Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Palmer Luckey, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: It was so much easier in the Oculus days because I felt that it was more singular. I was trying to bring VR to the masses which had never been done. They've never been a successful company in history. I started when I was a VR hobbyist, there wasn't even really much of a VR hobbyist scene. The whole VR community was a small collection of military research labs and scientific research labs. There wasn't really any action. In that case, the clarity of purpose was pretty obvious. We are trying to bring VR back from the dead and use it to the fullest extent to allow anyone to experience anything. Anything that a person is capable of experiencing, any joy, any experience, any beautiful sight, any educational thing, anything that the human mind can benefit from experiencing in reality, we want to make that possible for people to experience in VR. That was the end game to make the height of human experience, successful. [00:00:00] S0: Fully immersive, haptic, vision, smell, everything.
· Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S1: Eventually everything. You start with the easier senses and then yes, you work your way down the chain. And the idea was it was kind of egalitarian and the idea was that no human experience should be limited to only a few people. Anything that is worth experiencing should be something that can be universally experienced. That was kind of the ideal. Of course, I got fired from Oculus and I'm not a part of that vision anymore, and I feel like the vision has diluted from there to maybe more commercially oriented ideals, which I can't blame them for, they sold company for billions of dollars. They get to do whatever they want with it. When it comes to ideals now, it's probably a little bit broader. I'm trying to do things that are in the U.S. interest. I'm trying to do things that are in the interest of our allies. I want to do things that are material and large. And this is one of the reasons that I set out to make Anduril specifically a large company. Some people say, "Oh, we do good things. We'll be a good small part of the world." I'm not here to do that. I am here to grow a very large company with huge impact because I think that at the end of the day, large companies struggle to not have an impact. Yes, maybe it's negative, but you're going to make a difference in the world, if you're an enormous company that is interacting with other entities to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. It's just you can't not leave a footprint when you're doing that, whereas it's very hard to make a footprint when you're a small cottage company, when you're a small lifestyle business. And so that was one of the things that attracted me to Anduril. Actually, maybe if I could boil it down to one principle. I know my Facebook About Page has said for over 10 years, making the world a different place. The point there is, obviously, I want the world to be better. I don't want to make changes that are for the worst. But I'd say more than setting out to say, I want to make the world somewhat better. It's that I want to have a big impact on the world. And of course, I try to orient that in a way that I think is to positive ends, but I don't want to do something that doesn't matter. Part of that was also with Oculus. I got addicted to the sense of purpose.
· Palmer Luckey, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
And when I was booted, I don't think that I could have just gone to something that would have been small, I think I could have found joy in running a local restaurant or in retiring or in running a golf course or a resort. I had become addicted to a sense of purpose and working to deter expansion of dictatorships that want to destroy democracy around the world. Pretty easy to feel like you're making a difference. [00:00:00] S0: What has it been like for you in this period, we're recording this in the middle of October after the attack on Israel. What's it been like operating in an environment like this when your company obviously is facing the military sort of in the world of defense, just talk me through what it's been like.
· Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S1: I don't mean this in a way to make it sound like it's not impactful here. People here understand the impact. We have a lot of people who are very involved. But I'd say, actually, it's very positive in that everyone who's at Anduril, someone who believed in our mission of building advanced technology for the U.S. and our allies that is intended to deter exactly this kind of conflict. And when we get into these kinds of conflicts to win them decisively. I've seen a lot of other companies having strife where internally, you have people on all sides of the issue and what really should be done? Is it even right to use weapons in the first place? And everyone here, I'm not saying that there's universal political agreement on every aspect of the conflict, but everyone at least agrees on the fundamentals. They agree that Israel is the victim in this attack. They agree that Hamas is absolutely in the wrong, and they agree that there are some evils in this world that can only be met or stopped with violence. That's pretty universal. You don't go to work for a weapons company unless you're able to align with those ideas. For example, we're not getting people saying, "Oh, man, really, this is just a matter of diplomacy." I think people have a pretty realistic view of the problem, which is that there are people in the world who want to kill large numbers of other people in the world to accomplish their religious or political or strategic aims. That has been the positive side of this is I think everyone at Anduril, they feel like they are at a place that is making a difference on this. I can't get into the specifics of what we are or aren't doing as it pertains to Israel specifically, but it's kind of the same with Ukraine. This is a company full of people who really believed in what we are doing and believe that other people out there in the world did not have a clear view. We came here a lot of us, including myself, because we perceive that the world's tech companies were not going to solve these problems that were of huge national importance, not just in the United States, but to just democracy real large.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: If you're in a classroom, big seminar lecture room full of, let's say, 1,000 people who all share your interest in building something big in the way you articulated, but they had not yet done it. You wanted to make the most impact on them that would benefit the odds of their success. What would you teach them about? What are the surprising things you've learned about effectively building something very big?
· Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S1: One thing I would tell people is to care more about what other people think of you, which I know is a little bit counter to the usual advice. We've gone too far as a culture in this direction of thinking about what's best for you. Me, me, me. What makes you happy, you can be whatever you want to be. I think that's actually a pretty negative message that leads to people not being impactful. You said auditorium of 1,000 people who agree with me on these things. So maybe they already agree with that. Maybe they really want to be impactful in their thinking in terms of what other people will look on their work having meant rather than just what felt good to them? One piece of advice I always give people is to be very cognizant of your weaknesses and to focus on hiring people around you who can cover those weaknesses. There's a lot of people who want to be -- I wouldn't even say Steve Jobs. They want to be the mythological version of Steve Jobs, where he was hyper competent in every way, and it was really his show, and he did absolutely everything, not recognizing that a key part of his success was having deputies that covered his weaknesses and did the things that he was not good at. And there were also a check on his worst impulses. I think that people would be better served by thinking of it that way. You have to think of yourself as a deeply flawed person and be very honest with yourselves and try to surround yourself with people who understand what those deep flaws are so that you can build a well-rounded company of people who cover each other's strength and weaknesses.