From Wall Street to Flying Cars (eVTOLs) | Adam Goldstein, Founder/CEO Archer Aviation

That was a result of many, many failures to lead to one that worked. And after you pivoted six times, like who cares? On the seventh one you're used to pivoting. My second day of work was 9/11, so I'm walking to work and literally the first plane flies over my head and into the building that was connected to the building I was working. Every founder has some type of brutal story. It's not easy for anybody. If I'm going to do it again, I want to build a product that is so good that if we can build the tech, it'll sell itself.

Yeah, so I'm actually in the Bay Area. I don't live in New York, I live in the Bay. The company is out West, but it's out West because of what we do. It doesn't make sense to be in New York. But I'll start from the beginning. So I grew up in Florida, I went to the University of Florida, had an amazing experience. College was great. Late '90s, it was kind of like the pre-internet age—there was internet but not really, and so everything was really done manually. I started my first business in college, gave me the entrepreneurial bug. It was a magazine, actually, where I effectively redid the career Resource Center in the form of a magazine to help people get jobs, organized the college career affairs. And then ended up moving to New York. I lived in New York for about 20 years, half the time in finance, half the time in tech. New York was going through this amazing Renaissance period where tech was booming. It was so exciting, there was this energy in the city and neighborhoods were transforming—Flatiron and Chelsea were all turning into this tech hub. And I started a bunch of different companies, most of them failed, but my last one, which was called Vettery, worked. And it scaled, and we were, you know, friends and close with a lot of the other startups in that period of time, like the Pelotons and Warbys and Rent the Runway and Jet.com and WeWork and all those type of companies. But ultimately sold the company and used the money to start Archer. And had a really fun journey, but happy to dive in wherever.

Maybe I'll take you back even further. I moved to New York in 2001, and my first, first job was actually an investment banking job. I was an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. If you go back a couple years, when I was in college, I didn't know what investment banking was, but I found out what it was, and I was interested only because it was viewed as the most competitive job to get out of college. And more importantly, it wasn't a job that was really meant for college kids that went to state schools. It was all very Ivy League, and I was a big outsider and had a huge chip on my shoulder and would break down any barrier that was in front of me. And so I loved, loved, loved that challenge of trying to get that job. And so I end up getting the job through crazy stories that I had to go through to get it, but I ended up getting that job and I moved to New York. I lived at Chambers and West at the Westside Highway, and I go through the two-month investment banking training program. It's a lot of fun. There were 200 analysts, it was a big group coming out of the tech boom. And my second day of work was 9/11. So I'm walking to work and literally the first plane flies over my head and into the building that was connected to the building I was working. So I was working in the World Financial Center, that was in the World Trade Center. My investment banking experience was not typical. It was very much one of chaos, and really as a new employee in the workforce just trying to figure out like what was going on. I literally remember standing there looking at the World Trade Center on fire and calling my dad and being like, 'Dad, I've got this crazy job that, you know, on this journey I've been on, and the building next to mine's on fire. Am I supposed to go to work?' Bankers work no matter what. I mean, it was the craziest day, probably, of my life. So I ended up, through my journeys in finance, meeting some incredible people on the hedge fund side. And so I end up going to work for a fund that was two guys and a very little amount of money. They were three years older than me at the time. I was 25, they were 28. And we ended up scaling that business—I should say they ended up scaling that business. I was an analyst and having a good time, learning. To a pretty big-sized fund, a big player in the space. But it was very entrepreneurial. It's not like it is today. The hedge fund space today is very institutionalized and it's very systematic. Back then it was full Wild West—you could do whatever you wanted, invest in any asset class, any time, any size. There was kind of no rules. It was a bunch of young people figuring out and breaking down doors. The same way I feel like I had broken down the door to get into that first finance job, and then the same way now I feel like what I do now is very entrepreneurial, trying to break down new industries. Very similar type of things. And the guy I worked for taught me an incredible amount. But a lot of his philosophies and lessons were all about really trying to understand how the world really works and how to find value. And so it's shaped a lot of the ways that how I think today, and ultimately how I ended up getting into the aviation business, in this crazy world of eVTOLs that I'm in now, was really trying to understand true contrarian thinking and be willing to go for it. That really set me up. I ended up then working on a website that kind of told a lot of my journey, a lot of my story. And that really kind of morphed into building products because I had this blog with lots of traffic where we had lots of interesting users and then could effectively take that web traffic and showcase different products, try things out. Part of my philosophy—not a unique comment, but a philosophy that I'd buy into—is that there are features, products, and companies. And we were very much feature stage, and maybe we were product. We certainly were not a company. And so many of those features, I'll call it, just didn't really scale. And so it was a really interesting way to learn about how to build products and how to build technology and how to recruit and how to, you know, raise capital, all that kind of stuff. But ultimately none of them were really actually companies until I hit Vettery. And Vettery was the first one that actually really worked. It scaled. And so not knowing what product-market fit is and then hitting product-market fit is very obvious if you've done it. I think we did it six times, failed each time, and then finally found product-market fit and then actually scaled. Vettery was, I think, a great success for, you know, I'll call myself a first-time entrepreneur then, even though we had been through lots of stuff in history. But really like a thing that actually is working and scaling. But it really was a really fun experience to get to that.

