Founder and CEO of humanoid-robotics company Figure; co-founder of Archer Aviation and Vettery.
Adcock claims his analysis shows hundreds of thousands of guns enter US K-12 schools each year without being found.
“from our analysis, several hundred thousand guns are being brought into schools in K-12 every year in the, in the US and not found.”
Adcock claims his analysis shows hundreds of thousands of guns enter US K-12 schools each year without being found.
“from our analysis, several hundred thousand guns are being brought into schools in K-12 every year in the, in the US and not found.”
Brett Adcock licensed NASA JPL high-frequency radar that penetrates clothing to image weapons, even non-metallic ones. Pointed at a school entrance, it can spot every gun, knife, or bomb in real time from a distance.
“if you like read the research papers, you look at it, it's like, it's like a, it's like an airport security, uh, cam, like airport security, but like you can do it, uh, 50 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 entrance of a 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.”
Steal thisMine old government research papers for dormant tech you can license and commercialize.
Adcock argues big, grand visions are easier to execute than small ones because they attract more ambitious people and the 100x risk-reward that VCs need to fund their portfolios.
“It's 100% easier. You can hire better people because they're more ambitious and they're interested in working on harder things. Um, they're generally larger— could be larger outcomes. You're talking about like, you know, building like new industries that maybe never have been built before with huge TAMs. Uh, investors want like very high risk-reward trades where they can make, you know, 50, 100 times of their money.”
Adcock's naming rule: a great company name is easy to say, spell, and pronounce. He says most company names violate at least one of those three. He treats branding as the concrete foundation poured early.
“I really 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 3 rules. Most names are just like too hard. To spell and remember and pronounce in my mind.”
Steal thisTest any company name against three filters: easy to say, spell, and pronounce.
Adcock spent $100K on figure.ai, hundreds of thousands on archer.com (after running flyarcher.com bought for $9), and a few tens of thousands on Cover. He insists on owning the .com or .ai.
“And then I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying archer.com, you know, a year later, 2 years later. We bought figure.ai for $100 grand. And then we bought Cover for a few tens of thousands of dollars. So I want to own the .coms or .ais in these cases, if possible.”
Adcock admits schools have tiny budgets and make a terrible fundraising pitch; stadiums, concerts, and hospitals pay far more. He's self-funding Cover as a passion project specifically to solve K-12 shootings anyway.
“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 is high with shootings, but like the moneymaking opportunity is like relatively small comparatively, like stadiums and concerts and hospitals and areas that have big budgets.”
Adcock says it's all about winning, not the lab excitement. Spending 20-30 years on something that doesn't work is the worst-case scenario because of the opportunity cost of time away from family.
“I think it's just devastating to spend like 20, 30 years working on something that doesn't work. That's like, that's the worst case scenario for an entrepreneur as you're devoting 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.”
Adcock says early founders rush to hire engineers and raise a SAFE note, but he'd spend a month on the idea, direction, and the whys first. He built Vettery by falling into it but built Archer and Figure with deliberate intent.
“I was just like, dude, like if I had to reverse time, I would spend like a month on these questions. And most early guys just don't want to, like, don't want to hear it. They want to get moving and get, go build.”
Steal thisBefore hiring or raising, spend a month pressure-testing the idea, direction, and why.
Adcock's planning model: draw a north-south-east-west compass and keep your direction cone pointed north. You won't be dead-north, but if you head south too long you die. The cone factors in commercialization, funding, team, culture, and execution.
“I have like a little chart. I always draw people of like north, south, east, west. Like, you want to go north, you want to get this cone going north, right? You want to be heading this direction. You're not going to be straight dead north, but you want to be like not heading south for too long. Or you'll die.”
Steal thisMap your business to a direction cone and audit whether you've drifted south.
Adcock designed Figure (and Archer) from the ground up for speed: 120 engineers, zero program managers. He says adding headcount almost always slows companies down, so the org must be engineered to fight that gravity.
“we're 120 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— oh, I think we're kind of the anti-Silicon Valley company in Silicon Valley as it relates to this.”
Steal thisDesign your org chart for speed from day one rather than adding process later.
Adcock rejects the belief that spending two years on a robot makes it safer. In that window he'd ship his third-gen robot, run it far longer, find problems 10x sooner, and fix them recursively into a better product.
“People think that the longer you spend designing something, the safer it'll be and the better it'll be. It's for sure wrong because in that 2-year period of time where that one robot got out, I'm going to have my third-gen robot out. And I'll have, I'll have run it like an order of magnitude longer. I will have found all the problems 10 times sooner. I will have had time to go fix it recursively and make it better.”
Adcock's learning model: build a first-order understanding of a topic's 'trunk' before you can comprehend or remember the limbs and leaves. He needs a fundamentally sound trunk before adding detail.
“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.”
Steal thisWhen learning anything new, nail the core trunk first before chasing details.
Adcock's clarity test: can you clearly communicate any topic to a 12-year-old sitting on a bar stool? Most people can't. He says the smartest people he knows are also the clearest-worded about a topic.
“can you clearly communicate this topic, whether it's an engineering topic or not, to a 12-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.”
Steal thisPressure-test your understanding by explaining the topic to a 12-year-old on a bar stool.
Before his recruiting startup Vettery exited, Brett Adcock had put ~$200K of savings in, took no salary for 3 years, and was carrying credit-card debt and borrowed rent money in Manhattan.
