🌴Marc Averitt🌴

VC at Okapi Venture Capital✌️Hit me at: [email protected]

[Phil Trubey @PTrubey]

Brett Adcock, Figure CEO joined our 8 hour(!) live stream where a bunch of us were bird dogging and discussing Figure’s own 8 hour livestream showing a F.03 bot doing a logistics task completely autonomously including shift changes between bots.

Here’s my summary of Brett’s remarks. The attached video is just the segment with Brett.

We were first introduced to F.03 8 months ago, but Figure has been hard at work on their next version, F.04 which has just completed design lock, so expect to see that new bot sometimes this fall. F.04 was co-designed with the latest Figure AI stack called Helix and was built specifically for data.

Brett didn’t explain what that meant, but I suspect it means the bot has many more sensors to enable better training and transfer learning.

F.04 will be the biggest leap in performance they’ve had between versions so far which is saying something.

Brett is a huge proponent of cross training the bots with many different tasks such that seeming unrelated tasks makes all learned tasks better. He gave an example of the fridge loading training which was topping out at 60% reliability until they trained the same model with kitchen shelving tasks, then they saw the fridge tasks jump to 90% accuracy.

As such, they spend almost all their time in pre-training the unified Helix model to ensure they get cross training benefits.

Figure will have almost completely localized Figure’s supply chain away from China by next quarter. They build almost everything in-house.

Figure does not appear eager to get their bots into the workforce. Brett said they could, today, push thousands of bots into customer hands, and I believe him. But their goal is full general robotics where you can describe a brand new task to a robot, maybe do a one time demonstration, just like you would to a human showing them a new task, and then have the robot do the task.

This is the holy grail of AI robotics, and Figure is laser focused on that mission.

Brett initially said there was a possibility of achieving it this year, but then guided next couple of years, which I think is much more likely. Personally, I think they’ll need at least a new generation of NVIDIA inference chips to make that leap, and a lot more data gathering, training and hardware development.

Brett said their goal with the hardware is “Apple” quality. Ie. Something as well designed and made as any Apple product.

While the F.03 hand is clearly performant as shown in the 8 hour livestream, they are building a new hand for the F.04 bot which will be even closer to the full functionality of a human hand. Brett fully believes you need a humanoid hand as close as possible in capability to a human hand, if for no other reason that transfer learning from humans works a lot better when you can exactly mimic what a human does. If the bot can’t do something a human demonstrates, then you’ve just polluted your dataset.

By now Figure has built more hands than bot versions (5-6 hands). One of the first hands they tried was a tendon driven hand, and without explaining why, Brett said that was a dead end. Their hands now have all actuators in the hand itself, and are clearly already robust. Brett said he just sat through a 100 page powerpoint design review of the latest hand - that’s how complicated it is.

Brett’s other AI company, Hark Labs, has developed a conversational voice model which is installed now in the Figure bots roaming the office. Being able to converse back and forth with a Figure bot is now a thing and will get better over time.

All in all, I came away from this segment even more bullish on Figure.

[🌴Marc Averitt🌴 @OCVC]

@bryce 💯 agree (even though I’m in the carry)

[🌴Marc Averitt🌴 @OCVC]

@George_Kurtz @TIME @CrowdStrike Congrats! Well deserved! 👊

[🌴Marc Averitt🌴 @OCVC]

Shout out to @RealDougEFresh 👊

40 something years later and I still think of him every single time I notice it’s 6 minutes from the start of an event

[🌴Marc Averitt🌴 @OCVC]

@bryce Pint of?

[Joe Harris @_joe_harris_]

Tesla says 56% of Optimus's cost is actuators. America manufactures almost none of them.

Generational opportunity for builders in this space.

[🌴Marc Averitt🌴 @OCVC]

@GrantM Or a $10B call option…

[🌴Marc Averitt🌴 @OCVC]

@RonConway 🙏

[🌴Marc Averitt🌴 @OCVC]

@tmrohan Yep. Feature v Bug debate ongoing

[🌴Marc Averitt🌴 @OCVC]

@bryce Well, her dad isn’t a TV repairman so it doesn’t matter if he has an excellent set of tools…

[Martin Tobias (Pre-Seed VC) @MartinGTobias]

1/ The right investor at pre-seed is worth 10x their check size—and I’m not talking about cash.

2/ They bring connections. Your network is your net worth. A well-placed intro can land a partnership that changes everything.

3/ They offer expertise. Investors have seen it all. Their experience can steer you away from costly mistakes.

4/ They add credibility. A respected investor on your cap table opens doors you didn’t know existed.

5/ They’re a sounding board. When the going gets tough, the right investor provides guidance, not just money.

6/ They align with your vision. Choose someone who believes in your mission, not just your pitch.

7/ Vet investors as rigorously as they vet you. Focus on alignment, not just capital. Start building those relationships now.

[Maximilian Alexander @signalgaining]

Today I’m incredibly excited to announce Wendy.

Wendy is an operating system and developer platform for Physical AI — built to make it dramatically easier to build and deploy on NVIDIA Jetson, Raspberry Pi, and other edge devices.

We think robotics, edge AI, industrial systems, autonomous machines, and smart cameras should be far simpler to create.

Less setup. Less infrastructure pain. Faster time to first demo.

This is the start of something big.

Get started at https://t.co/yGruInmaZ6

[Brett Adcock @adcock_brett]

Figure and Hark just took an entire data center of NVIDIA B200s - every rack in the building

Figure will be using these to predict physics and Hark will train next generation multi-modal models

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

"So You Want to be a VC"

Im enjoying this week in Boston visiting students promoting my new book - Runnin Down a Dream. Not surprisingly, many ask me about trying to break into venture capital. I wrote a letter answering this question 15 years ago. I would send it out when people inquired. I'm making it public for the first time - with zero modifications.

1) I think it holds up well
2) make sure and read my new book also
3) I probably can't help with followups (as suggested in the letter)

Hope you find it useful. Good luck!

[🌴Marc Averitt🌴 @OCVC]

@bryce 💯

[🌴Marc Averitt🌴 @OCVC]

@mobileraj Slowly

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild.

He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed.

When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them.

Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate.

The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions.

Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement.

The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean.

That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.

[Multiplayer @trymultiplayer]

Our CTO is heading to Minneapolis to say the quiet part loud. 🎤

[🌴Marc Averitt🌴 @OCVC]

@bryce GenX rules 👊

[Brett Adcock @adcock_brett]

Humanoid robots at scale will unlock the largest economic boom the world has ever seen