One of the best ways to find a problem is just by looking at improving an old and outdated method.

That’s just what Jake Loosaraian did when he went on a tour of a nuclear power plant in his college years here at Grove City College. While on this tour he found out that this particular plant had frequent shutdowns due to maintenance precautions, especially on the boilers. He found out that this type of shutdown was very common in the field and in other industries that used similar boilers. He was even more shocked when he learned that to check for possible breaches, the companies had personnel repel down with notepads and inspect that way. An hour of this slow inspection downtime costs the individual plants over $1 million.

So, he decided to do something about it. Loosarain, with the help of a couple of other classmates, designed and made a robot that could analyze the facilities and collect the data safely without decreasing the company’s bottom line so much. This was tested in the one plant he visited in college and ended up saving them $10-20 million. So, he decided to scale up and see if any other companies would be interested in this approach. And they did. Eventually, Gecko Robotics would have four different types of inspection robots with different types of applications but all with the same goal in mind; preserve human life and save the bottom line.

Even though it is one of the primary methods of innovation, replacing something is often overlooked because of how commonplace our age-old methods are. Loosaraian saw a problem that seems obvious today and created a 0-1 product out of it. This gave them total control of the market and some great financial backing relatively quickly. Gecko Robotics now has multiple big-name sponsors and even more competition. The company is doing well for itself today but to keep control of the market they will have to make some last-mover innovations that keep them ahead of the pack.

In 2007, Palmer Luckey had a passion for collecting old tech and tinkering with it. The 15-year-old future business mogul had a love for video-game technology and so started collecting VR headsets of the 80s and 90s. As any true gamer would attest, the dream of true virtual reality was a fascinating phenomenon but for many years it remained just that, a dream. The head-mounted devices of the time where all abject failures. No one had been able to figure out just how to get them to work, and any that did work had debilitating flaws. They were too expensive, were not true VR or the computers were just not powerful enough.

Palmer fell in love with these old defunct machines and stated that at one point he probably had the largest private collection in the world. Luckey was part of a few forums on VR headsets on the Web and collected ideas and shared his own on them. So, soon enough, in tinkering with them, he discovered that he could assemble them in ways that no one else could. Excited by this idea and looking to share his work, he turned to the net and displayed them. Then, by the nature of things, Palmer crossed paths digitally (and eventually literally) with the co-founder of id-Software John Cormack, who was part of some of those same forums.

The idea took off. The gaming giant that was John Cormack was very interested in the possibility of true virtual reality and invited Luckey and his tech to his E3 2012 demonstration in early June 2012. Now everybody was talking about it and the time had come to officially do something. On August 1 2012, Luckey started OculusVR and launched a Kickstarter campaign.

Kickstarter

In the early days of considering Kickstarter, Palmer felt like he could sell 100 headsets and maybe break even and have enough to buy a pizza at the end of it. Later when the company launched with fame and big names backing him, he must have realized that he could have not been more wrong. He had set a modest goal on August 1; $250,000. In three days the idea had $1 million invested and when it closed on the first of September it had amassed almost $2.5 million.

Palmer Luck has since sold Oculus to Meta for $2 Billion and now runs a military tech company.

I believe it is important to reflect on that all of this snowballed from a simple 15-year-old boy with a dream of achieving virtual reality. In 4 short years Luckey became the biggest name in gaming because he had the original network to connect to. He had ideas and he had people to bounce them off of.