Anduril Founder, Palmer Luckey: "I Am Here To Build a $50Bn Company"

Of course. Thanks for the opportunity to come and chat about fun stuff.

I’m used to moving fast. Oculus was one of the fastest multibillion dollar exits of all time. When I started Oculus, I was 19 years old, living in a 19 foot camper trailer. I had just dropped out of college. My parents weren’t super stoked about that, and we went from just being in a trailer to a multi billion dollar acquisition by Facebook in less than two years. So that was an incredible experience. I learned a lot about how you run a company, how you grow a company.

Even after we were acquired, I stayed around for a few years. We’re trying to do the same thing here, not necessarily cash out quite so quickly. I’d say, in the case of Oculus, we went for that acquisition because we felt like it could turbocharge what we were doing and allow us to do things we would never be able to do on our own. I think that the defense space is a little different. You kind of have to do things on your own because the system isn’t set up to allow you to succeed when you’re working through other partners and letting them kind of be in the driver’s seat.

You can’t just be a subcontractor to a prime and expect to build a multibillion dollar company. I’m not doing this because I want to build a $50,000,000 company. I’m not doing this because I want to build a $5,000,000,000 company. I’m doing this because I want to build a $50,000,000,000 company that will fundamentally change the way that national security procurement works in The United States, and that’s true for everyone here.

So I don’t want be one of those people that says that I don’t care about money because I really do like money and I like the freedom that it affords me to not only not worry about things, but also to pursue things that I would otherwise never pursue. Like, if I didn’t have money, I wouldn’t have a collection of vintage military vehicles. If I didn’t have money, I wouldn’t be restoring a bunch of cold war missile silos. You can kind of have nice hobbies that keep you relaxed when you have money, but when I started Oculus, it wasn’t because I thought it was going to make money.

I had been working on virtual reality for years at that point as just a hobby. I built my first head mounted display when I 16 years old, maybe 15, I don’t know, 15, 16, something like that. I didn’t really have to come up with a story about how I was going to make money until I needed to convince investors to give me money so that I could run the company. I guess the fact that it ended up making so much money was really kind of a happy coincidence.

I happened to be passionate about something that was in the right place at the right time for me to work on it. It’s been a little different with Anduril where I specifically, at the start of the company, wanted to work on something that I knew could be successful. I saw that this was an area where a lot of money could be made. To answer your question though, when I made all of my money, it wasn’t really that big of a change for me. I know this is a cliche, but I kept doing most things about the same.

I mean, when I moved to Silicon Valley after Facebook acquired us, I was living in a shared house with 12 other people because rent’s really expensive in the Bay Area, and everybody was kind of blown away by how much better quality of life we could have if we all moved into a big giant hacker house together. Of course, I could have afforded to do anything, but there’s nothing like having a ton of money and a ton of security and knowing that you’re doing things because you want to, not because you have to.

I’d say Taco Bell has never tasted so good as when you know that you could afford to never eat Taco Bell again. Turns out it’s still great, and it’s the same thing for the cars that I like to drive. It’s the same thing for the lifestyle I like to live. I still play the same games. I still have the same friends. The nice thing about having a lot of good friends before you make money is that they’re the one thing that you can’t buy with money is friends who liked you before you had money.

Yeah. I mean, that’s the reason I ended up doing this company. When I left Facebook, was looking at a lot of different things I could have done. I could have worked in the VR industry. I could have tried to do something else in that space, but I felt like I wanted to do something that I was only able to do because of the large financial resources I had been blessed with. I was looking at doing private prison reform, petroleum based food products, or national security.

When I looked at national security, it was a very interesting space where the only two unicorns in the last thirty years in defense, Palantir and SpaceX, were both founded by people who had just sold their company for billions of dollars. Another way to kind of look at that pattern is everybody who isn’t a billionaire fails when they start a defense company and everyone who is a billionaire succeeds. For that reason alone, I felt like I had to do something in this space if only because if I didn’t do it, nobody else was going to do it.

