Apr 30, 2026 · 33m · sourcery
The $10 Trillion Bet on Humanoid Robots | Figure Founder Brett Adcock · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
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In this interview episode of 'Sourcery,' host Molly O'Shea speaks with Figure Founder and CEO Brett Adcock about the rapid development, AI strategy, and economic potential of humanoid robotics. Adcock details Figure's vertically integrated manufacturing model, the decision to develop physical AI entirely in-house, and his ambition to capture a portion of the $40 trillion global labor market.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Molly holds 22.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Molly as informed peer 3.0 Guest teaching 2.9 Guest disagreement 2.2 Molly pushing back 1.6
speaking balance: gold is Molly, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 17:15 Declaring Figure outpaced and fired OpenAI
Brett bluntly dismisses OpenAI's robotics learning competence relative to Figure's internal team, declaring that Figure ran circles around them and concluding with 'So I fired them.'
Hardest push from Molly ▶ 29:20 Pressing on capital and valuation riskMolly directly challenges Brett on whether raising nearly $2 billion and reaching a reported $39 billion valuation creates structural constraints or risks for the company.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 10:05 Explaining why historical humanoids failed commerciallyBrett breaks down why prior robotics benchmarks like Boston Dynamics' Atlas were fundamentally research tools plagued by hydraulic leaks and unsuitable for commercial deployment.
Molly holds their own ▶ 2:30 Connecting Skydio drone cycles to humanoid roboticsMolly demonstrates domain knowledge by comparing the current humanoid race against past drone hardware hype cycles learned firsthand from Skydio's leadership.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Molly as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Molly pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome & Hot Take on Robotics | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Molly opens by referencing recent viral takes and contrasts humanoid robotics with drone hype cycles learned from her interview with Skydio. Brett lays out his timeline for scaling from thousands to millions of units. | |
| Overcoming Commercialization Bottlenecks | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Molly asks directly about bottlenecks and whether Brett worries about Tesla's Optimus. Brett reframes the challenge from a manufacturing problem to an intelligence and AI policy problem. | |
| Leaving Archer and the Macro Vision for Humanoids | 4 | 4 | 3 | 1 | Molly brings up founder liquidity dynamics discussed with A16z Perennial to ask why Brett self-funded another venture after Archer's IPO. Brett critiques past robotics efforts like Boston Dynamics' hydraulic Atlas as research projects unfit for commercial scale. | |
| Sponsor Segment: Brex and Turing | 2 | 4 | 1 | 2 | After sponsor reads, Molly questions Brett on time management and drills into how he acquired 100% of the terahertz radar IP from NASA JPL for Cover. Brett details the mechanics of standoff weapon detection technology. | |
| Dissolving the OpenAI Partnership | 3 | 2 | 5 | 2 | Molly asks about the dissolution of Figure's OpenAI partnership and notes corporate espionage threats in the Bay Area. Brett candidly asserts that Figure ran circles around OpenAI in robotics learning models, prompting him to terminate the collaboration. | |
| Leadership Performance and Time Allocation | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | Molly inquires about maintaining leadership performance across multiple companies. Brett explains discarding board meetings, PR panels, and social obligations to stay embedded in the engineering bullpen. | |
| Sponsor Segment: VCX, Public, Merge, and Deel | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Following mid-roll ads, Molly asks about leadership inspirations. Brett cites Steve Jobs and Figure investor Jeff Bezos as templates for playing the startup game at maximum intensity. | |
| Core Risks and Fleet Reliability Challenges | 3 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Molly asks what keeps Brett up at night regarding operational risks. Brett educates on the technical reality of hardware and software faults across expanding fleets and unpredictable state spaces. | |
| Financial Potential and $10 Trillion Vision | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Molly presses Brett on whether massive capital raises and a reported $39 billion valuation create downstream risks. Brett counters by mapping the potential revenue against the $30 to $40 trillion global labor wage pool. |
Statements from this episode (20)
Figure is not teleoperating its humanoid robots, says founder Brett Adcock
“We're not teleoperating this stuff.”
