YouSaid · the spoken record

Palmer Luckey

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87
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2026-02-03
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2026-02-03
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Kind of incredible. We had about 25 products. The interesting thing about Anderall is what we're doing where we're launching many, many, many products and where we are having individual product teams on each of those that are relatively lean is actually easier for me to run as a company than the companies that have to invest in one or two products and grow them to serve everybody. Like the ultimate example of this is these large enterprise software companies where you have thousands of people working on one thing and it has to serve everyone in commercial and consumers and enterprise and government. And that is a very hard problem to build a product with thousands of cooks in the kitchen. All I have to do is keep making new products and then I keep a small number of cooks in each kitchen. And that ends up being a pretty self-regulating strategy. People are tribal people work well with a certain number of people. There's only so many people you can have very high trust in where you trust their”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Look, you'll never be perfect Everything you do makes the problem slide this way on the scale towards better. And so, like, like, don't work at Androil as an ad campaign. Tripled our recruitment on terms of incoming. And also, we got a lot of more qualified applicants, mostly it brought in people who are unqualified. But you're trying to move the needle. And I think it all adds up. We, of course, hire people who are bad fits. And then we fire them.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “They're going to be repelled by that. And so, by the way, same thing with investors. It's important to get investors at a certain point you become so hot that everyone wants to invest. And then you have to figure out how will I repel investors who are not mission aligned. And so you have to say crazy stuff. You have to really push the limit. You have to, you want to generate that conversation in the LP meeting where they're like, why are you investing as a company? And you need them to say we are.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So we did a commercial where we showed people how you have to go out in the field and work in the dirt and your hours are unpredictable and you might see your family. You also might not. And there's a guy in the ad and he complains throughout the ad about how awful it is. And then at the end, he says, yeah, don't work in Andro. And the idea was that to a certain type of person who's looking for purpose and mission and adventure, like there's a point where he's on a boat with a bunch of special forces guys. They're on a little rubber boat, he's bouncing around and, you know, and going off to some, you know, some forward deployed location. We actually do this. We have a team of hundreds of forward deployed engineers supporting a lot of these missions. And our customers love it for us. But the idea was to a certain person, they see that and say, oh my gosh, this looks like the coolest thing ever. And the normal person who wants to play soccer and do yoga and be home by five.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And so it's important to get the right people. It's even more important to repel the wrong people, no matter how well they dress themselves up and hide their true nature.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “People have been to enough of tech conferences know exactly what I'm talking about And so the problem is Androil has now gotten to the point where there's no filter. We are now cool enough to get those people”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “It has become so when you're doing something early and it's really crazy and it's new. This is true with Oculus too. You only get the true believers, the people who are there because they want to and they believe in what you're doing and they could be making more money elsewhere. As long as they feel like what they're doing is like, why would you go work at this start that everyone's laughing about and thinks is a joke like Oculus was early on to a lot of people in tech? Why would you go there if it's not even going to pay you well? And the answer is because you really believe in what they're doing. And that's a natural filter for the lily pad jumpers, the think fluencers. You know the people I'm talking about. You see them on the LinkedIn. These are the people who they're AI experts right now. They were AR experts a year ago. They were VR experts a year before that. I guess, yeah, they were like, you know, the social, local, mobile experts before that. Web 2.0, I guarantee they all were Web 2.0 people as well. And Web 3.0. Don't forget Web 3.0, 5G.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Thank you Won the Wired Magazine Worst Person in Silicon Valley Award. Bloomberg called us the most controversial company in tech. So this was back when Andrew was 25 people building drone defense systems. And by the way, this was the same year that we work had been indicted by the feds Uber had just ousted all of its senior leaders”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “He is a very sharp guy and he's a man of the people. He wanted everybody to have VR. But it turns out that Quest at 399 hugely outsold Go at 99. And I think that says something about the shape of it. Now you see Apple and Samsung attacking the high end of the market. I think that has a higher chance of success. I'm praying that it works this gen Or we're going to have to go through another bit of a winter.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “That was my argument. Unfortunately, people didn't listen to me and they kept going and they launched the Oculus Go at $99, which went back to being threaded off. And that was a whole misadventure. This is one of the things where me and John Carmack were actually at odds. He thought that price. John Carpenter, very sharp. I always”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Upwards of 90% of them would stop using them within a month because it's just the quality's not quite there yet. In other words, free isn't cheap enough to make VR succeed.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Use it. And so when people say, I'm not interested in VR, you can give them an easy hypothetical. Okay, well, wait, what if it was a pair of sunglasses and it was as good as the matrix and it were $99? Would you use it? And it doesn't, even unimaginative people are like, yeah, if I could do literally anything that I could imagine in a pair of glasses, of course I would do it, but that's not what VR is. And I say, well, then we're just arguing about when VR is going to take off. It's not if it will. We know the physics allows us to get to something like what I've described. And so I argued that this relentless push on making it cheaper and cheaper is pointless because even if it was free, it wouldn't be good enough for people to keep using. I would pause it. You could give a VR headset as they exist today to every person in America.