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.
This is really neat how he turned his passion into his career. It’s a gift to have a passion to tinker with tech, and it is neat how profitable he became.
This is a cool story! I am impressed with how young he was when all of this started. It is really neat to read about the progress of this idea and see it come to life. It is amazing how his expectations for this company were so low and then those expectations got blown out of the water once he had big names and brands backing up his idea! So cool! I also like his work ethic in all of this. He seems to be creative and hardworking which paid off greatly in this area.
This is a great story! It is cool how you can become so successful from some little collection or a side hustle. An important part of this story is how he started plugging in with other people with the same interests and sharing his work. If you keep it to yourself and try to do it alone it will be more difficult.
Great post. It’s awesome to see the passion turn to an idea turn into profit. It’s also great to see the adjacent possible at work, Luckey used the resources and building blocks around him to expand into new realms of possibilities. Awesome that he bounced and collaborated on forums and the like. Well done!