Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· 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.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: Has there been a most surprising thing about building now 2 things and more that are very big?
· Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S1: The biggest surprise was that Oculus became big, when I set out to build Oculus. I didn't have any of this perspective. That was big by chance. Obviously, I believe that VR was going to take over the world. I believe that it was going to become the dominant form of computing. But if you would ask me to honestly bet the odds that Oculus was going to be the one that managed to pull it off, that was a tougher bet. I started working on VR as a hobby, and I was able to turn it into a job and able to turn it into a company. That was a crazy bet. And so I guess my other advice to people would be don't look at things like Oculus and think that, that is the optimal way to make an impact in the world. It's not to say, what am I passionate about and what do I like doing? I'm going to turn that into a business and I'm sure it goes well. It's actually to completely separate the impact you have from what you want to be doing. Put it another way, I don't want to be doing Anduril, not really. I would rather be making virtual reality headsets. I'd rather be making video games and toys, fast cars, spaceships. That's what I want to be doing. I'm doing what I'm doing with Anduril because I think that it's important, and I think that it's going to be more impactful. When I was starting Anduril I specifically said, "I want to do something big. I want to do something impactful." And I don't know if you've ever heard me talk about this, but there are 3 things I was considering One was solving obesity, which is the biggest killer in growing that I think we can feasibly solve. The other is private prison reform. I think there's ways we could eliminate the private prison system by out competing them with better incentives and align those incentives towards…
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S0: Recidivism? [00:00:00] S1: Recidivism, I am sorry, I was just drawing on myself. And then the other was trying to fix national security. And so this is the one I ended up in. But none of those 3 things sound like fun things to work on. But they are important things. [00:00:00] S0: When you approach those problems, I have heard you talk about those other two, which is totally fascinating how you approach things. Maybe even before I ask this question, I'm just curious what your method of invention is. So you find an interesting problem either that you want to work in this case, don't want to work on necessarily. Is your method iterative? Is it more theoretical? Describe the way that you start to invent in a field when you approach something for the first time.
· Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S1: Well, it depends on if it's a field that I know a lot about or don't know a lot about. If you know a lot about something, it's easier to get right into the iterative side of things and know that you're probably on a pretty reasonable path. In that case, iteration is a valuable tool to move very quickly, find out what works, find out what doesn't and then continuously make it better. The risk with going with a strongly iterative approach in areas that you maybe don't understand, and you might even think you do, but let's say you truly don't is that there might be much better approaches that you should have started iterating on. Or that you should have examined before you committed to one particular path. I talked about this earlier, but it's really about going back to the future. I love to go and see what everyone else who solved this problem thinks about it, not in the recent times. I don't want to know what my competition looks like because when I started Oculus, I wasn't looking at what existing companies were doing in VR because clearly, they were all doing it wrong. Whatever they were doing was not working. I was not going to look around at the handful of VR companies that existed in that time and learn anything except how to fail. So I wanted to look into the past, what were people thinking when they were thinking bigger, when they were willing to look at wackier paths. When they were willing to consider things that have been eliminated often because technologies just weren't ready. There's a lot of technologies that have been discarded because they weren't practical at the time, and nobody ever revisited them and said, "Hey, I actually think the time has come." A good example is with the Rift. Doing real-time distortion correction is not a new idea. It existed in the 1980s and 1990s in the virtual reality community. They have been discarded even by NASA. There's a fascinating NASA paper where they talk about doing real-time geometry distortion correction on a virtual reality headset that made the optics lower distortion and allow them to, therefore, use wider field of view. Lighter weight optics than would have otherwise been required to have an optically perfect image. And the conclusion was, yes, this is a really good way to save money and to save weight, but it's too computationally expensive.