10 Years of Oculus

Key ideas

Marking ten years of Oculus, Luckey recalls dropping out to turn a niche hobby into a business, his firing five years later, and his case for cheaper headsets.

1. 1

   Turn an obsession into a company

   Luckey writes that he dropped out of school at 19 to make a business from building high-performance head-mounted displays, a very specialized hobby of his. The 2012 About page he reprints treats persuading others to join in as part of the obsession itself.

2. 2

   Compete on a different set of challenges

   In that 2012 text, Luckey grants that established makers of costly headsets solve hard engineering problems for their own customers. He says gamers need something else: a very wide field of view, low-latency tracking, comfort for long use, and prices in the hundreds of dollars.

3. 3

   Hours to start, months for paperwork

   Luckey says choosing the name, registering the website and announcing it on the forums he used took a couple of hours, while the final company paperwork took almost two months. The 2012 text says the name came from a Latin word someone used in a meeting.

4. 4

   Fired, yet crediting Oculus for Anduril

   Luckey writes that he was fired from his own company a few days short of five years after starting it. He also says he learned a lot and made a lot of money along the way, and that Anduril would not be where it is without Oculus.

In Palmer’s words

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