Money is what gave me the freedom to make that choice. I never would have been able to justify working in defense if I didn’t already have enough money to get through the years of startup that it takes to start a successful defense company.

I get asked this all the time, and you’re right. They are very, very different. You sell things in a different way. You develop things in a very different way. A lot of people expect me to have some kind of philosophical explanation of how they’re two sides of the same coin and I’m really applying my skills, blah, blah, blah. The reality is they have almost nothing in common. I had to build pretty much a new base of expertise to work in this space. We ended up working primarily on autonomous systems for DoD applications, and artificial intelligence is not a natural outcropping of virtual reality or augmented reality.

But when I did a first principles analysis of where America was falling behind, where our allies were falling behind in the military, it was clear that that was the area where I could have the biggest impact. I wasn’t going to have the biggest impact building manned fighter jets or building reconnaissance satellites or building aircraft carriers. It was going to be these kind of much smaller, much harder to make tightly integrated hardware and software systems that the Department of Defense is traditionally pretty bad at procuring.

Well, our core product is something called Lattice, which is an AI powered sensor fusion network that can take data from tons of different sensors and merge it into a real time common operating picture of everything that’s going on right now and that’s going to happen in the near future that you can share with all of the machines and all of the people that you operating in an area. One of the trickiest things about building something like that is that we can’t control all of the sensors.

This isn’t like a cell phone where we’re building to a platform where we have deep hardware integration with everything. We kind of have to build our software systems so that we can integrate with the hardware we make, but also hardware that’s been deployed for literally decades, whether it’s in space, whether it’s undersea, whether it’s on land, whether it’s mounted to an aircraft where the design lock happened thirty years ago. We get to do cool things like detect a target on the ground using some new cutting edge sensor, push that through a secure network into an f16 using a radio link that is pretty ancient technology by this point.

But like I say, having to work with other people’s tech where there’s parts of the stack you just can’t modify has been a huge challenge for me, and it has definitely been frustrating at times as a person who’s used to more vertically integrated hardware and software development where you do control everything.

That is the end goal. In the end, I want to build products that make all of my other products more valuable. The reason we started with building Lattice is because that was something that we could build hardware products on top of that feed data into Lattice and then also act on data from Lattice. Our Sentry Towers feed data into Lattice. Our ghost helicopter drones feed data into Lattice. Some of our unannounced sensor systems that we’ve deployed are feeding data into Lattice, and then we have things like Anvil, is our counter drone system, which is basically the interceptor that knocks drones out of the sky, and that’s acting on data from Lattice.

But what’s really cool is that all of these products make the other products more valuable, like Anvil makes our Sentry Towers more valuable because now it’s a way to not just detect what’s going on in the sky, but to control what’s going on in the sky. I think this is an approach that’s been taken in consumer technology and enterprise technology for decades. Tech companies understand that it’s better to build products that make your past products more valuable and your future products more valuable. In the defense space, because of the way the incentives work where most contractors are paid kind of on a time and materials basis, they’re incentivized to do the same work over and over again.

They’re recently incentivized to throw away everything they’ve done in the past as often as they’re allowed to and redo it all from scratch and get paid in the process. It’s totally flipped upside down from the way that it should be. What we’re really doing is just applying a modern, vertically integrated hardware and software platform approach that works in enterprise and consumer sectors, and we’re applying it to defense applications.

Generally, the way that we’ve looked at this is a continuous development process where we are getting things out into the field, deploying them with our customers, solving real problems in war zones, and then getting continuous feedback from them, features that they would like, failings in our system we didn’t expect, weaknesses in our system that we hadn’t anticipated, and just continuously developing the products to be better. That is very different from the consumer area where there’s kind of very clearly delineated product releases, like where you’re releasing this big new version and here’s all of the features.

If anything, I think the hard thing to know is when you can kind of stop having to invest heavily in something and lock it and make it more stable. We don’t have the same problem as a lot of other people do in the defense space where they have to think about cannibalizing their own products because all of our products are continuously updated. We don’t sell somebody a software system and then sell them the new version a year later. Instead, we’re basically continuously selling it to them usually as a service, We have the luxury of being able to continuously update it and make it better and better and better and better.

