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Greg Koenig
@gak_pdx
The Jonny Ive/Apple manufacturing videos from the 2010s really infected startups with a poor path to manufacturing. People need to realize - when the original iPhone production videos came out, Apple was already at 1 million units/day scale, with like $800B in the bank and the ability to (famously) bully suppliers around and a Foxcon/Catcher mfg chain that was still in learning/execute whatever Apple wants mode. They had the need to meet massive demand, a decade of talent (both in CA and Shenzhen) on-deck, and the massive resources to build some of the most intricate, automation heavy, factory porn looking processes in human history. Your startup is not Apple when the Apple juggernaut was firing on all cylinders. You do not have the capital runway to call Yasakawa to beat them up on robot pricing, or the paint booth producers to make your little helmet sprayer and sell it to you at 75% the normal market rate because you are Apple, and you have the best procurement people in the world who beat the shit out of vendors at the negotiating table. You don't have Brother building knock-down assembly plants in China building machines *just for you*. You've got $250 Million in the bank and you have yet to prove product-market-fit. You have a VERY promising technology, and you need to start probably scaling up production... You need to be the Model 3 production line in a parking lot with some fucking tents. You need to be hiring manufacturing engineers and paying them a premium for 6 months to load helmets into a polishing station. You need to be outsourcing injection molding and land an engineer at that facility when running your parts before you buy your own Engel e-victory 265 injection molding machine. You don't actually buy the capital intensive factory with all the high-end Eurotrash tools - you build the team who learns the process through blood, sweat, and tears doing it on a shoestring to prove it out, get product-market-fit where scale is assured, then you unleash that manufacturing talent you forged in the struggle with fat POs to build the porno looking white floor science fiction facility.
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Brett Adcock
@adcock_brett
Today I'm excited to introduce: BotQ BotQ, Figure's manufacturing facility, is the highest volume humanoid production line in the world Initially designed to produce 12,000 robots/year, it will scale to support a fleet of 100,000
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Max Witt MD
@MaxWittMD
Gotta wonder what the break even quantity is for hiring a neurosurgeon (arguably the most expensive set of hands per minute) to polish those heads vs buying and setting up those machines.
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Greg Koenig
@gak_pdx
To be fair, my father was a Stanford neurosurgeon and he couldn’t help me put together plastic airplane models when I was a child. Dude was an Air Force flight surgeon and put the engines of the C130 on backwards!
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Warszawa
@nematophy
You are assuming the plan is to create a real profitable company, rather than a SPAC pump-and-dump For the latter, your factory is just a marketing stunt
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Ryan Chow
@ryanchowww
IIRC Starlink terminals were manual lines, with outdoor tents, until ~10k/yr. When it rained in LA the parking lot would flood and engineers taped tupperwear to the bottom of their shoes to walk around. In-house injection molding wasn't a thing until they needed to support ~1M/yr
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⚡️(human)
@galaxybrain6999
You’re missing the point. Brett is the most successful grifter in SV. He knows what they’re doing. Figure is the theranos of “humanoid robot”
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Andrei Miclea
@DreMiclea
I think they probably built good general purpose bot hardware and are betting it all on the LLM/software side to make the product actually useful. In the future we'll probably see the hardware-software side split in humanoids purely because top talent in manufacturing is not
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bryan willman
@bryan_m_willman
And this particular show factory is making "humanoid robots" - why? I have lots of robots that don't look humanoid and very useful (dishwasher, clotheswasher, dryer, etc.) In the end something like a very heavy weight roomba with an arm may well come to dominate.
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Hans Brix
@herrohansbrix
lol. At least 3 different types of industrial robots. Why would you do this as a small company? This is just a lot of pomp and circumstance, prolly not even shot at the same site even.
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diekarly.mp4
@diekarly
I hate this company so much Thankyou for putting it into words. just saved me a trip to the gun store (sporting goods enthusiast not Luigi)
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David Woodlock
@Wood_loque
Could make sense if they got a bunch of grants that could only be used on capital and not headcount/R&D, which is common. If they’re doing it with their own funds it makes no sense and has to be driven by marketing
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Kane Vato
@kanevato
Interesting points, but also, this marketing video has us all talking about it. So technically it’s done its job.
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