D'Amico: Home appliances avoid the costly developer subsidies of VR platforms
Sam D'Amico · The Stove Guy: Sam D'Amico Shows New AI Cooking Features on America's Most Powerful Stove at Impulse · Mar 31, 2026 · at 11:43
Sam D'Amico, founder and CEO of Impulse and former Meta engineer, contrasts the platform economics of VR hardware against building direct-utility home appliances.
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“If you need to have an app store to make the thing work, well, you need to subsidize all these developers to basically come to your platform. And I want, you don't need an app store for home appliances. Now, maybe some people think that that would be a good idea, but like, ultimately I do not believe you need an app store for home appliances. And so, Like, you can ship them a stove, and as long as it cooks, you are good. Meanwhile, if I ship someone a game console, well, unless I'm paying game developers hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, aggregate, probably billions in some sense, if you look at how much, like, Meta Reality Lab spends on content for the Quest headsets and stuff like that, it's like, That's a, it's an expensive proposition to actually maintain that two sided marketplace, especially before the user base is mature.”
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