I don’t know if I’d caught a mistake on their part. I mean, they’re making a lot of money. The system really works for them for the things that they’re making. I think that in a few years though, it’ll be easy to look back and see the mistake that they’re making, and the biggest mistake they’re making is not investing nearly enough in what the industry calls IRAD, internal research and development. Most of what defense contractors build in The United States is paid for by taxpayers. The R and D is paid for by taxpayers.

The production is paid for by taxpayers. The deployment is paid for by taxpayers. They don’t take on very much risk compared to modern technology companies. A typical defense contractor will spend between 13% of their revenue on IRAD, whereas a modern tech company is going to be spending 20% to 50% to even 80% of their revenue on IRAD. The problem with that is that it means that as a company, if you’re reliant on the government paying you to do work, it means you’re only ever going to build things that the government and that politicians already believe are possible.

If you do that, you’re never going to be able to build the things that are truly on the cutting edge. That’s kind of been our sweet spot and where the defense primes have failed is we use our own money to decide what to build, how to build it, when it’s done, and that means that our sweet spot is building the things that politicians don’t think are possible, building the things that the DoD isn’t willing to bet on yet. Because if the DoD isn’t betting on it and the politicians don’t believe in it, that means that none of the big defense primes are working on it.

If none of them are working on it, that means there’s no competition. That’s how we’ve been able to move so fast. It’s because we’ve kind of stayed in these blue sky areas where there’s not much competition. When it comes to things like automated surveillance towers, what we’re doing is just so far beyond what anyone is trying to do. We’re not just trying to highlight interesting things in an image. We’re not trying to tell you if there is a person who’s armed in a camera feed. We’re trying to build a single fused map of where every person, every vehicle, every drone is and then have the operator viewing that final fused output without even having to look at the raw video feeds.

That’s something that nobody else is really doing. The nice thing about that is when you show up, the government is pretty good at recognizing that.

Well, yeah. I think that one of our internal mantras is always believe that the customer understands what their problem is. Never believe that the customer understands what the best solution is. A lot of times they think they know what it is and they’re not necessarily familiar with the whole trade space of what’s possible. There’s definitely an education process that needs to go on. When we were first starting the company, we were talking with one of our now large customers. At the time, we didn’t have any hardware.

We didn’t have any software. We just had a small team of people who said they were going to change the defense industry. We met with them and said, Hey, we are going to build these sentry towers. They’re going to detect everything that’s happening in your sector. It’s going to tell you exactly what’s going on. It’s going to make you so much safer, so much more effective. The response we got from them, which was very shocking to me as someone who had just spent five or six years as kind of a whiz kid that could do no wrong in the eyes of my tech peers, everybody kind of liked what I had to say even if they didn’t agree with it.

They basically said, Look, computer boy, you might think you understand the real world, but you don’t. This isn’t how the real world works. Your thing might work in a lab, but it’s never going to work in the real world. AI is just not anywhere close to good enough. Radar is not good enough. Thermal vision is not good enough. Computer vision is not good enough. We’ve spent billions of dollars on this problem in the past and failed and gave up on it, but, you know, feel free to go waste your time on it.

And then two or three months later, we had a fully working demo where we were able to bring the same customer out to our desert test site and show them a full demo with multiple towers, automated drone following, and our fully fused map through our Lattice user interface. To their credit, we went from doing that demo to being on a pilot contract with that customer in, I think, less than two months. The education process is you have to really prove that it works because they won’t believe you otherwise.

This gets to one of the differences I mentioned earlier where government is so different than consumer sales. With consumer sales, you need to convince every person buying your product that they want your product that’s interesting for them, and you only have maybe like thirty seconds to get their attention in a video ad or five minutes to get their attention in an interview with some tech press outlet. And you have to convince hundreds of thousands or millions of people based on a very short interaction that they should buy your thing.

