Oculus

“The other problem is they've spent Cumulative hundred some billion dollars on Oculus”

“At the time when we acquired Oculus, part of the rationale was there was a research division led by Michael Abrash that was looking at augmented reality technologies. Augmented reality translates into glasses and wearables. And right out of the gate, we starte…”

“So I was the first investor in, in Oculus and Oculus was a company that I invested in, not just on the street. I mean, I obviously Brennan Palmer great, but like, I was like, try the actual product and I'm not a product person, but I tried the actual product a…”

“I was only able to accomplish what I accomplished because I focused on what I was good at, which was optomechanics, a little bit of electrical, and then the product integration of all of these different components. I didn't have time to learn to program. If I …”

“Back in the Oculus days, when we sold the company to Meta, one of the first things that happened was New York Stock Exchange emailed our contact info, email, and they asked if I would come and ring the bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Sounds pretty cool, r…”

“There's a guy running around now who says that he's a co-founder of Oculus, who was very much so not a co-founder.”

“Like, I'd argue the cost for meta of belief isn't that high. No one really cares. They can fork over a few years of cash flow, right? Like, investors will look the other way. They'll kind of be like an Oculus. They'll be mad for a minute, but get over it, righ…”

“In the early days of Oculus, we were very clear with developers. So our business relations, we are not Nintendo. We are not going to compete with you and basically destroy your sales by preferentially treating our own developers better, our own studios. So we …”

“Because Andrel would not have happened if not for Oculus. Oculus would not have happened if not for Palmer's obsession with gaming, right?”

“3D printing, like this led to my investment in Oculus and Coinbase really were both from that you know, from that thesis sort of VR, seeing the developers and the kind of, you know, Kickstarter community enthusiasm around, you know, when Palmer, Palmer Luckey …”

“In one cynical sense, you know, the Oculus acquisition was awful. It was like you spend two billion, which wasn't that bad. And then you spend another sixty billion on top of it, which is pretty dreadful and you didn't get much”

“The only reason Oculus exists today versus being a completely fucked company that is dead in the water 10 years ago is because Facebook picked it up and sheltered it, right?”

“I don't think that we've done anything in hardware where that hasn't been the case. I mean, the one was Oculus, but Oculus got, you know, they sold relatively early to meta.”

“Some of the bold bets, you know, I personally don't think work out as well. Oculus and, you know, the kind of the meta as they focus, but he's a constant infinite learner and takes bold bets.”

“So there's no way for Sony to come out and like, make a good device and charge good margins on it's going to be a hundred percent software ecosystems. And like, those will end up being like, I think the Oculus world in the Apple world.”

“Meta has spent, I think, at least thirty five billion dollars on this stuff. Because they spent like over thirty billion dollars on operating losses for the Reality Labs group, offset a bit by revenue from selling hardware and games. And they bought Oculus, an…”

“The one thing they didn't talk about is fitness, which is interesting because VR fitness is the one thing that's other than games sort of work for Oculus.”

“So the default for Oculus and for every other VR device, and that's partly because of where they came from and what was possible 10 years ago, the default for them is you put on the headset and you're somewhere else. Whereas the default for this is you put it …”

“If we had started out saying, hey, you know, this is the headset that changes everything for everyone all the time Everywhere. I don't think we would have gotten very far.”

“It's not like Oculus where we sold 55,000 developer kits of DK one and over a 150,000 DK two development kits.”

“VR wasn't on their roadmap, certainly not their ten-year or, you know, long-term roadmap. It was just an interesting thing going on. So even if they would have bought us, it would have been to, you know, use us as a gimmick to sell game consoles, or as an inte…”

“Apple's biggest advantage is they have a hardware device. Zuck just needs to make, if he has to ensure the next 20, 20, 20, 25 years, he needs to get hardware right and his big bet is Oculus or the metaverse, which is it's going to be a thing where we all sit …”

“When you think about a device that is once so bulky to cost 400 dollars or 500 dollars, whatever it does, the new version, right? It's for Very few elite experiences, right?”

“I don't think that the killer use case for AR VR or the metaverse has been introduced yet, and so what people are hearing is a lot of hype, and then if they get the oculus, I got an oculus, you know where it is? It's in my closet. And the reason is because I d…”

“After I, you know, I called a strategy meeting from my leadership at Oculus on a Sunday morning, you know, which seemed like a reasonable thing to do, because then you have a large block of time, and then I got a call from Facebook HR the next day, and that wa…”

“One of the things I'm most proud of in my whole career is that everyone who worked at Oculus achieved financial independence because we were able to build something incredible.”

“I was locked up on a five-year vesting schedule. So typical would be for, Most of our employees were four. I got locked up for five cause I was a key guy.”