So the original website that I had built with my partner at the time was really about our story of breaking into this job of finance in this high finance world and then taking that same philosophy and kind of extrapolating that to some other sectors and sub-sectors of here's how you can go do that kind of thing. And it just drove a lot of web traffic. We were really good at identifying keywords that Google would rank very highly and it wasn't that competitive in the space we were doing it. And so because we had like a job-oriented type of setup, it allowed us to start building products in the job space. So an example was everything was going mobile at one point, and it was like, okay, well, none of the websites, especially job websites, were optimized for mobile. So if you wanted to apply to a job on your phone, you get this big screen shrunken down and you're trying to like fill out your resume on a phone, it doesn't work. And so you can build off features from LinkedIn and suck down social profiles and lots of different things that you can do to help make it a much better experience. So there were things like that that were very good ideas—like it made perfect sense—but it didn't work as a company necessarily. And so the concepts around finding jobs evolved as I was building features or products and not really turning them into companies, knowing when to pivot, when it was time that this wouldn't really scale, and then ultimately going and trying the next one. Vettery was an evolution. Vettery was not a direct like, 'Hey, let's go try this.' Vettery was a result of many, many failures to lead to one that worked. And after you pivoted six times, like who cares? On the seventh one you're used to pivoting. Pivoting is a very hard thing because most people are not willing to do it because it's your baby that you built and you put so much hours in to just destroy it. So it was an evolution. But because of my past, I was able to raise money from people who knew me. And so I was not your typical—you know, back then it was like, 'Well, did you go to Stanford? Did you work at Google?' It was like a very—the Silicon Valley-funded companies were a pretty particular profile, and I was not that profile. But hey, that's my whole life. That's what I've always been. I've never been the right profile. And so same thing today—I'm not the typical aviation founder. But that type of setup was a fund challenge. So I raised money from some non-traditional people and then used that to start, and then was just very tactical in making sure we could not burn through it, make a real business, and really stretch those funds.

So there was one, I'll call it, traditional VC that first started. There was a guy named Rick Zullo who was working out of Chicago who had met us, and he was—yeah, Equal—now Equal, yeah. So he was one of the first guys from a VC that said, 'Wow, actually these are like smart people and this might make sense,' and willing to take a bet. And so he worked at Lightbank at the time, and so he was great. And then another guy named Will Wertz who was at Grafton at the time—Rick brought the deal to Will, and then Will really believed in it too. And then Will brought in Ian Sigalow who was the co-founder of Grafton, and they really liked the concept. In the end, the way I think it always is, is they just ended up betting on the people, like me, rather than the idea. And it was just, you know, there's certain people that will force an idea to work no matter what it is, and that kind of was the mentality—we will make this work no matter what. And what I believed was the company we were building, this marketplace concept, it really was like a CAC business, right? It was all about acquisition and managing acquisition cost of the items we would put on our marketplace. In our case it was candidates, so candidate acquisition cost was the whole game. We had a big competitor called Hired—Hired.com was the big competitor. They had raised over $100 million. We raised nine, and we effectively put them out of business, ended up acquiring them at the end for nothing, effectively assuming their debt. And it was all because we were very efficient in how we ran the unit economics of the business. And maybe that was just because at the time in New York the money was not as free-flowing as it was on the West Coast, and so we protected those dollars. I hope founders are listening and taking notes. The market is still interesting, and I wish more folks were focused on unit economics.