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Written by me. But it's this great piece where I laid out this hypothesis years ago called free isn't cheap enough. And I argue that the thing holding VR back is not the price per unit. It's not the fact that it's $300 versus $200. It's what you're talking about. It's too heavy. It's too sweaty. The quality and content pipeline is just not there to make an average person, not a gamer, not an early adopter. Like your mom”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “There's a great article that's definitely worth reading, very well written on PalmerLucky.com called Free Isn't Cheap Enough. It's the number one Palmerlucky blog on the internet”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I also like to compare it to iPods too. And it's been a while since I did this exercise, but we had some vanity metric where we pointed that the Oculus Rift in the first year outsold the first three years of the iPod. And like, it's true, iPod took off in an exponential way later. But by the time those first three years, I mean, it was on the cover of major magazines. It was winning gadget of the year. All the hottest, like it was an it thing to have. And we were out selling it. It used to be that success was enough. That's not enough anymore. It needs to be megabillion success, or you're nobody.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It sold way more than Xbox. Quest 2 sold better for the first three years that it existed than the Nintendo 64. Like, and so it's like, huh, what a failure. It only sold better than every game console I owned as a child. It's this. It's because they're comparing it to smartphones. But smartphones are this unparalleled explosion in technological change. Yeah, we're not as good as the biggest change in the way we've used computers in history. But we're like the next, we're only one step down. By the way, that's just quest two. You also then had quest three selling for the same time as a while. Like you had, of course, PlayStation VR, which sold about 6 million units. We don't have numbers for PlayStation VR2 yet, but they're definitely selling millions of units. You had HTC Vive, which sold at least.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I'm a true believer It is going to work. And there's people who take a kind of glee and it's failing. You got to actually look like rationally it is not failing. I think it's not living up to what certain people, myself included, believed that it would be. But when you see these articles from the modern tech press is not the tech press. They're the anti-tech press. But when you see modern anti-tech press articles, why didn't VR succeed? They're not mentioning that the last version of Quest sold 20 million units. They're not mentioning it.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “The official public number is $60 billion. The way that I look at this and the way that I convince myself that I wasn't so bad that I got fired from my own company, that I built as a youth and put my whole adult life into, is that in the end, Facebook didn't really acquire Oculus. Oculus took over Facebook. We became the overwhelming and dominant component of their spend and their R&D and their product creation engine. That's pretty good. That's pretty good.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “And so this offer from Mark, they said they were committed. I actually remember exactly the words I said. It's in a book called The History of the Future. The author got a bunch of Facebook. It's a good book, a bunch of Facebook internal documents. But the email that I sent out to the founders, they're like, oh, I think Zuck might be BSing us. I said, if Zuck is playing us, he's Van Halen.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “$250 million valuation. It was a big deal back then. And for us to raise billions, I'm not going to have any control of my company. It would have taken years if the market had downturned and you have a burn rate that relies on a billion a year in VC money having your toast.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “That was the thing that was most important to me because you start running the numbers. How am I going to get a billion dollars a year to do R&D? Are you launching a platform takes a lot of money? Xbox spent like $5 billion launching the first Xbox. The content is expensive. The people are expensive. The marketing's expensive. And so we had people like Chris coming and saying, we're going to raise more money than we've ever raised. And any company in history. You remember it was a $75 million round.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “The real thing that made the difference was that they were willing to put money behind that belief. They said, we will put a billion dollars in R&D behind you every year for the next 10 years guaranteed.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well, you remember the other side of that. You are the other side of the table on this. So for me, the founder position was I wasn't interested in selling for money. And I also believed that Oculus is going to be worth a lot more than a billion. Why would you sell out for a billion dollars and give up control? The thing that convinced us is Mark came back and said, one, here's why we are aligned in ways that Microsoft and Google is not. Here's why we want VR and AR to be the next platform. Whereas they generally want the status quo to continue. So he convinced us they really did want what we wanted. Which was not to sell us for parts or use us to sell more Xbox Offense to Microsoft. Love those guys. But.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “When Forbes gave me the 30 under 30 award in 2014, they had everybody had to give one sentence of advice to young entrepreneurs. And I was on the cover. It said Palmer Lucky, quote, buy more Bitcoin.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “But yeah, and then the lawyers came in. This is the worst part. We got approval, and then we got a new COO, and he brought in real lawyers, and they stopped us. Is that how do you handle the taxes on this? Is it an asset? Is it a currency? It better not be, or it's illegal.