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- Oculus & Anduril founder Palmer Luckey on the privilege of working with “true believers”
Oculus & Anduril founder Palmer Luckey on the privilege of working with “true believers”
“One of the things that I loved about working in virtual reality is that nobody had any good reason to do it. In so many businesses you get people who are there because you can make a good paycheck.”
Before Oculus, there had never been a successful company in history and most people thought it was a dead idea.
“Everyone who worked for me was someone working on VR because they wanted to work on VR… Nobody was working for me because they thought it was prestigious or because they were going to make a lot of money. In a way we were a band of misfits. Today we call ourselves the true believers. It was all the people who worked at Oculus and on VR before Facebook bought our company for billions and proved that this market was going somewhere.”
Palmer continues:
“Those were really cool days to work with a bunch of true believers who just loved virtual reality. Loved the technology. Loved what we were doing. We didn’t think we were going to make as much money as we did as fast as we did. But we really believed that virtual reality was an important technology to work on whether we succeeded in our particular iteration or not. And I still talk with all the true believers today. And I think what’s interesting is all those true believers, they were the people who when the going got tough even later—so after we had lots of money to work with—those were the guys who would still be in the office at midnight. They’d be the ones who are working seven days a week because they were the ones that were there because they believed in VR.”