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Oculus & Anduril founder Palmer Luckey explains why founders need to “make themselves obsolete”

💡 DAILY INSIGHT

Oculus & Anduril founder Palmer Luckey explains why founders need to “make themselves obsolete”

“When I started Oculus, I thought I was really good at everything… But I was only the best at a lot of things in our company because I had been negligent in my hiring process.”

For example, Palmer was the best optical engineer in the company, but he realized that wasn’t something to be proud of.

“That was a failure. I failed my company and my investors by making myself a critical dependency for any of our products. And the reality is I’m actually not a very good optical engineer. I was just the best at Oculus.”

Once you start scaling your company, Palmer advises founders:

“You have to make it your goal to make yourself obsolete, even at the things you like doing.. And that was really tough for me at Oculus because I realized I was basically playing house. I was sitting around doing things that way better people could be doing faster, more effectively.”

He continues:

“I give my managers the same mindset. I say, ‘Hey, your job is not to do things. It is to get them done in the best way possible. If that means you do it, then you need to do it… If that means that somebody else needs to get hired to do it, that’s what you need to do—even if you like doing it.’”

📥️ Founder Q&A

Q: How much should a founder pay herself after a seed round?

A: The answer varies based on a number of factors, such as where you live, how much money you raised, the culture you’re trying to create, etc. For example, when Reed Hoffman founded LinkedIn he paid himself minimum wage to show his team and investors how committed he was—but he already had a lot of money from his PayPal exit. After raising $2M from Sequoia in 1993, Jensen Huang and his two cofounders at NVIDIA paid themselves each $100k per year. I personally like former Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel’s advice that you should pay yourself enough so you don’t add unnecessary stress about money to your life, but not so much that you’re saving money. “Salary is for living, and equity is for upside” is generally a good principle. If I had to ballpark it, a base salary of $75k-150k seems reasonable.

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