Bombora Publishing House has released the Russian book “Oculus. How to create the best VR company in the world and lose everything?“. First of all, this is the story of the rise and fall of the eccentric Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Rift virtual reality helmet. But there is also a part about the sale of his company to Facebook Corporation. We talk about the volume and publish an excerpt from it.
In the original, the book is called The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality. Its author is Blake J. Harris (Blake J. Harris) is well known for his other work — “Console Wars“, the history of the confrontation between Nintendo and Sega in the early 90s.
His book about Oculus, first published in English in 2019, is devoted to matters not so far away. It covers in detail the period from 2012, when Lucky began promoting a prototype of his device, to 2017, when, after being fired from Facebook and a lawsuit with ZeniMax, he decides to launch a new company focused on cooperation with the US military.
We are publishing a prologue to the book.
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On March 25, 2014, in the afternoon, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unexpectedly arrived at the office of a startup in Southern California. Sitting in a small office kitchen, he shared some important news, discussed Facebook’s grandiose plans with employees, and then began to rant about the wearable technology that the developers had been struggling to create for so long. According to him, it is she who is destined to make a grand breakthrough.
“People describe it as something like a religious experience,” Zuckerberg said, addressing fifty engineers, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts. “They enter the virtual world with a pair of fancy glasses, but then they seem sad to return to our reality.”
The device that Zuckerberg was so excited about was a virtual reality helmet called Rift, and the people gathered in the kitchen were working on its creation. All of them were participants of a young and already managed to become a cult startup called Oculus. The developers have taken on a mission to realize the dream of virtual reality, which came from science fiction. The founder of the startup, Palmer Lucky, who was only twenty-one at the time, liked to repeat: “We must finally create virtual reality!” For what? For computer games, for education and communication. After all, for everyone who would like to put on a virtual reality helmet and find themselves in a computer world that is becoming more realistic and where anything is possible. Although there was still a long way to go to the cherished goal, Oculus participants suddenly felt that they were closer to it than ever – and all because about an hour ago they learned about Facebook’s intention to buy their small company for three damn billion dollars.
Just two years ago, Palmer Lucky was a hardware hacker and was holed up in a murdered tourist trailer. Just twenty months ago, three savvy software entrepreneurs convinced him to quit what seemed to be his dream job and use them to promote Oculus. Less than a year later, they scraped together sixteen million dollars with a big squeak to finance the first stage of the company’s development. And now what? As a matter of fact, Oculus broke all the records of the growth rate among startups, rising to several billion dollars at the time of sale.
The purchase of Oculus seemed to most employees to be something incredible, since the whole story started completely unexpectedly. Zuckerberg, for example, visited the Oculus office only once, two months ago, when he came to try out a demo prototype called The Room (and, to the great admiration of many Oculus employees, brought with him a bag of takeaway food from McDonald’s. “Wow! they thought. — Technomagnats are almost the same people as us!”). At that time, no one who was not in the narrow circle of top managers had any idea that preparations for the purchase of Oculus were in full swing. If they had found out something, they might have tried to slow down the process. After all, the guys from Oculus, to put it mildly, weren’t big fans of Facebook. For example, the chief technical director did not have an account in this social network at all, an installation with the Facebook logo on a pack of cigarettes was stored in the CEO’s office, and ordinary employees kept mocking the site, which, in their opinion, was “clumsy” and “poorly made”, “violated privacy” or “trite parasitic on users.”
Apart from ideological differences, there was a much more compelling reason to consider a merger with Facebook unlikely. In fact, Oculus is a video game development company created with one sole purpose — to provide gamers with the opportunity to “immerse themselves in the game.” It still made sense to sell the company to game console manufacturers like Sony or Microsoft, even selling to some Silicon Valley titan like Apple or Google had its own reason – they, at least, were engaged in the development of “hardware”. But why sell Facebook — a company that has not released a single consumer product?
Zuckerberg, who was talking with the staff of the newly acquired company, found an answer to this question: “I think we have the potential for development, and you guys probably also thought about becoming not just another gaming platform, but manufacturers of real gadgets of a new generation.”
Zuckerberg went on to say that, in his opinion, every ten to fifteen years, new equipment appears that reaches critical mass and almost completely displaces its predecessors. More recently, he recalled, it happened with smartphones. “By the end of 2012,” Zuckerberg explained, “there were about a billion active smartphone users. It seems to me that somewhere between 2012 and 2013, smartphones began to overtake computers: although each of us still has a PC, the smartphone is gradually becoming the main area of application of computing technologies. I believe that if we thoroughly get down to business [virtual reality], then this technology can take the place of a smartphone.”
The more Zuckerberg talked, the more similarities were found in the strategic plans of Facebook and Oculus. The concern related to the fact that after the purchase of Oculus, the situation could radically change, subsided when Zuckerberg said: “I believe that Facebook has a positive experience of acquiring companies with independent management, which we plan to provide to Oculus. We are not going to interfere with your corporate culture… We will only help you achieve results in your business faster. What you’re doing is just wonderful, and you guys should be proud of what you’ve created.”
When Zuckerberg invited listeners to ask questions, he apparently managed to dispel all the long-standing worries that plagued Oculus employees.
However, one fear still remained, and a serious one at that. It touched on a rather delicate and unobvious aspect of Facebook’s activities, which subsequently manifested itself in full force and directly influenced the fate of Oculus. In addition, millions of users began to loudly question him later, who were increasingly concerned about Facebook’s working methods, the reasons for the company to use them, as well as the impact they have on privacy, social interaction and even liberal democracy.
“Listen, Mark,” Chris Dykus, Oculus’ first employee, began. — As I understand it, you know that many people consider Facebook an unethical company… So I’m curious how this will affect the image of Oculus.”
When an awkward silence hung in the room, punctuated by incredulous laughs, several thoughts flashed through the head of Oculus founder Palmer Lucky:
- Come on, Chris. Facebook cannot behave unethically. A company whose founder loves McDonald’s chicken nuggets cannot be unethical.
- Mark believes in virtual reality — and that’s the only thing that matters right now.
- At the same time, he does not just believe in virtual reality — the fact is that he believes in it strongly enough to invest large sums in us.
- Nevertheless, we all know that there are questionable dealings behind Facebook, and Daikus had to gather all his courage in a handful to ask a question that literally turns on the tongue of everyone present in this room.
- Chris Dykus is a living legend!
However, Zuckerberg did not attach much importance to Dykus’ question, and Lucky checked his phone and, after viewing another batch of death threats, asked himself: what did we subscribe to by contacting Facebook?
However, he did not bother to think about the changes that awaited them ahead. Lucky decided that today, on this memorable day when Facebook bought his company for a much larger sum than he could ever have imagined, he would not act as usual. Today, the inventor will not try to look into the future and will mentally return to the past, to those times when his incredible madcap journey was just beginning, to the very source of the path.