The government is totally the opposite. There’s only a handful of people who make the decisions. You only have to convince them, and they dig very, very, very deep on what they’re going to buy and what the capabilities are. So if you show up with something that really works and you really can prove that it works, they are actually pretty good at adopting it quickly. I guess the point is the government is very bad at funding cutting edge new R and D because you haven’t proved that it will work to them yet, and they’re not in the business of risking taxpayer money on crazy science fair projects.

But if you show up for the real thing, they are surprisingly good at moving quickly and adopting it.

To be a contrarian here, I’d say we’re actually just a return to the past. Silicon Valley is born of DoD. The Department of Defense is you cannot really remove the two from each other in terms of how they started and how early Silicon Valley was influenced. It’s a very recent and modern phenomenon that all these US tech companies are pulling away from doing work with the DoD. It’s actually unprecedented in history, but I do think that it is going in the other direction. The good news is there’s this kind of common belief that Silicon Valley as a whole does not want to work with the Department of Defense, that they don’t want to work with the military.

I think that’s actually not quite fair. I would bet that upwards of 90% of Silicon Valley is very supportive of the military and the perception that it’s not is a symptom of another problem, which is that a very small group of radicals have managed to hijack the narrative and convince everyone that they speak for Silicon Valley on the whole. It’s crazy for every one person who’s angry about what we’re doing, who’s angry that the DoD has better technology, there are 10 or 20 people coming in and say, Hey.

I just want you to know. I agree with what you’re doing, but don’t tell anybody. I’m afraid of what will happen. I really do think it’s like a 10 to one ratio of people who support it to people who don’t, and all 10 of those pro people think that they’re the one person. It’s really a crazy dynamic, that’s one of the reasons I got out of Silicon Valley is because the culture there is so toxic to things that are actually outside of the norm and actually thinking different.

I would be a lot more like China. I think that China has done a very good job of focusing their resources on the technology that they believe is going to win the next war, not building up a massive arsenal of technology that will allow us to win the last war we already fought again. I think The United States is very good at building the things that we’re already good at and not very good at adopting new technology. You’ll see this manifested, for example, in this dismissive attitude in a lot of defense circles around China not having a blue water navy.

You’ll say, China only has one aircraft carrier. They can’t project power. They have no clue what they’re doing. Their navy is a joke. Their boats are falling to pieces. Their engines are low quality. Yes, that is true. They don’t have a very good navy. They don’t have a good blue water navy for sure, but that’s not what they’re trying to do. If China wanted to have a good blue water navy, they would be kicking our butts. They are so much better at building things at large scale quickly than we are.

The reason they don’t have a good navy is because they’re putting their points into other things. It’s actually not all that much different than playing a game of civilization if you’ve ever played that. They’re going down a different tech tree, and there’s a tech tree that they think is going to be more relevant that’s focused on things like large scale signals intelligence, cyber warfare, computer vision, autonomous systems, small unmanned aerial vehicles, and unmanned surface vehicles, and unmanned underwater vehicles.

China doesn’t need a fleet of intercontinental ballistic missile launching nuclear submarines to win World War III, If I was running the DoD, I would try to recognize that and say, let’s reprioritize even a few percent of what we’re spending on tools to win the last war and put them into tools that will only win the next war.

So it has to come from everywhere, but I guess of all of the paths that I have to changing the way the DoD works, doing it through Anduril is the best way. I don’t think it’s through me being a congressman. I don’t think it’s through me paying congressmen. I don’t think it’s through me doing media talks about how important innovation is. I’m still going to do all of those things, but the most important thing I can do is put my money and my time where my mouth is, prove that things can be better, prove that we can build better technology, and then sell to the DoD and say, Hey, look, DoD.

You didn’t have to fund all of this work. You can get good tech from companies that build it if you have the right structure around it. Now, the good news is you asked if DoD would have to want to change this themselves too, and the good news is they definitely do. You see a lot of new initiatives like the Defense Innovation Unit, like AFWERX. The Department of Defense more than ever agrees that small technology companies are a path to deploying innovative capabilities, and if you ask politicians, the zeitgeist has never been more in favor of innovation, at least in theory.

