That same year, Adcock met with two trusted lieutenants in his basement. He described to them the idea of creating a company to produce humanoid robots. “He said, 'I think this could be the biggest market in the world,'” says Logan Berkowitz, vice president of business operations for Figura, who attended the meeting with Randaccio, to whom he is married. “He looked at the labor statistics and I think his mind was blown,” Berkowitz says. “It's like, 'Oh my God, if we can get into this market, it'll be a trillion-dollar company.'
Within a year of Figure's founding, the company built a huge silver robot with exposed wires, Figure 01. A year later, they built the sleeker Figure 02. From the beginning, the company paid close attention to creating glossy videos of its robots that could be shared with potential investors and on social media. An early video shows Figure 01 walking on his own to the accompaniment of electronic dance music. In June this year, the company uploaded an hour-long, unedited video showing Figure 02 packages being sorted on a conveyor belt. And a week before my visit, they posted a video of Figure 02 successfully folding five towels in a row. Videos are commonly used in the robotics industry to create hype, but they are less useful as a barometer of a robot's abilities. “One thing you learn in robotics,” says Hans Peter Brøndmo, former vice president of Google’s Everyday Robot project, “is to never trust a YouTube video.” Adcock is dismissive of competitors, some of whom he says are secretly using remote-controlled robots in demonstrations. The figure, he says, never does this.
