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The Story of Oculus Rift
An anonymous reader writes: A lengthy new article details the history of the Oculus Rift, from the VR headset's stereotypical beginnings in a hacker's parents' garage to its $2 billion acquisition by Facebook. "Luckey got into VR by way of computer games, which he was obsessed with for a time. After building what he recalls as a "beautiful six-monitor setup," for extreme visual saturation, he wondered, Why not just put a small screen directly on your face?" At just 19 years old, Luckey built a prototype good enough to impress John Carmack, which brought him all sorts of further attention. Investors came running, and eventually Mark Zuckerberg took an interest. "When Zuckerberg arrived, Luckey introduced himself and then quickly walked away. 'I'm a big fan,' he said, 'but I actually have to get back to work.' ... Zuckerberg seemed taken aback by Luckey's brusqueness but also charmed. 'They definitely have the hacker culture that we have,' he says." As the device approaches release, they're all wondering how much VR will change the world.
Oculus became completely irrelevant to me as soon as FB bought it. I'll wait to see what Valve comes up with.
What I'm curious about is to why all of the articles detailing the history of Oculus VR omit the subsequent gutting of Autodesk Scaleform for staff.
In 2012, two of the co-founders of Scaleform, Michael Antonov and Brendan Iribe, cashed out of Scaleform shortly after it was bought by Autodesk - Brendan left in late 2011, but Michael stayed on to prevent an excessive amount of brain drain while Scaleform brought on more engineers.
Shortly after Michael and Brendan joined Oculus VR, from Scaleform they poached Andrew Reisse (senior engineer, RIP: killed by a high speed pursuit while taking a walk), Artem Bolgar (senior engineer) and JP Ratliff (senior support staff), and I would wager good money that they would have also brought along Maxim Shemanarev (the mind behind Anti-Grain Geometry, on which Scaleform is based) had he not already died due to unspecified medical complications.
Everyone seems to want to tout Palmer Luckey and John Carmack as the brains behind Oculus VR, but if it weren't for the people like Artem and Michael handling (I'm assuming) the interface libraries that the Oculus VR uses to communicate with the underlying game engines, and the influx of VC from Brendan, I'm not so sure that Oculus would have actually made such a stir or lasted long enough to even be acquired by Facebook.
Full disclosure: I don't work for Oculus VR, I don't hold any shares in Oculus VR, I'm just an interested party who got to see the best and brightest of his coworkers get rampantly poached by Oculus VR.
Um, you shouldn't be one, either.
Let's do the math: drop tens of millions of dollars of your investor's money to be the beat out the other institutional investors to a company with a cool prototype built from Kickstarter funds. Realize a few months into it that the tech, while kick ass, isn't quite ready for prime time and won't have an available market of 10M users for at least a few years. Do some more math and realize they'll run out of money before then and have to take on additional VC money, possibly in a down round that will affect your position. Call one of your successful investments with money to burn, ask them to buy you out of your investment and give everyone a good return. Repeat with the next cool tech. Claim you have the unique ability to spot unicorns. Raise more money for your fund.
_That's_ how you think like a modern VC.
Of course, this is just a variation on the IPO scams of the first boom. In this case, the few successful companies (Facebook, Google, etc) replace the role of the public in providing quick returns on questionable investments. The public foots the bill indirectly: some IPO money and shares are used for the buyouts and ad revenue provides the rest of it.
-Chris