Thirty years ago, if you asked politicians if we’re getting good bang for our buck from the DoD, many of them, maybe most of them would say yes. Nobody says that anymore. The average American knows that we’re getting screwed. The average politician knows that we’re getting screwed, and the average DoD official knows that we’re not getting the capabilities that we desperately need. I’d say the zeitgeist is very much in our favor. The biggest problem is just what everyone already knows. It’s the institutional inertia. It’s easy to say you want change.

It’s harder to actually push that change, and then it’s also hard to make people who want change understand what’s actually important. One thing you’ll see in DoD is people in various branches bragging about how many small companies they work with. They’re like, Oh, we do so many small business grants. We do so much work with small businesses. Check out all of these research projects. Check out how we did this pitch day where people were able to get a check-in five minutes, and they’ll brag about how they wrote 500 checks in one month and like 80% of the people who asked for money got some.

Now, that is a step in the right direction. I’m glad the DoD is willing to do things like that, But if you look at that in comparison with the private sector, imagine if there was a venture capitalist who went out there and bragged and said, Oh, yeah. Here at my venture capital firm, we give everybody money. 80% of the people who walk in the door get a check. We funded 500 companies this year. The first question you’d ask is, how many of those have actually gone anywhere?

How many have had an exit? How many of them are making a profit? If your answer is none, none of them have ever made it into a program, none of them have ever made it into an deployment, Clearly, your strategy is flawed, and I think that that’s a big problem with DoD is they in some of these innovation related programs, they are equating the number of deals that they do with success when in reality, they need to be measuring how many of these programs go on to be real deployed capabilities and how many of those companies go on to become investable companies that can raise private venture capital so they’re not just subsistence engineering firms depending on what are essentially welfare payments from taxpayers.

As an American, I wish that venture capital was flowing more towards defense focused companies. As somebody who is sympathetic to the venture capitalist perspective, I understand why they’re not doing it. Like I mentioned earlier, there’s only two unicorns in the last thirty years in defense. In the same period of time, there have been dozens of unicorns in social media apps, dozens of unicorns in automotive, dozens of unicorns in fast casual dining, finance technology, biotech, medtech, consumer hardware, you name it, there’s a lot more success. Defense is not a good industry to get into and the only two big success stories, like I already mentioned, were founded by billionaires.

Most venture capitalists say, Look, I’m interested in defense. I want America to have good technology, but how can I justify investing in something when there’s no examples of success aside from a few outliers that were funded by billionaires themselves? You bring a company to them that’s not funded by a billionaire, they know that the overwhelming odds are that they’re going to fail, and it’s not even a matter of believing that the founders aren’t capable or the companies aren’t capable. I know venture capitalists who meet with companies and say, I love the founder.

He’s brilliant. I love the company. Their technology is amazing, but I don’t believe they can ever achieve a financially significant outcome because the way that the DoD is built does not make that easy or even possible. The DoD is going to try to get them to subcontract to Lockheed or Raytheon. They’re never going to actually own their IP because the government’s going to fund all their R and D and own everything. I guess I’m very sympathetic to the VC perspective of why they don’t invest in more defense companies, and that’s why the DoD needs to generate more success stories so that venture capitalists will invest in defense companies.

I want to see a world where there’s 10 times more investment in defense startups from VCs than from the government. Right now, that’s definitely not the way things fit. Founders Fund was the first institutional investor to say yes to Oculus. They didn’t lead our Series A, but they were the first people to say yes. I think it was a $1,000,000 check out of a $16,000,000 round. But at a time when everyone was saying no, every investor we talked to was saying no, that was a huge vote of confidence for us.

It seems obvious in hindsight, but remember that in 2012, there had never been a successful VR company in history. They’d all either crashed and burned or ended up kind of in a zombie state limping along with a couple dozen people doing like subsisting on military and medical research grants. There were no success stories. Founders Fund was betting not only that we would be a successful VR company, they were betting that we would be the first successful VR company and that VR as a whole would finally become viable because of us.

