Opinion
Adcock: Independent Board Members Make Terrible Decisions Because They Lack Equity
“So you have like all these folks that have like no stock and no skin in the game coming in, trying to be impartial that are making the worst decisions I've ever seen. Like, it's just a fundamental issue with public companies. I fundamentally believe independen…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Adcock: Everyone Moving Fast at OpenAI Is Going or Gone
“Everybody that's moved fast at OpenAI is gonna go, or is gone. Like, and they'll be left with folks that move slow, want to think about safety and all this stuff”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Adcock: OpenAI Will Suffer Unrecoverable Speed and Brand Damage
“And now open AI is going to have a
Massive issue with speed and brand and everything else, and it's going to be unrecoverable.
They're never going to be a recover from what happened.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Humanoid robots will not displace labor near-term due to massive shortages
“I think in like the near and medium case, we're really not going to be displacing that much labor. I think what we're seeing every day we're walking into a warehouse or manufacturing a retail scenario, they have a tremendous amount of unemployment. The turnove…”
Insight
Adcock: Risk-Averse Boards Directly Conflict With Early-Stage Startup Needs
“Generally the board is a very They're frightened of risk. They're frightened of getting sued. They're frightened of told the wrong thing. Like, a lot of times doing nothing is easier than doing something that might be very aggressive, that'd be hard, and a lot…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Nov 2028
Adcock: A Board Coup Will Never Happen to Altman or Me Again
“Like this will never happen to Sam ever again. This problem that we're talking about here will never happen to me going forward again.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Billions of humanoid robots will be manufactured to solve labor shortages
“We think there's an opportunity to manufacture millions and ultimately billions of robotics to help with the world, and we think that's going to have, like, very substantial impact on the economy.”
Insight
Special-purpose robots will never reach high volumes or scale AI
“And then the problem there is you're building one product for one application. That application will never be done. A product will never be manufactured in high volumes, which is hard for cost. And you're never really going to build an AI data engine on one pr…”
Prediction Open · timeframe May 2033
Figure aims to ship one million humanoid robots within 10 years
“I hope within the next, you know, 10 years, we can ship at least a million robots into the world.”
Disclosure
Adcock: Retooling Archer's Board for NYSE Independence Rules Was a Mistake
“I took my company public on the New York Stock Exchange. You have to have the majority of all your board seats be independent. So I had to basically retool my whole entire board at Archer when I went public. And it was a, you know, I made like a, basically loo…”
Insight
Adcock: Truly Vetting Board Behavior Requires a Ten-Plus Year Relationship
“I think if you haven't had a relationship with somebody for like 10 plus years, you're never really going to truly understand how they're going to behave in certain instances on a board like this, to be really frank.”
Opinion
Traditional venture capital avoids high-risk, capital-intensive deep tech startups
“There's, you know, some folks at the big groups that focus on D tech, but they really focus on like kind of the ancillary businesses. They're not focused on the businesses that need a ton of cash that have potentially low odds of success that could be really g…”
Insight
Electric aircraft range depends on three core physics levers
“You can boil almost everything down to three big levers that the business had or the product had on the aircraft side. You basically had we basically, I basically built an, like, you know, electric range equation that amounted to how much powertrain efficiency…”
Assertion Supported
Electric aircraft remove thousands of parts and improve safety over helicopters
“When you moved electric, you were basically removing thousands of parts that are not necessary in a helicopter. You're changing the dynamics, like, the aerodynamic dynamics of the rotors and the blades that Change, like, the acoustic signature significantly. Y…”
Disclosure
Figure aims for human-speed robot performance by the end of 2023
“We actually have a full warehouse built in our lab here, and we want to do full end-to-end human speed performance of the robot by end of year.”
Opinion
Silicon Valley cultures split between lifestyle perks and mission-driven execution
“And I think there's like, there's, like, there's basically two bifurcated cultures out here in Silicon Valley. There's the culture of like, you know, Google, Facebook, Pinterest, that like, you know, we're here for you. We'll pay you as much money as possible,…”
Insight
Adcock: Founder-Led Companies Require Both Board Control and Supermajority Stock
“You really need the board control in terms of, like, number of unique votes, and then you need the majority of votes, and then you really need the supermajority to be a true founder-led business.”
Assertion Contradicted
Adcock: Roughly 50 Dual-Class Companies Went Public in Two Decades
“Roughly 50 companies went public last like two decades that had this.”
Insight
Adcock: Hidden Contract Clauses Can Strip Fired Founders of Voting Rights
“Basically like, you know, like layman's terms, if you get fired, you lose, you can basically lose your common votes for governance purposes. These are kind of hidden in your transaction agreements. So the investor rights agreements, right at first refusal, co-…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Adcock: Sam Altman Will Emerge Ten Times Stronger From OpenAI Firing
“Sam's gonna come out of this, like 10 X stronger hellbent this was probably inevitable based on when the board was set up and the mess that was going on”
Insight
Entrepreneurs need personal capital and credibility before entering hardware
“I think there's some, like escape velocity needed for any entrepreneur to get into hardware. I think that's just, like, really tough.”
Insight
Hardware operates on clear physical rules unlike unpredictable software marketplaces
“Like, there's, like, there's physics in hardware. It's, like, there's rules that we can follow that are either right or wrong, and in software marketplaces, it's not, right?”
Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2099
All non-rocket transportation will become electric this century
“Basically the century, all form of transportation besides rockets will move to electric.”
Insight
Solving urban traffic requires building infrastructure above or below ground
“I think the way you're gonna fix this is you need to use a z-axis. You need to go either above or below ground to fix this. You need to go into three, the third dimension.”
Brett Adcock