“We had an earn out. That was a, it was a huge earn out. It was hundreds of millions of dollars for the founders of the company. If we could hit certain sales targets, And user user, like hours, hours of time targets. And we actually had four years to hit those…”

“First time we talked, I think basically we were offered a billion dollars to sell. And we said, no, we're not interested. We think this company is easily going to surpass that value. We think it's not going to be a problem for us to make more money.”

“They were willing to commit billions of dollars a year for a period of a decade or more.”

“We decided that nobody in the company was going to make over a 100,000 dollars. We called it the hundred K club. So we're paying the CEO a 100,000 dollars. I was getting paid a 100,000 dollars.”

“It's a tough business, and I'm not convinced that Oculus would still be around if we hadn't had those resources.”

“Actually a huge fraction of the people that I hired for Oculus in the early days were volunteer moderators on the mod retro forums.”

“I mean, like, honestly, Oculus owes more to the iPhone than anything else. I mean, like, if the iPhone wouldn't have existed, there wouldn't have been broken iPhones for me to buy, unlock, repair, and sell on eBay. Like, cause I made tens of thousands of dolla…”

“I led our investment in Oculus, which was a large check and a hardware company and one or two other firms on earth at the time. Would have both the financial resources and the will to do that kind of investing.”

“Imagine how hard it would have been to raise money if I hadn't founded Oculus. Would have been impossible.”

“I started Oculus as a teenager, and I would have been there for another 50 years.”

“Jason and the people like him are the reason I was fired from my, from Oculus, my own company.”

“The Oculus sold two to three million units during black Friday and Christmas time.”

“The Oculus will stay the 300 dollar consumer type thing and they'll have a thousand or 1200 dollar one.”

“Oculus outsold Xbox this year. So Oculus sold ten million units, which is about four billion in revenue for Facebook on just the hardware for getting the games and the app store that they have.”

“Every VR company in history had failed spectacularly.”

“We were like 45 people when the Facebook acquisition was announced.”

“Very quickly, the nascent VR players, whether they were big like Sony or small like Oculus, We kind of decided it was going to be in our best interest to collaborate, and we actually did. Like, we shared a ton of research. We shared our interest, our research …”

“They didn't buy Oculus to make a games device. And if it's only ever games, it's a failure.”

“This is why they cleared out all the team, because they bought a company staffed by people who wanted to make a games, a high-end games console, and they know they don't want that.”

“We were investors in, in Oculus, and I don't think Oculus would have ever gotten initially funded had it not been for the crowdfunding.”

“The PC, the headset, anything that you need, it's now more than half the price. That's a significant drop in a year, year and a half.”

“There are going to be dev kits of that next year, and that shows that if you move the price point up, and if you move the timeline of another six to 12 months or 18 months, you do get a fully standalone headset that does have the full capabilities of six degre…”

“But it's also higher resolution. It's at an affordable price point, so they're launching at 350 dollars. Rather than how Oculus launched a year and a half ago at 800. So it's lower price point, easier to use.”

“Back when Facebook bought Oculus, that's when expectations of VR started to get wildly away from reality. Oh, by 2016, there's gonna be 20, fifty million headsets out there. There might be a hundred million headsets by 2017. Some analysts definitely blew a lot…”

“You know, between WhatsApp and Instagram, Oculus, and so on, that are run as very distinct entities, and they don't overlay some grand strategy about what's going to go where, and who's going to do what, when, and tie all the pieces together.”

“Initially where you know when you have sites like Steam and you know, Oculus site and all these will be the first places that you're able to sort of download, but I can see very clearly a time when you will have this sort of Netflix like library to choose from…”

“And so if there's a hundred Daydream devices, then the Facebook product, you could argue, ends up looking a bit like Kindle Fire. It's sort of subscale, squeezed out fork, and no one bothers developing for it.”

“At the very least, they will probably surpass Oculus plus Rift combined before the holidays are even out.”

“Oculus, I think we would all agree that the software component of Oculus is both more complex, has many more people working on it, and is kind of the core of the investment. Sometimes if you have a breakthrough technology, then you require new hardware to actu…”

“We think it's like, this is the Apple II, like the Oculus is the Apple II. And, you know, if you go back and look at it wasn't until 81 when the PC came out that it really kind of exploded. So we're a couple of years away, but it's very, very clear what you ne…”

“I'd like to say the world's now divided into two groups of people. People who haven't tried the shipping consumer version of Oculus who think VR is stupid. And then people who have tried it who think it's the future of everything.”

“Fast forward this, 1218 months, and you could see the reviews and the columns, and it's going to be the Samsung VR kit, the Xiaomi VR kit, and just like 12 different ones that are like the same but different, and people are going to evaluate those, and then th…”

“And we're still waiting for The consumer, which is like the super high quality version, which is coming out next year”