Knowing the Right Answer Isn’t Important…But This is

What’s up, all you beautiful people? Pull up a chair. Come gather around. I want to tell you a story today. I want to tell you a story today of one of the greatest entrepreneurs I’ve ever had the pleasure of interacting with. It’s a story of greatness, of a great man being torn down by Internet trolls. And what we can learn from this, the lesson we can take and apply to our own personal life. See, I think one of the things that we often have is a misconception in the mind of what does it take to go start a business, to be an entrepreneur. I think the thing that stops a lot of people from ever even taking that step is the belief that they have to have it all figured out or that they have to have even a little bit of it.

A little bit of it kind of figured out. And the fact that they know practically nothing, or at least they know enough to know just how little they know in the grand scheme. Well, it ends up turning off a lot of really brilliant people. They get inside their own head, and they can see all the reasons why, of course, this thing shouldn’t work, and they talk themselves out of doing it. The thing, though, is that the people we look up to, as I’ve said on this podcast countless times before, the people we look up to are only there because they’re standing atop a larger pile of failures than we are. They didn’t know what they were doing. In 99% of cases, they were just too stupid to quit. So they went after this thing that they thought they could do, and they figured it out along the way.

And I want to tell you the story of a guy named Brett Adcock, brilliant entrepreneur. This guy, I can’t even remember exactly all the things that he’s done, but he started off, and he, like, bootstrapped the software company and then sold it for tens of millions of dollars. Then he went and he bootstrapped pretty, pretty much took all the money that he got from that. That exit, took all the money poured into his next venture, which was this wild concept of flying cars called archery. Well, he ended up taking that company public, I think, for $2 billion just a few years later. Flying cars, $2 billion, wild stuff. Anyway, it takes all the profits, all the proceeds from that, which is, you know, tens of millions. I think he put, like, I think he must have taken probably, like, 50 million from that, that exit alone.

He takes it all, and he makes a massive bet on his next project. And it’s the project that he’s building right now. It’s a company called figure. Now, figure is really interesting. It’s all about humanoid robots. So think of irobot, right? Those robots that look like humans, they can go around, they can move, they can. They have actuating joints for hands, they can pick things up, they can move things. The thing is, there is a trillion dollar workforce industry to be disrupted.

If you can find a way to get these humanoid robots into manufacturing plants, right into distribution centers, to do the work that humans don’t really want to be doing anyway, going around, lifting up heavy boxes, moving it from here, moving it to there. There’s so many countless use cases for a humanoid robot, but it’s actually a very complicated thing, right. First, the technology. How do you actually create the robot capable of doing all the things that a human can do? And then the AI to go and figure out how does it learn and how does it continue to improve over time so you don’t have to program every single use case into it, because that would be all but impossible, right? Because we want this thing to be fairly autonomous. So he has taken on this wildly ambitious goal. He’s. I’m going to build robots. Well, I invested in this company back in their seed round and then again in their a series, and I have nothing but faith.

And in the time that I’ve put money in the. That deal, it went from. I can’t talk about valuations, but it just has done a lot. Right. Now, here’s the thing. This company, I don’t care about the money. I just think it’s the coolest project to be part of building the future. But also, here’s why I did it.

Here’s why I made that investment, was because Brett is just one of those entrepreneurs that you don’t bet against. He’s one of those guys that every time he touches something, he figures it out, he makes it work. Now, I share all of that to lay the foundation for understanding that the trolls that are trying to tear him down, see, he’s in direct competition with another great entrepreneur you might be familiar with named Elon Musk. See, Tesla is also trying to build humanoid robots, right, with their. With their Optimus series. And if you were a betting man, you’d probably bet on Musk in this, because he has more resources at his disposal, he has more experience with large scale manufacturing all the things, right? But I still like Brett, and I still have faith in that man. And he went to Twitter the other day and he tweeted this. He said, I don’t remember exactly what it was, and I don’t have in front of me, so I can’t quote it directly, but it was to the effect of, what are the best books and resources you guys can recommend on high production manufacturing? Now, up to this point, they spent the last two years building the robot, building the joints, building the actuators, building the.

The software, the infrastructure, all that stuff. Right now, they’re getting to the point where they need to start producing this thing, a scale. And the truth is, manufacturing is the hard part. When it comes to these scientific breakthroughs, it’s often that the practice follows the theory by years, because it’s one thing to know how to do a thing. It’s another thing to be able to actually go and build the thing. And that’s where Brett is now in his journey. He’s out there saying, okay, we’ve. We’ve gotten to this level.

We have robots. Now it’s time to start producing them at scale. I need to start learning how to do that. So what do you guys have? So he takes to the Internet to ask for this, and, of course, the trolls come out, and one of the trolls says, imagine being an investor in figure. And you wake up today and you scroll Twitter, and you see Brett asking, how do you. Does anybody have a book they can recommend on how to do this thing? And it got me so fired up. It got me so fired up, because the thing is, like, that is entrepreneurship, in a nutshell. If the guy knew exactly how to do any of the things that he was trying to do, it wouldn’t be worth doing.

It wouldn’t have as much value as it has. And the same goes for Elon Musk. If he knew how to get us to Mars, it wouldn’t have any values, because we would have already done it. So, by definition, to step on the fringe and the boundaries of our capacity to try to move civilization forward with these kind of, like, massive technological bets, you’re gonna be doing things that you don’t know how to do. But the reason I made a bet on Brett wasn’t because I thought he knew how to do everything. It’s because I know he knows how to go get the answer. It’s not that he knows or that he has all the answers. It’s that he knows how to get the answers, and then he knows how to implement and execute those answers.

And that right there is the 1% skill. That is why I think he will succeed, because he knows how to go get the answers, to recruit the talent, to build the teams, and to execute. That’s the hard part. That right there is actually the hard part. It’s not about knowing what to do. That’s not as hard. It’s actually once you figure out what to do, putting it all together. So I wanted to share that story because even this guy who, you know, has built multiple billion dollar companies, has a track record of sex success is still getting torn down by trolls.

And I can imagine how you might feel as you step into your greatness, into your entrepreneurial journey and you start to think, I don’t really know what I’m doing. I had this one skill, this core capacity. But now, as I’m growing a business, it’s constantly revealing all the ways and places that I, as an individual, am weak and insufficient. And I need to level up and continue growing and expanding. And I just don’t know what I’m doing. And I’m sharing this with you to let you know that you, my friend, are not alone. That is the journey that we are all on. And I believe in you.

I believe that you have the ability to go find the answer and execute. So keep your head up, don’t listen to the trolls, and go change the world. I’ll see you in the next episode.