The Exchanges

Q You're almost four years old. How did you scale up this fast? What was the process like?

A Um, yeah, I've been building companies for like about 20 years now, uh, scaled a software company up pretty fast, sold it, scaled Archer up pretty fast, took it public. And so, um, you know, every time, you know, I'm scaling, I'm doing, I'm in this phase, I get, I get to sit back and say, how do, what did I learn from past experiences and how do I do it better? And, um, you know, at Figure, we took a very differentiated approach to basically vertically design everything. 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. Um, the sensors, the structure, the kinematics, the joints, uh, we like this, you know, the batteries that you saw today and the battery packs that, that I think has really enabled us to like control our destiny. We get to like build our own supply chain. And, uh, without that, you're like left at the mercy of like some vendor. And then if that has an issue, like how are you gonna go solve it? If it's got a code problem, do you understand it? Can you QA it? Can you fix it? Can you patch it? Um, So we understand the whole stack from top to bottom. There was enormous lift up front to get the right people here that could do that. And then we've now been iterating through, as you can se…

AI assessment note: “we took a very differentiated approach to basically vertically design everything”

Q How do you, I mean, I know all of this is stabilized, but like, is it better that it's one piece in the torso versus distributed across the body?

A Yeah, it's way better than one piece. The battery pack has, um, just even for safety, we have like a lot of thermal runaway, um, properties inside the pack that we've designed here internally to make sure, um, in the worst case, you basically want, uh, to say like, okay, if the, if the batteries, if a cell or battery cell is going to thermal runaway, you never want that to ever propagate outside the pack. So you want it to contain it to the battery system itself. So we have like basically a structural, uh, system and also basically a thermal runaway venting process we've designed internally. To basically allow for the battery to be extremely safe. Like the, the requirement is like you want no flame to ever exit the pack. You don't want a robot like on fire or something like that out in the world. Uh, so we've designed the right CC systems. We, we've never had a robot ever have.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it's way better than one piece. The battery pack has, um, just even”

Q How much did this one cost to make and develop going down the line?

A Oh, wow. Um, this one was like, uh, built to be expensive and move extremely fast, uh, in terms of building it. So this was like hundreds of thousands of dollars, uh, and the robots we have now are, are like, uh, uh, you know, well under a 100,000 dollars each. Um, and, uh, So yeah, this was very expensive. Mostly expensive because we CNC manufactured the entire thing. Uh, like basically the way we made all the metal parts was like extremely high precision, like, I think like Formula One race car type, type, type, type stuff. Um, we had this walk-in within the first year, uh, and we did, we did a lot of the early AI stuff here that we kind of proved out at the company. It was, it was great. Um, and then we moved on to figure two, which is, which is here. Uh, some improvements we did is we moved the battery, uh, that was on a backpack. Into the torso.

AI assessment note: “this was like hundreds of thousands of dollars”

Q Do they need to be connected to Wi-Fi too? What are the, what are all the integrations?

A These, these robots have five G and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Uh, but we do not need to be connected to Wi-Fi to do work. Like these robots out here, if they lost like internet connection or network, they can basically continue to do work. We run Helix on board. Uh, so they're actually loaded into, uh, GPUs on board and memory, and we run inference on board. Meaning if we, uh, if we lose internet connection, we can still do housework and logistics. Like, like humans are. Yeah. I mean, maybe I have a hard time, like, doing work when I, like, losing our connection, but most humans can do most work. Um, so, uh, so another thing that we, um, we, like, we're working on solving that I'm, like, excited to show you here is, um, what, what if you lose, like, what if you lose communications with, like, all, any of the 40 joints? Or what if you lose power? And upper body's kind of fine if, like, you lose a wrist or elbow, like, it's, like, you're not gonna fall at the very least. Um, but falling is, like, a, it's, Terrible event for us. We don't ever want to fall. We actually have an initiative internally called Never Fall. It's like, we never ever want to fall, even, ah, and, you know, we will fall, but we don't ever want to tolerate it. Um, the hardest problem here, uh, for the controller is like, what if we lose like a, like a, like an ankle, a knee, or hip? What if you just like, lost a kn…

AI assessment note: “we do not need to be connected to Wi-Fi to do work”

Q How many are you In development, testing all at the same time. Like, what is the typical, is it, these bays are always active? How does it work?

A Yeah, we basically, uh, so the goal of this lab is to basically do final, uh, final checks for all software. That could be, like, that could be embedded software. It could be, like, a neural network, a helix. It could be firmware on the robot, and then any new hardware changes we have. We need to make sure, like, they're, if those, those changes are bulletproof before they head out of here, because it's going to cause a lot of problems if, like, We're trying to run a use case for logistics or home, and the robots are messing up. We're not sure why it's messing up. That's not great for us. So basically here, we're basically doing a ton of testing. We have, like, test plans laid out every single morning. We're running those down, and when we see any potential falls, we have to go solve it. Then we have to retest those plans. Uh, so these, these robots running here, like, all day, uh, every single week, and we run them really hard.

AI assessment note: “these robots running here, like, all day, uh, every single week”

Q You've raised nearly two billion dollars. I think most recently publicly stated at thirty nine billion dollars. Do you see capital as a risk or a constraint or the valuation as a risk?

A This will build like the biggest business in the world. Like half of, like a little under half of GDP is human labor in the commercial market. Like they pay wages for humans. We, we do human work. So you're looking at, we will have the ability to ship, if the robots work well, billions of robots in the commercial workforce, uh, you'll produce, you know, there's like, 30 trillion, 40 trillion of wages paid to, like, every year to that, to, like, to, to, to folks that would be doing at work. We'll be able to expand that work, automate more, like, a lot of it, and continue to scale it up. I think, like, that plus the stuff we're seeing in the home, We'll just build, like, enormous of tens of trillions of revenue. We'll build something massive. I mean, what do most companies trade it? Tech companies trade it 10 or 20 times revenue. You're in, like, 10 trillion dollars or, you know, whatever, a hundred billion dollars to a trillion dollars of revs. Like, this is gonna be a huge business.

AI assessment note: “This will build like the biggest business in the world.”