Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Palmer Luckey, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
We're using most of our processing power to warp the image in real time rather than render this wire frame image. And so this is not a good approach. You should just do it optically, and then you don't have to have a more expensive computer. But back then, compute was the expensive part and the optic transform used up a lot of your compute. Nobody reexamined this idea even as computers got better. Nobody went back until me and said, "Wait a second, you can do real-time transform on a modern graphics card for like 1% or 2% of your render horsepower." And also your graphics card doesn't cost $100,000 anymore. It costs a few hundred dollars. And so if you're worried about that 1% or 2% impact, just buy a graphics card that costs a few dollars more, so you can save hundreds or thousands of dollars on the VR headset itself by using optics that have geometric distortion or in chromatic aberration, for example. That was an idea that had been discarded and nobody ever came back to it. And most of the things that made the Rift successful were ideas like that, there's a few others where I was just going back to the future and realizing, "Wait a sec, these ideas, they were actually pretty good. They were just a little too early." [00:00:00] S0: It makes me think of the Nintendo lateral thinking with whether technologies idea, you can always recombine stuff.
· Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S1: We talked about that a lot at Oculus. It's true. Sometimes it's also combining new technology with old technology. I actually had a background of thinking this way before I started Oculus. I don't know if you know, but I ran an Internet game console modification forum called ModRetro. The whole purpose of ModRetro was to combine modern technology with retro game consoles. So the primary focus was taking old game consoles, cutting them up, removing a lot of the old legacy components that can be replaced with better modern versions like the power regulation side, the audio management side and then building them into handheld portable devices that were much smaller than the original consoles, but provided full functionality. So like, for example, building portable Nintendo 64 that could fit in a cargo pocket. I started that forum I think when it was 14 or 15. And actually, if you look at my Twitter Bio, even today, I listed as the founder of ModRetro, Oculus and Anduril working on projects in that forum was actually what gave me this mindset originally, where we were very much looking at what these old consoles were? How they worked, what they had done and then speculating what modern technology would they be using today to solve the problem if it had been accessible to them. It's usually quite clear. And so taking old ideas and combining them with the latest implementations of modern components, Nintendo has done that very successfully. They waited until motion tracking got just good enough, and we're able to use pretty limited compute and pretty basic ideas to do things that, of course, have been talked about for many years. But Nintendo, they were like right on that edge, right as MEMS-based motion controls and image sensors that were appropriate became possible. They immediately turned that into something that was a lot better than some of the parts.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S0: How often do you meet somebody that is as or more an original or out-of-the-box thinker as you? [00:00:00] S1: this is going to be a self-serving answer, right? Not often. Peter obviously is out of the box as it gets. I don't know if you know, Founder's Fund was the first institutional investor in Oculus. So there was a time when nobody believed Oculus could succeed because there had never been a successful VR company in history. And so that was pretty unconventional belief, not only that my company would succeed, but in doing so, it would become the first company to ever succeed in an industry littered with corpuses. That's pretty out of the box. I'd also say there's a lot of people who -- we just say who's the most out-of-the-box thinker? I mean there's Jaron Lanier. He basically invented the term virtual reality, and he is the epitome of out of the box. But I also think that he has a different perspective on the world that doesn't necessarily align with my own. Being outside of the box I meet outside of the box people quite frequently. Very rarely do I meet ones who are outside-of-the-box thinkers, who want to engage with very conventional systems like the U.S. Department of Defense or electronics retailers. There's a lot of outside-of-the-box people who they almost divorce themselves from the timeline of the boring corporations and the large government agencies. Where I've done well is being willing to interface with those things and leave my life on the terms of inside the box thinkers as an out-of-the-box person.
· Palmer Luckey, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: this is going to be a self-serving answer, right? Not often. Peter obviously is out of the box as it gets. I don't know if you know, Founder's Fund was the first institutional investor in Oculus. So there was a time when nobody believed Oculus could succeed because there had never been a successful VR company in history. And so that was pretty unconventional belief, not only that my company would succeed, but in doing so, it would become the first company to ever succeed in an industry littered with corpuses. That's pretty out of the box. I'd also say there's a lot of people who -- we just say who's the most out-of-the-box thinker? I mean there's Jaron Lanier. He basically invented the term virtual reality, and he is the epitome of out of the box. But I also think that he has a different perspective on the world that doesn't necessarily align with my own. Being outside of the box I meet outside of the box people quite frequently. Very rarely do I meet ones who are outside-of-the-box thinkers, who want to engage with very conventional systems like the U.S. Department of Defense or electronics retailers. There's a lot of outside-of-the-box people who they almost divorce themselves from the timeline of the boring corporations and the large government agencies. Where I've done well is being willing to interface with those things and leave my life on the terms of inside the box thinkers as an out-of-the-box person. [00:00:00] S0: What do you attribute that to? Why are you wired that way, do you think?
· Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S1: Probably practicality. It comes back to what I talked about earlier. I want to make a big impact on the world. There's not that many people who have made an impact, divorcing themselves from the establishment, just doing their own thing. And almost all the ones you can come up with are artists, and I am, unfortunately, no artist. I could do a lot of interesting things. I know a lot of people in the maker community they don't like this, the hacker community, and they go off and they follow their little passion or their interest. They're building cool wacky things. They're pursuing some novel technique for making a new programming language, but they're kind of a purity test that dictates who they're willing to work with and how they're willing to slow themselves down, I think actually limits their ability to impact the world. You can have a lot more impact as a person who says, I have out-of-the-box ideas. And I am going to force myself to engage in the unpleasant task of trying to push these ideas onto conventional people in conventional institutions. Then if you say, "I'm just going to go and I'm going to do this on my own in my garage, and I'm going to put it on the Internet as an open-source project. And we're all going to circle jerk about how novel and cool and high performance this technique is," because at the end of the day, that's not how you have a large impact. Having a large impact means engaging with the people who are going to be able to get that into schools, the large software and hardware systems, into policy. I think if you're driven more by wanting to make an impact than wanting to be outside of the box, you will naturally end up where I am. There's a lot of people like me. I don't think that's all that unique to me.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: You remind me, I can never pronounce his last name. His first thing is Mihaly, last same start with a C, the guy that wrote about creativity and flow. His study said that the great creatives, the thing that they did that no one talks about, Picasso is a good example. They cultivated the field that was going to be receiving the work, and they put a lot of work into the conventional critics, the field, and that's basically sounds what you're saying.