Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Palmer Luckey, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
They're not going to sell that many of them, but that's not the point. The Vision Pro is the thing that is trying to prime the audience to be ready for a VR revolution, not the VR revolution itself. [00:00:00] S0: A few quick hits for you before we wrap up. The first is, if you had to hire everyone based only on you knowing how good they are at a certain video game, what video game would you pick?
· Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S1: I'm immediately actually jumping to -- wanting to rig the competition. I would want it to be something that John Carmack has made, like Quake III. So that then John Carmack would come work for me again. He left id Software to be our CTO at Oculus, a year after we started Oculus. And that was the strongest hire I've ever made. I wasn't able to get John to come over to Anduril. He loves what we're doing. We're still buddies, but he's working on AGI. That's been his push. The immediate thought is, I want to just rig your competition. It's actually just about hiring John and nothing else matters. If I couldn't do that, I think I would pick Kerbal Space Program. The people who are really good at Kerbal Space Program are displaying a really useful skill. Yes, Kerbal Space Program doesn't have real physics. But to do really powerful things, you have to understand what the limits of that world are, how they've set up the physics and the gravity and the mechanics and the things that exist. And you have to be very, very good at doing systems-level trades of which direction you're going to pursue, how are you best going to put together these components, how are you then best going to come up with a plan that uses them in the optimal way. People who are very good at Kerbal Space Program have to be good at a lot of systems level and strategic thinking that I think is not that common. I think if someone is really, really good at Kerbal Space Program, if they're the people who are building a low part count, cheap system in that game that is able to go to the farthest reaches of the solar system, pick up samples, and come back and do so with margin to spare, that is a person who even if they have no engineering capability, if they were to become an engineer and were able to develop the engineering skills, which I think is totally doable. I think you can learn to be an engineer. But if you're the type of person who can do that systems level thinking, you're probably going to be unstoppable once you're also a good engineer. I will say I'm not very good at Kerbal Space Program. I like it. I like Kerbal Space Program, but the things that I build are certainly not optimized.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S0: You said higher for your rig or this is… [00:00:00] S1: And I think that, that's probably for example -- I'm thinking what's the counter example, what's the game I would least want people to be playing. And it would be like other games that I do like but probably are not useful is probably Quake III or Unreal Tournament or maybe Call of Duty, ones where it's primarily based on repetition of twitch muscle reflexes. And I'm all about that. I think it's really fun. But someone having really good hand-eye coordination probably not going to be the thing you need to succeed at Anduril, probably. Maybe I'm missing something. [00:00:00] S0: Final two. What have you learned about marketing?
· Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S1: If you want to take a really cynical view of my career, it's that I have primarily accomplished marketing better than anything else. With Oculus, I know we did a lot of great technical stuff, but I think that the biggest thing we did differently was just figured out how to make VR seem appealing to people. That was the real win. And that was enabled by technology, being able to make a thing that was good enough. It was small and lightweight and low cost enough that it seemed reasonable. But we did so much work making it cool and making it desirable and making it something that people wanted to be involved with, both on the customer side and also the game developer side. Marketing is not just about your end user. It's about all the people you need to work with. When we market at Anduril, we're doing something very different. At Oculus, we were marketing primarily to game developers we needed to partner with and then to end users. And the thing about end users is you have to convince them one by one individually by the millions that they need this thing in their lives. In the defense space, you really are marketing to a very small group of people. You're marketing to people that you need to recruit, and that's the number one audience, people that you need to convince that Anduril is the place to be. Your other audience is politicians who pay for your stuff, and the third is your actual customers that're going to be buying your things. But with the DoD, I don't have to convince the end user. I'm not convincing the guy who is setting up the system in the field that this should be bought necessarily. I'm convincing the people who are more at the strategic level. Put it another way, every person in the U.S. who gets to decide what rocket motors get purchased, you could fit them in a conference room. There's not millions of people that I need to reach. It's actually a very small group of people. And so it's a very different kind of marketing that we have to do. I think that's probably the toughest lesson for me to learn coming into this from Oculus, where it was like one-to-all marketing as opposed to what we've done at Anduril, which is one to few and being hyper-targeted. It's really fun to make TV ads and do big trade show presences and to do a press tour where you meet with 50 press outlets over the course of four days.
· Palmer Luckey, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
That's what I would do when I was, for example, at Oculus, going to CES. I would go to CES, and we would give people 30-minute meetings each press outlet, and it would be 15 minutes of talking with me and then 15 minutes of getting a demo of the latest Oculus hardware and software. I would rotate through four press outlets an hour, doing this 15-minute spiel and we would start at about 9:00 a.m., and we would go till 5:00 p.m. So you'd have about 32 outlets a day, and you do that for four days, and you'd say, "Wow, I met with almost 200 people in the last few days. That was really fun." And of course, now you're reaching the millions of people that read those 150 or 200 outlets. But as fun as that was, it's not something that makes sense for Anduril. [00:00:00] S0: What do you think of AGI?
· Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S1: I love it. I'll be honest, I've been less focused on AGI because I think it's a very hard problem and I don't think that Anduril is in a position to be the company that figures it out. There's so many people trying so many different approaches, unlike VR headsets, where I think there's a clear tractable road map to solving the problem. It's very clear what you need to do to make it work really well. You can road map today a technical plan that gets you to a headset that is indistinguishable from reality on the visual side, at least, in some environments. It's very hard to reflect -- some things are harder, sun glaring off of snow, very, very difficult. I'd say there's a clear technical road map to a headset that provides you with an experience of sitting in a fluorescent-lit office room that is indistinguishable from the real deal. We know what we need to do. That is just not the case for AGI. There is not a clear path, and I suspect that whatever ends up working is going to be a bit different than what people are betting it is today. I'm going to let everybody else work on that, and I want to be in a position where the second someone figures it out, I can jump on it and integrate that capability into my system. So that means building systems that are optimized around autonomy in the first place, building systems that can be well controlled by a computer, building systems that are made more useful by more computational intelligence, things that can take advantage of advances in autonomy. And Anduril is in a really good place. If someone came up with a perfect AGI that was as smart as the smartest person in the world than anything, Anduril would be able to make great use of that, and I am looking forward to it. I hope John Carmack figures it out. If he does, then it means we get to work together directly again. That's the Palmer Luckey fantasy. It is that John Carmack is the one who figures out AGI with his Carmack-led crack team of geniuses. But whoever it ends up being, we're in a pretty good place to take advantage of it. The only other thing I'll say is, I am not scared of AGI the way that a lot of people are. I think that AGI is a technology where the benefits do accrue more to the defender than on the offensive side.