually went public via SPAC at a $1.5B valuation, but the stock collapsed. By April 2022, when Brett left to start Figure, Archer stock had cratered from $5-6 to $1.80. He was locked up and selling shares in a falling market to fund his next company.

Figure's vision is audacious: humanoid robots that can do any physical task a human can do. Brett's insight is that the physical world is built for human interfaces—door handles, tools, stairs—and half of global GDP (~$35-40 trillion) is spent on human labor every year. He reasoned that if he could build robots that navigate this infrastructure, the addressable market is nearly unlimited.

What drew Brett to hardware over software is revealing. With Vettery, he had infinite product choices and had to convince people they needed it. With hardware, the physics are fixed and the demand is explicit: "If I can build this, people will want it." He started with first principles learning—calling 300 aerospace experts, spending six months on cold calls, going back to school for mechanical and aerospace engineering. He even took over a 12-person lab at the University of Florida that was building electric aircraft drones on Archer Road (hence the name Archer).

For Figure, Brett assembled a small team focused on iterating fast. By the time Sam Parr visited the office, there were roughly 10-18 people in a garage-like atmosphere, getting excited when a robot's knee moved, treating it like a glorified Lego set and cutting-edge R&D lab combined.

Brett's approach was boots-on-the-ground validation. He walked into warehouses, manufacturing plants, and retail facilities expecting pushback about job losses. Instead, he found a crisis: 15% daily absenteeism, 50-150% annual turnover, harsh working conditions, and desperate pleas for automation. "We'll buy a million of them if you could do this," one client told him. The demand wasn't theoretical—it was urgent and concrete.

The go-to-market was direct enterprise sales. Clients were already buying robots; they just wanted ones that could do dexterous, human-like tasks that current industrial robots couldn't. This was the opposite of Vettery's challenge of creating a new market category.

What worked was ruthless focus on technology development. Brett's thesis: "The most important thing is the technology development you make—how often you're iterating, how much progress you're making between cycles." Everything else—PR, fundraising, TechCrunch articles—was noise.

What nearly broke him was the capital structure. In early 2023, during the worst fundraising market since the financial crisis, with Archer stock down 75%, Figure was burning $7M/month. Brett was selling Archer shares (limited by lockup and volume restrictions) and wiring the money to Figure's bank account to make payroll. He took out a second mortgage on his house. At one point, he told his Hampton group he was "running out of money" and "might not make it." But he had a wife of 15 years ("a warrior") who believed in him, and he had been through near-death experiences before.

The key realization: hardware companies with proven demand are simpler than software because the burden is purely on technology execution, not on convincing people they need the product.

By the time of this interview, Figure had demonstrated working robots in early commercial applications. Brett's vision for the next 2-5 years: robots deployed with "some of the world's biggest brands" in low volumes, proving the concept and training neural networks on real-world data. In 5 years, he believes Figure will be in the $40-50B valuation range—bigger than autonomous vehicle companies like Cruise or Waymo, because the use cases are easier to scale (warehouses vs. open-road driving) and the demand is explicit and enormous.

Brett's bet: humanoid robots will be the world's largest hardware category, solving a structural labor crisis (shrinking global workforce due to aging and below-replacement fertility) while generating the kind of returns that only come from betting on a $35T+ addressable market. He had already proven he could play this game twice—once with Vettery, once with Archer. Figure was his third all-in bet, and this time he believed the payoff would dwarf everything that came before.