The Founder Journey with Brett Adcock ($2.7 Billion IPO)

Quick reminder that all 35+ deep dives + our new community are now live. Learn more here. We hosted our first mastermind this week and have had 150 founders join who’ve raised over $200 million in total. Incredible!

For this week’s deep dive, we’re trying something new. Brett Adcock took his first startup through a $100 million acquisition and his next one through a $2.7 billion IPO. Now he’s building autonomous humanoid robots all while growing a Twitter following of over 100,000.

He also was incredibly active and helpful during the SVB crisis in March.

Brett and I recently sat down to chat for this piece, and I’ve pulled together the insights he shared during our wide-ranging conversation.

You’ll learn how he thinks about fundraising outreach, why a founder who’s IPO’d spends time on Twitter, and how to “attack the impossible.” 👇

The Founder Journey: Brett Adcock

Building in Public

If you spend any time on Twitter, you’ve probably seen some of Brett’s viral threads:

Plenty of founders “build in public” like this, but Brett may very well be the most successful of them all.

So why would a founder who’s experienced massive success multiple times, and is now building a new startup from 0 → 1 (a time when every second is precious), bother writing detailed and tactical threads on Twitter every week?

When I asked Brett about this, he emphasized how helpful is can be for fundraising (at any stage). If Figure, his new autonomous humanoid robot startup, is successful then he’s “going to need to raise enormous amounts of capital.”

Building in public, or at least building an audience, allows him to get consistent exposure to prospective investors and top-tier talent. In fact, Brett said he’s already hired over a dozen people via Twitter for Figure.

Later on in our chat he hinted that driving positive, founder-led PR (something he’s written about before) was also a factor:

The bottom line is that people want to feel like they’re part of the ideas that change the world, and the founders who embrace that are more likely to build successful startups.