So it was time. So Vettery was such a fun cultural experience. We hired like—when we started scaling we built the first like, you know, our SDR team, our sales team, our enterprise sales team. There was at one point like, I don't know, 150 or so between 22 and 26 year olds working at Vettery out of the 200-something people. And so it was like a very young, fun company. People would get Vettery tattoos, which we banned. We said, no tattoos, like stop, this is fun but that's permanently on your body. We had to ban. Everyone was smoking Juul at the time because they were one of our big clients. It was like this party kind of thing, and it was all working too, and it was scaling. And so it's always fun to be part of one of those things that can really build. But it was a brutal business. What we did as a company—just so you get the perspective—is we would take the best candidates that existed and almost like put a reverse job board. So we would showcase candidates and then the companies would come and they would effectively request interviews with the candidates. But in order to request an interview, you had to say, 'Here's how much comp we'd pay roughly, here's what the company idea is,' and you'd match up these candidates with these companies. The reason why the candidates would do that, it's very interesting to see 20, 30 companies say, 'Hey, I'd interview you and I'd pay 200 grand.' 'Oh, I'd interview, I'd pay 500 grand.' And across serious seed to public companies would do this. So the better the candidate, the more attractive they are on the platform, so it attracted really attractive candidates. So it just worked. But it is an incredible grind, and the scalability of it I think was really tough. Along the way I had met the head of Corp Dev from the Adecco Group, which is the biggest staffing company in the world, and they were looking for something interesting. So we initially started talking to them about investing in the business, which turned into more of an acquisition kind of conversation. But it was a really interesting fit. And so I've kind of explained the story to many founders: like, selling a company isn't necessarily what you think. And so a lot of it has to do with really making sure you're in the sort of path of progress of these companies. There are real champions in there happening. So what was going on at Adecco at the time was there was a lot of pressure from Wall Street for them to get involved in HR tech, and they were not necessarily investing a ton. And so they did not want to go bet the house on it, but they wanted to invest something. So we were a really nice tuck-in size acquisition, $110 million. It wasn't too much where—because they were a big 10-plus-billion-dollar market-cap company—it wasn't too big where it would hurt their earnings, but it would be a big drag on their metrics because it was a very metrics-expense-centric company. But at the same time it was big enough where it wasn't like $10 million where nobody would really care, so they could kind of like show us off as, 'Hey, this new hot tech company,' but at the same time not really have to spend too much money. So it was perfect. It worked for everybody because they saw growth in it, it wasn't too big, they could try it out. And that's really kind of the real reason why they wanted to buy it. And when you're going through this and how hard the businesses are and you get offered a lot of money, it's very tempting to go do that. And especially in a grinder business like that. But for me the lesson was: I wanted to be in a bit—if I'm going to do it again—because startups are so brutally hard. The lashes on my back are so deep, right? It's like every founder has some type of brutal story. It's not easy for anybody. If I'm going to do it again, I want to build a product that is so good that if we can build the tech, it'll sell itself. And that was the different philosophy I had, where I did not want to be in the monthly sales game where I'm grinding it all down for some virtual product you can't see and touch. I love the concept of hardware that you can have an emotional connection to the product, which allowed me to start thinking different about and working on something new.

Yeah, so Archer is building everything for the future of vertical flight. So you can think about—there's helicopters out there today. There are vehicles that you can build that are lower cost, safer, quieter, that can be scaled at much greater lengths than what you could scale the existing solutions of helicopters today. You can see that across commercial and across defense applications. The defense side is being talked about a lot in the news right now: why are we building expensive F-35s and F-22s? And same thing on the helicopter side—they're extraordinarily expensive vehicles, they don't need to be that expensive. We need to be building for the modern-day problems. So really exciting new category to go use electric powertrains to go build totally new types of aircraft that can take off and land vertically, so they can offer a really great solution for people, for products, and think about ultimately saving time whether it's goods or people, and moving commercial or defense. So starting into it though, you know, when you start to think back to the philosophy of what I was talking about, the other big characteristic that was really important was: if I was going to do it again, it had to be something really big. And so as I learned about recruiting—so Vettery was a recruiting-based company—so I got to see the dashboards of, you know, we have 20,000 customers at the peak, and all the big companies used it. I got to see the dashboards of the best companies in the world and how they recruited and the talent they would get. And I'd always be so jealous of the quality of talent some companies could get, and I always wanted to build something that could attract talent like that too. And so why is that? I remember reading Peter Thiel's books and Elon's books, and really thinking about going after some of the bigger, harder things. Most people think building a crazier idea or a bigger company is actually harder—in a way, it's easier. It's easier to attract talent. It's easier to attract capital because people want to bet big and win big. It's easier to be inspirational about changing the future of aviation than it is about changing the future of recruiting. And so when I started thinking about the kind of categories of things when you think like that, you think energy, food, healthcare, transportation, right? And so you start looking at the world from that lens. When you start to think about what Elon did on the ground with electric powertrains, and you listen to the words that he would say, which he still says today, which is everything will go electric outside of rockets, you start to really imagine what the world could be. And so the philosophy I like to use is: I want to build the world that I want to live in. And if I'm going to spend the time doing this again and go through the pain of the startup again, it better be for a world that I want to live in. I went back to the University of Florida and we started building airplanes.