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So I literally was with Brian Armstrong yesterday, and we were going back through my emails to refresh our memory, and I have an email chain of me with Brian Armstrong In late 2012, talking about supporting Coinbase is going to be rolling out a payments system. You'll be able to take Bitcoin on your website. And we were going to be their very first customer. And I was grilling him. I said, why should I work with you instead of BitPay? But I did have a wallet at Coinbase. I was an early Bitcoin guy before there were any exchanges on the Bitcoin talkder informs. The guy told you I sold banner ads on my website for 400 Bitcoin. I bought a Samsung Galaxy S vibrant, which was the T-Mobile's first Galaxy phone for 8,000 Bitcoin. Could you imagine if I wouldn't have bought that phone? I could have done so much more Bitcoin gambling at the time.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “You should be criticizing. But once you, I just meant once you experience That's right. And it was critical to get to that as fast as possible. I mean, I would argue the DK1 days, we knew we were living on borrowed time. We were living in this world where people would see it and they'd get a five-minute demo and they'd say, oh, this is absolutely incredible. But without six off tracking, it will make them sick and it will make them nauseous. Cyber sickness is caused by a lot of... And so we knew that we were on borrowed time. It was a great piece of demo hardware, but we knew we needed to get to really good 6DOff tracking before too many people figured out what was going on. And we did. And we did”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I agree it was not the real thing. Look, people forget that I was a hobbyist who started building VR headsets as a 15-year-old. And then I got all of you guys to give me a bunch of money to do it. A business. And so I knew that Fridolf was not going to actually work to build this VR revolution. But it got you guys to give us money and we got from DK1 to DK2 very quickly. And here's the good news. DK1, we sold about 55,000 units, which made it the best-selling VR headset in history at the time. By the way, the previous bestseller was the Phillips scuba in the US. It was the Takara Dinovisor in Japan. But combined that same design sold exactly 50,000 units. So 55, we specifically sold that much so that the DK1 would be the best seller. And then we sold 250,000 DK2s.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Samsung Gear VR. Correct There was really no amount of money that would convince them to do what we need to make our display, but then we need to deal with them to basically be the software and hardware designers behind the Samsung Gear VR product. So if you bought VGEGRVR or if you got it for free with your phone, it was Oculus that made that happen. And we sold over 10 million units, which was.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “It actually made it much better, but it was the asymmetry. You've ever seen those cross eye puzzles where you cross your eyes, you can see what's different. That's what it's like having a dead pixel. You're constantly seeing this asymmetric mismatched image. And so those dots stand out so much. Anyway, we ended up not doing that because it turns out customers still disliked dead pixels, but it was a tricky time.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “That's right Oh, it was even worse. Samsa was the only company that was sort of able to make them. So we were using Samsung displays that were more advanced than was in their smartphones. We were trying to take things that really were engineering samples and prototypes. We were trying to put them into full-scale production. And so we had very low yield on those lines. We had to test every display and reject ones that had dead pixels. And in VR, you really can't get away with one dead pixel. Forget bright pixels. Even dead pixels, it's because it's so obviously apparent. It's right in your face. It's stretched out in a big way. And then also it's the mismatch between your eyes. One of the schemes we experimented with actually was if you had a dead pixel. Killing an equivalent pixel in your other eye. So”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Maybe not really easy, but it's relatively easy. What's hard is when you put it into a real room, real rooms have glass in them. They have reflections in them. They have other people walk through, now a large chunk of your scene is moving. You have to reject that. And that sounds easy for the bulk of it, but what about the things on the fringes? What about things like curtains that move a little bit? Or like you scan your scene and then you come back and next time it's moved just a little bit. Also fans, ceiling fans, the death of inside out tracking. It's just rejecting all of those things. Becomes a Herculean challenge, and we eventually got it working. That was Oculus Quest.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “We're experimenting with different systems. Actually, I mean, that was an inside out system that you're referring to. We ended up still using an outside in system for the DK2. And then even for the CV1, it took us years to get inside-out tracking robust enough that we could take it out of a room that we would show investors and actually get into people's living rooms. Because we were taught a little bit about this earlier, but the edge cases are what kills you. It's easy to make it work in a lab. Very, very, very easy.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Exactly. And so then we were developing a sixth off system. That was what became the Oculus Rift DK2. That's right. Like that was the real first modern.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “But what it was is the first development kit didn't have any spatial tracking. You couldn't track movement through space. It was just where you were looking.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Recommend going on Joe Rogan if you get the chance, but the one problem is that all of your messaging tools become completely unusable for a period of at least 48 hours. Because a lot of things like inboxes, your SMS, email, it relies to some degree on there being a limited quantity. And so, if you have over a thousand messages come in from everyone you've ever known saying, bro, so cool on Joe Rogan and everything else in between. And then there's like Palmer. You must finish your security training today or you will lose your clearance. And they're like, Palmer, did you get the message? No, no. Hang on. Bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Very big picture here is in 2017, a lot of people believed we lived at the end of history that there was no more geopolitical movement of significance to happen and that United Nations could write mean letters to dissuade people from Expansionist actions. The cynics were right. The cynics who said no, war is still a thing of the present. You can't start working on bombs after the war has started and expect to have any deterrent impact. You're just going to be part of fighting wars instead of preventing them.”

    2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source