That’s a pretty nutty bet if you look at in the context of the time. And so when I went to start this company, I started out using my own money, but I immediately went to Founders Fund and said, You guys are the ones out of everybody that have always kind of been the nuttiest, been the craziest, seen where we were going when it seemed like it was going nowhere. I wanted to work with people like that again because the defense industry, I know this is very trite and you just said, you’ve interviewed thousands of venture capitalists, so get ready for something that just sounds cliche.

But the defense industry truly is an industry that is ripe for disruption. It is ripe for disruption in the very, very traditional generic sense that the companies that are there are ready to be disrupted.

Well, to be fair, it’s not just Founders Fund. We just raised our Series C, so since then, we’ve been joined by a lot of other investors like General Catalyst and Lux and Andreessen Horowitz, Valor. I’m a big fan of party rounds. I like working with all of the people that I’ve worked with in the past who have treated me well. I guess I’m loyal to a fault and I want everyone who’s helped me in the past to be along for this ride too. As to why they’re making the bet, I think it’s because we really quickly proved that we were building all of the right components.

Like I said earlier, you can’t just win by having a good product in defense. You have to understand the legal side. You have to understand procurement. You have to understand procurement better than government procurement officers because most of them aren’t even aware of all the legal authorities they have and the ways that they have to move money around. You have to be really good on the political side. You have to understand how to interface with politicians and convince them that your stuff really is going to make warfighters safer and not just be a huge waste of taxpayer money.

You need basically a legal machine, a lobbying machine, a product machine on hardware and software. You need a great management team. You need a great finance team that’s able to keep the kind of finances that will keep the government happy, which believe me is very different than the type of finances that will keep a venture capitalist used to working with small seed stage startups happy. You have to have all of these things or you can’t succeed.

I think there are a few things I’ve changed. The first is consciously realizing that I don’t necessarily get to work on the things that are the most exciting to me, and I had to accept that when I started this company. This was a big struggle with Oculus. When you start a tech company, you do it because you want to work on technology, right? That’s why you’re interested in the space in the first place. As a company grows, I had to realize if I’m still doing optical design in my company, it’s because I’m being negligent in my hiring process.

I need to find people who are better than me because there are a lot of people out there in the world who are better than me. Same thing here at Anduril. I could be doing board layout.

Like I could be laying out printed circuit boards, but it would be a huge disservice to our customers, to our employees, to our investors if I was kind of playing house and having fun doing the things that make me feel relaxed and happy rather than doing the things that I’m uniquely good at, which is convincing people that they should be coming to work for me, convincing them that they are going to have a big impact, keeping people stoked about what we’re doing so that they can keep up a high quality of work and a high intensity of work.

Doing things like government sales where, like it or not, even if I have a sales guy who is better than me at selling, he’ll never have quite the same impact as the founder of the company showing up. Sometimes you’ve got to show up because the customer wants the big man to show up, and it’s one of those things where as a technologist, I’m like, God, do I really have to go fly halfway across the country for a thirty minute meeting where I’m just going to present something that someone else is better at presenting anyway?

The answer, when you’re starting a company, is often yes because that’s your job. That’s what you signed up for. You didn’t actually sign up to work on technology. You signed up to run a tech company, and those are two very different things. I think going into Oculus, I did not understand that. I was much more idealistic. This time around, I fully understood what was happening and what I was doing, and you just have to embrace it. I think it’s a lot healthier to realize that going into a company than to have it beaten over the head after making a series of mistakes.

I definitely do. There’s people that have helped me in the past. There’s people who continue to help me. One of the things that is great about my life is that I have been in situations that most people my age never get to be in. I have been around people that most people my age don’t get the chance to work with. Whether you’re talking about world class programmers like John Carmack who basically invented three d gaming and then continued to be relevant for decades past that, that’s pretty rare in the game space for sure.