“And then, you know, I didn't take any salary for 3 years. That meant like I had to pay for my own healthcare, food, rent. I was living in Manhattan. It's really expensive. In 2015, things got so bad that I had to borrow, I think it was $50,000 to pay for rent and survive. I had like credit card debt. I was, yeah, I was probably in the red, like negative $100,000 prior to the acquisition of Vettery.”
Brett Adcock's recruiting marketplace Vettery sold for $110 million; he had raised only ~$10M over 7 years, so he owned a large percentage.
“$110 million.”
With zero aerospace background, Adcock built a spreadsheet of ~300 people (NASA, professors, rotorcraft/turbofan engineers) and spent roughly six months in a room cold-calling them to learn how to build an electric aircraft.
“So the first thing I did is I basically built a spreadsheet and I called everybody in the, I could, I could think of in the world. So I think I made, I think that spreadsheet is about 300 people I connected with, whether they're at NASA or professors or working in industry at rotorcraft or airplanes or turbofan development, whatever it would look like. And I just immersed myself in, I wanted to know every technical book that was on the market.”
Steal thisBuild a spreadsheet of 300 experts and cold-call your way to domain mastery before you build.
Adcock's takeaway from cold-calling hundreds of strangers to learn aviation: people genuinely pick up and want to help.
“It's crazy, man. Like people will pick up the phone for you. Like, it's just like you just got to pick up the phone and call and people will talk to you. People want to, People want to help.”
Right as COVID hit, General Catalyst's Joel told Adcock his Archer flying-car raise was the most disrespectful pitch he'd ever seen given people were dying in hospitals. Adcock calls it the worst phone call of his life.
“This is the most disrespectful pitch I've ever seen. We have people dying because of COVID It's like the hospitals are filled up and you're asking me for money, like for, like for this, like flying car idea. Like, what are you talking about? It's just not possible. Like, why would you be doing this?”
With all his money locked in Archer stock under a 12-month lockup, Adcock sold limited tranches to fund Figure while Archer fell from ~$5-6 to $1.80, racing to reach the April 2023 unlock before running out of cash.
“I even put $1 million in the SPAC pipe as we went public at $10. And so personally, I was like, I'll put another million dollars in here at $3 billion valuation just to show you guys. It's all I got. And when I left Archer in April of 2022, I had 12-month stock lockup.”
Adcock funded Figure by repeatedly selling Archer stock and wiring it to payroll while the company reached a seven-figure monthly burn within six months of starting.
“Yeah. We were like, we were within 6 months, we were at a 7-figure-a-month burn.”
After whiffing a Goldman interview, Adcock wrote up his self-taught finance notes as Street of Walls. It drew ~30M views over 15 years on pure organic SEO and seeded the traffic that later bootstrapped Vettery.
“And that was the genesis for A Street of Walls. We've, I think I've gotten like 30 million views of that site for the last, like, you know, 15 years, which has been, which has been great. Like a lot of folks have been like, this has been my primary reason I've gotten a job. And, but, you know, as you can see, I've, I haven't spent a nickel on it in over a decade.”
One year out of college, Adcock was making $5,000 a month selling finance interview guides off his SEO-driven content site, a roughly 98% margin business.
“Yeah. I saw at one point I was making like $5,000 a month selling those interview guides. Like, like, like one year out of college, it was great. I mean, it was like a 98% margin business.”
Adcock's filter for what to work on: meaningful technology impact requires either a huge number of users or a small number who love the product intensely. Anything in between wasn't worth his time.
“I strongly believe, like, I strongly believe I need to touch like the mass market and to have like significant impact in technology, you need to have like either a lot of people using your product or very few that use it, like really like it a lot. And I just felt like the products, the services I was starting were just not important enough for my time.”
Following the Predictable Revenue playbook, Vettery built an outbound lead-gen engine with a 300-person Philippines team. They had effectively the same product as Outreach (later a $4-5B company) sitting internally and never commercialized it.
“But it was really funny to see us, you know, me go out and build like a $100 million company when internally we had a $4 billion company sitting internally. So there was a few of those that happened through the life of Bettery that were, it was just interesting to see.”
Adcock reframes the Vettery experience: he fell into recruiting rather than choosing it, and now treats choosing what to work on as a deliberate decision because time is the most precious, non-renewable asset.
“I do have a choice on what to spend my time on, and everybody does. And it's the most precious asset you have because we don't have that much time left.”
Adcock argues human-like labor is ~half of global GDP (~$70-80T), and with hardware and AI now capable, AI-powered humanoid robots will be the largest company in the world over the next 10-15 years.
“So like, you know, GDP is roughly $70, $80 trillion. Half of that goes to human labor to pay wages every single year in the world.”
Adcock's advice to his younger self: marketing, PR, the TechCrunch article, and who you raise from are meaningless. What matters is technology development, measured by how often you iterate and how much progress you make between iteration cycles.
“Brett, what really matters or what doesn't matter is like marketing, PR, who you raise capital from, the TechCrunch article. Like none of that is meaningful. It'll make you feel good as a founder because it's usually extremely shitty for like so many years building companies. What really matters is the technology development that you make, which means how often you're iterating. And then you can measure that by how much progress you're making between those iteration cycles.”
Steal thisIgnore PR and fundraising vanity; measure yourself on iteration frequency and progress per cycle.