Are You Ready for Robots Smarter Than You…Everywhere? with Andrew Kang

**Raoul Pal** (0:00)
So, you're now essentially building a new species. Smarter than us, stronger than us, and cheaper than us to run. Who the fuck is ready for that yet? But it's coming.

**Andrew Kang** (0:09)
When I came across the company, it felt like seeing Bitcoin in 2014, maybe. It seemed like this technology was going to change the world, right? We were finally going to have robots everywhere. So, you can see very quickly how we can get to a number of trillions of dollars of revenue, which would imply tens of trillions of dollars of market cap. Those are astronomical numbers.

**Raoul Pal** (0:28)
The whole of politics is going to center around this. Accelerate or decelerate, and we end up with, do we give the robots rights and the AI societal rights in the end?

**Andrew Kang** (0:37)
You just can't ban technology. You just can't fight it, and I think we're going to need societal benefits, safety nets for people, and UBI.

**Raoul Pal** (0:44)
Hi, I'm Raoul Pal, and welcome to my show, The Journeyman. The Journeyman is where I traveled to that nexus of understanding between macro crypto and the exponential age of technology.
A few years ago, I coined the term robots are the new demographics. It's in part to answer the issues we've got with an aging population and how we can drive productivity. It's the magic formula for GDP. But robots are much bigger than that. They're really a step change for how the economy will run, what it means to be a human, and what society we're going to live in. So, I thought there was no better person to speak to than Andrew Kang from RoboStrategy to figure out how he's thinking about this space and how he's investing in it. I think you're going to enjoy this. Join me, Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto and exponential age landscapes. In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.
Andrew, welcome to Real Vision.

**Andrew Kang** (1:56)
Hey, Raoul. Thanks for having me.

**Raoul Pal** (1:58)
Look, this is going to be a lot to talk about. But as ever, I love to get people's journey, how they got to where they are today. So give us a bit of your story.

**Andrew Kang** (2:08)
Yeah. So my story, man, I guess in terms of investing, started out in 2018, 2019 in crypto in my 20s, had a good run and ended up hiring around five, six guys to help manage my personal book on public market investing, trading and also VC investing.
And around three years ago, decided to start investing in robotics. Started with a company called Figure AI. And when I came across the company, it felt like seeing Bitcoin in 2014 maybe, right? In the sense that, man, it seemed like this technology was going to change the world, right? We were finally going to have robots everywhere, Humanoid Robots, not just like the robots that exist in factories, but the robots can help you cook and clean and do everything you need to do in your daily life, right? The same way that maybe nannies or home helpers do today, but that could be applied to an infinite amount of applications at service centers and F&B, really anywhere where you need people, anywhere you need work and the world is just running out of people that want to do this kind of work.

**Raoul Pal** (3:20)
What did Figge look like when he first, how did you get to see it so early? What stage was it at?
What made you think, well, these guys are worth backing versus other robotics?

**Andrew Kang** (3:32)
Yeah, great question. What's funny is that the Figge SPV, I invested through four SPVs. I didn't know the company, I didn't know Brett, the CEO at the time. I got introduced to somebody on the executive team and they were running SPV. I invested out of that SPV. I also invested out of three other SPVs. It was really just like the conviction came over time. At the end of it, I was like, well, I need to invest as much as I can, so just try to scoop up as much as I could.
It's funny because when I saw it, I thought, man, every Silicon Valley VC firm should be all over this.
It makes sense because CHEP GPT was starting to take off, AI was going to get really good, really fast, and robots were going to be capable. But what was interesting was that that round was actually didn't have any well-known Silicon Valley VC's. They had great names like Microsoft and Jeff Bezos, and OpenAI, etc. as investors, but traditional VC's weren't lapping up. That made me wonder, am I missing something? What am I missing? Because it's got to be a reason. The more I dug into it, the more I talked to people that were traditional venture investors, I think, the more I realized there was a bias in the sense that robotics as an industry had never produced venture-scale returns. The biggest exit at the time was Boston Dynamics, which had sold for a billion dollars in 2021, 2020