Or, you know, working with people who hold senior government positions and have been doing so for decades to serve their country. To even some of the researchers that I worked with before Oculus, I worked in the University of Southern California ICT mixed reality lab, I’ve had the benefit to work with a lot of people that most people my age do not get to work with, and I think that really has made a big difference in my outlook.

Put it another way, I feel like if you could take your average person who’s just, let’s say, loser, gamer, Internet, nobody, which is what I was for quite some time, and you were to give them the same experiences that I’ve had, they would almost have to try to not be capable. Like, if you’ve been around capable people and been mentored by capable people, you have to try to fail.

I’m ready to rock and roll. I hope

No.

I’m not sure what my favorite book is right now. I was actually just talking about this with a friend. Growing up, my favorite book was Journey to the Center of the Earth because it was a story about how a few people pulled off something extraordinary not because they were trying to do it for everybody else, but basically they were doing it for different reasons, but they were doing it for themselves, their own reasons. They did something incredible. They experienced something extraordinary, and that really spoke to me when I was younger.

Now that I’m older, I’ve learned that very few things work like that. Everything’s a team effort. Maybe it rings a little more fantastical these days, not just going to the center of the earth, but doing so as a team of just three or four people. Another book that I really I don’t know if I’d say it’s my favorite lately, but I really liked Three Body Problem, not just as a piece of hard sci fi, but also as a piece of hard science fiction from the Chinese perspective.

It’s very interesting to compare American science fiction and Chinese science fiction because there’s baked in cultural assumptions that are just so different around collectivism and the value of the individual versus the value of the whole. What level of screwing over individuals for the greater good versus sticking to your guns no matter what. It’s very interesting to read well written hard sci fi that you know was kind of written from a perspective that you would not necessarily agree with.

I think one of my biggest strengths is being able to convince people that what I’m working on is the most important thing in the world and the most important thing that they could be working on, not just one time when you hire them, but continuously as they continue to work for you. That’s what keeps the quality of the work high, the intensity of the work high, and the quality of the product really high. This is true actually even going back before I started Oculus. When I grew up, I ran Internet forums where I convinced people that modifying vintage game consoles was the best thing ever and it was the coolest thing ever.

The same thing when I used to play sports when I was a kid, convincing people that working with me was the best thing that they could possibly do. It’s kind of funny where it’s not all that different going from eight years old to almost 28 years old. As far as weaknesses, I like to think that I don’t have any weaknesses that I’m not managing, and if I do have weaknesses that I’m not managing then hopefully I’m unaware of them. I would say one weakness I have is I get distracted easily by wanting to solve every problem that I know I’m capable of solving.

I’ll see something and say, Oh my god. Me and my team could just crush that problem. We could make such a big difference, and we could do it very quickly. The problem is when there’s hundreds of problems you could solve, you can’t solve all of them. You can’t try to solve all of them because you’ll never solve any of them. You have to pick one to focus on. You have to pick a few that are important, and that really drives me crazy, especially when I pick problems where I make the wrong bet and it does go poorly.

I can’t help but waste a lot of time thinking, how could it have been? What could I have differently? Is there anything that I could have done where I could be on an even better path? That said, given how well things are going, I’ve had a lot of the right choices made, some on purpose, some on accident.

I think that the most important thing is to never play yourself. You never want to come out of a mistake like that convincing yourself, oh, I did the right thing. That totally made sense. I can’t believe this. I got screwed. You cannot afford to be a professional victim. You have to look at it critically and say, how did I fail? How did we fail? And you have to be honest about that failure or you’re not going to learn in the future. I know it sounds trite to say, Mistakes are a chance to learn.

It allows you to learn for the future. I’ve definitely done the unhealthy version of this. There’s times where I’ve made mistakes and it has eaten me up every night for months on end afterwards, but I try not to do that because in my experience, it hasn’t been productive yet.