Adcock: Humanoid robots are working now in living rooms and commercial settings
“We just want humanoid robots to work, and like, they're working now. It's pretty simple. Like, we're seeing robots to do everyday things. Like, we saw it clean up a living room, do commercial work.”
Adcock: Figure is probably a few years ahead of all global competitors
“We think we're probably at this point a few years ahead of every big, everybody globally doing this.”
Adcock: Figure will build thousands of robots this year, has parts in-house
“We'll make thousands of robots Over the, like here, like basically as fast as we can this year. So we're ramping Bocu, like, lines up as fast as we can. We had record production in March, and we're gonna try to three X that by May, and we'll build thousands of…”
Figure robots operated daily at a BMW plant for six months
“So we had a small batch of robots that went out to B&W last year and did work every day. We ran for six months every single day.”
Adcock: Humanoid Robotics Is an Intelligence Problem, Not Manufacturing
“In my mind, this is not a manufacturing problem. This is an intelligence problem.”
Adcock: Figure designs more robot parts in-house than any competitor
“I don't think there's any group in the world that I wouldn't think on the robotic side that makes the designs more parts than we do on the robot. We design the motors, basically every part within there, the rotor stator, everything.”
Adcock: Figure hit $1M monthly burn and 40 staff within five months
“I self-funded the whole company up front. We got to, you know, we got to a million a month of burn in four months. It was like a no joke. We got the 40 person team in four or five months.”
Adcock: Solving humanoid robotics will create the world's largest business
“It's if you can solve this, it'll build the biggest business in the world by like a large factor.”
Boston Dynamics' Atlas was an unsafe, uncommercial research project, says Adcock
“And I think for humanoids, like, you know, the best we had four years ago was like a, you know, Boston Dynamics had a hydraulic humanoid called Atlas. It like dripped oils everywhere. It lasted like 20 minutes. It was like very big, very unsafe. You could neve…”
Adcock: NASA JPL tech detects concealed weapons from 20 meters away
“There's a technology that was designed at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab about a decade ago that it can detect weapons underneath clothes and in backpacks and bags from, like 10, 20, you know, five, 10, 20 meters away. And they built it for the Iraq-Afghanistan war t…”
Adcock: OpenAI co-led Figure's Series B alongside AI collaboration deal
“OpenAI led our, led my series B a couple years ago. And as a part of that, we did a collaboration agreement to work on like next-generation AI models together.”
Adcock claims Figure's internal AI team was running circles around OpenAI
“It got to a point where we were just like, our team internally that was designing these models were running circles around OpenAI. We were just way better at this. And we were better about testing on the robots, training the models, like all, all of it.”
Brett Adcock says he terminated Figure's AI collaboration agreement with OpenAI
“And so I fired him.”
Figure caught an unauthorized drone peering into its headquarters
“One day we're like looking up and we're like it was in this office. And we look at the corner of the window at the top, there's like a drone sitting there looking in the office, like right over here.”
Adcock: Eliminating casual socializing allows total focus on family and companies
“I decided, like, five years ago to, like, stop doing like the annual golf trip and stop doing like this person's in town. I haven't seen in 10 years. We need to go out to dinner. I just don't do that anymore. I spend all my time with family or my companies. Th…”
Jeff Bezos is a major investor in Figure, says Adcock
“Jeff Bezos, which is a big investor for us at Figure and, you know, I get to basically have access to and talk with.”
Adcock: No humanoid robot has demonstrated 7-10 failure-free autonomous hours daily
“I want to be able to put a robot into a home and be able to do, like, seven to 10 hours of work successfully without failures, with, like, to know, like, with no human intervention and do that every day forever. It's just, like, a hard problem. Nobody's ever s…”
Adcock: Figure 3 faults weekly compared to Figure 1 faulting hourly
“Like we used to run that robot here, figure, figure one, and man, that robot could like run for like an hour and it would like fault. We know all the reasons or it would fall or would like, you know, lose power. And, you know, we moved to figure two. I think w…”
Adcock believes Figure has the recipe to achieve physical AGI
“I want this to be the first place where we see see AGI in the physical world. And we think we have the recipe and we think we have like the right training processes in place to do this. We and this will be an important, this year and next will be important to …”