Oh, boy. I’d say one of the biggest misconceptions is probably the idea that what we’re doing is politically biased in one way or the other. I’d say there’s a lot of people who say, Oh, you’re working on border security. That means that you’re a Republican company, and the reality is that most of our leadership and, honestly, most of the company actually leans more to the left. The reality is that border security is something that there’s broad bipartisan consensus on. There’s lot of disagreement on immigration policy, but nobody credible in politics thinks that the right way to solve immigration policy issues is to turn a blind eye to human trafficking, weapons trafficking, drug trafficking.

Everyone agrees we need border security, and I think the same thing goes for military. You mentioned earlier that Silicon Valley seems to be against working with the DoD, and I think it’s really not that Silicon Valley is against working with the DoD. I think that even itself is a misconception. Most people in the Valley support the military. Most of them would love to work with it, and they’re letting a few people who, to be honest, it’s pretty fair when a Google employee says, hey, I didn’t sign up to work on military technology.

I don’t want to work on this. I understand where they’re coming from, but it’s important to recognize that those people are the minority. Think, if anything, I’d say, of all the political opinions in The United States, one of the rarest is that we would rather have foreign powers like China and Russia have better military technology than The United States. Certainly, not just The United States, but our allies. You look at The United Kingdom, you look at Germany, you look at Australia, those guys want us to have the best military technology in the world.

It’s not just one of the most universally popular things in The United States. It’s probably one of the most universally popular things globally is the idea that The United States should be in the driver’s seat and have the best technology. I’d say when it comes to big misconceptions, I’d say the big misconception is that what we’re doing is controversial when, in fact, it’s probably one of the least controversial things that there is outside of a very small number of people who do care about it very passionately.

The biggest scaling challenge so far has been just the natural rate at which a company can grow. I grew Oculus to about 1,400 people before I left, and we grew very, very quickly. Sometimes, I would argue maybe too quickly, especially right at the end. I don’t want to do that here. I don’t want to hire 1,000 people in a year because I know that it’s almost impossible for any organism to survive that. It’s kind of like the infinity stones in Marvel. You can’t absorb that much power so quickly or you will kill yourself.

I’d say that’s been a problem for me because I don’t want to build a little company. I don’t want to build a medium company. I want to build a company that is big enough that we can be a major player that changes the way defense is done and that changes the way defense technology is procured. It’s very frustrating to me that we can’t just kind of grow overnight to be that type of company because I’m very confident I can raise the money to do it. I’m very confident we can hire the people to do it, but this big scaling challenge is bringing people on as fast as you can while still retaining the culture and structure that made you successful in the first place.

Unfortunately, I know it’s going to take at least a few more years before I get to where I want to be because you can’t grow a company at infinite speed. That’s kind of a challenge for me. I’m only 27 years old, so for me, a few years seems like an eternity. I started my last company when I was a teenager, so three years doesn’t seem like much to people who’ve been in this industry a little longer. But to me, I feel like I was in diapers when I started the company.

I guess this goes back to what we said we wanted it to be when we first started raising money from Founders Fund and from others. I said, I want to build a defense product company that changes the way defense products are bought, that saves taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars while making us tens of billions of dollars, and makes sure that Western values are preserved here in The United States and abroad with our allies. Business doesn’t make sense to be in if your goal is just to make money.

I’m going to make sure it makes money because I have to. I literally cannot achieve my ideological outcomes unless I make this company large enough to matter. But if I wanted to just make money and that was my goal, I would have started a company in a different industry where there’s proof of success. Like it wouldn’t be in an industry where almost nobody succeeds. If you’re working in defense, it has to be because you believe in the mission and because you want things to be better and because you don’t believe things are good enough.

I know everyone says that that’s why they work in places like Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat. I think that it’s kind of not true. You’re not going to make the world very different if you make Snapchat 1% better, but if you can make the United States Department of Defense 1% better, you are going to save a lot of lives. You are going to save a lot of money, and it’s hard to imagine a mission and a customer where you can have a bigger impact than the US military and our allies.

Thank you. I’ve I mean, it’s been a lot of fun.