Building Oculus: Innovation, Grit & the $2 Billion VR Revolution | Michael Antonov (Part 2/4)

Intro - 00:00:06: Welcome to The Biotech Startups Podcast by Excedr. Join us as we speak with first-time founders, serial entrepreneurs, and experienced investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a biotech startup, from pre-seed to IPO, with your host, John Chee. In our last episode, Michael Antonov shared stories about his early years in Russia, how discovering computers sparked his passion for programming, and how an entrepreneurial mindset started to take shape during high school and college. If you missed it, be sure to check out part one. In part two, Michael reflects on founding Scaleform during college, the challenges of building a business from scratch, and the lessons he learned about perseverance, product market fit, and scaling a startup. He also talks about the decision to sell Scaleform to Autodesk, what it was like transitioning into a large corporate environment, and how that experience ultimately set the stage for his next chapter. 

Jon - 00:01:19: Talk a little bit about that experience. I'm going to imagine it was great to reunite with your co-founder. What was that experience like? 

Michael - 00:01:25: Well, first of all, it was moving across the country. So the company was in a place called Aliso Viejo. I think many people may not have heard about it. It's kind of... Orange County, but the first down under along the coast of California. So we lived in Orange County. So I kind of moved and literally crashed at Brendan's apartment for first months. And then I was like, I'm going to figure out where it is. But honestly, I moved there in, I think it was May. And I joined and I, as much as he sold me on this job, I started working with their code. And I realized I didn't really need kind of that type of senior architect because they had their own CTO and the way they were doing it. They could benefit from it, but it wasn't quite as necessary. And I needed to kind of learn and get my bearings in the new organization. So I ended up learning code base, writing docs and such. But in the end of the day, the Oculus thing happened. So I turned out that I only worked for a company which I moved to across the country for all of 75 days. 

Jon - 00:02:43: I was moving to the West coast, just like personally for you. I like the area. I just like, but I'm, I don't know if I'm going to stick around here the whole time. Like the job itself? 

Michael - 00:02:52: Well, Orange County, it's pretty. It's got oceans and views and nature. There's actually really not much of anything else to do there. 

Jon - 00:03:03: Yeah. At least it's warm. Yeah. 

Michael - 00:03:05: Yeah. So Washington, D.C. suburb is much more exciting socially. So that's a minus. Tech and new environment is interesting. So I just went with it. But then, you know, the whole Palmer Luckey VR thing happened. And it was like nothing else. And honestly, I didn't have much time. For anything besides work over the next couple of years. 

Jon - 00:03:34: Totally. So talk a little bit about the, you know, meeting your co- Obviously we know, you know, Brendan, meeting Palmer. How did the Oculus, like what was the driving force of founding Oculus and how did it all come to be after obviously you just made the move? What is the Oculus origin story? 

Michael - 00:03:50: So it really kind of came out of nowhere. I didn't plan to start a company or anything. But I think Brendan, like he was for a year in Gaikai as an executive. And some of it worked well. Some of it, there were some internal tensions. So he probably wanted to do something different to what it is by then. But. For me, I just learned about it from a phone call because what happened was one of Brandon's buddies called him and he said, oh, have you heard about this VR thing that is in the news? And Brendan was skeptical. I was like, well, I'll check it out. And turned out people were writing about this. Oculus Rift in the news and it happened around the E3. Presumably, there was this young guy called Palmer Luckey who made a headset, and it was promoted by John Carmack, who is a very well-recognized. Industry veteran. And it was an incredible thing. So like Brendan went and looked at it and there was all these online things that he decided to reach out to Palmer who conveniently was living in Long Beach, which is, you know, half an hour to an hour away in California. So he reached out to me and said, well, you know, there's a young guy called Palmer and he has this VR thing and we should go meet him and we should do this. And we should try to figure out he wants to do a Kickstarter. Maybe we'll do something together. I think we should start a company. So I was like, okay, Brendan, what is this? Random thing. Okay, I'll go to dinner with him. So there was also another young guy who used to work with us in Scaleform, kind of was joined later on as an intern and progressed and he became very impactful and huge in Oculus called Nate. So Nate, Brendan and I went to meet in a restaurant with Palmer in Long Beach. Palmer shows up in his Hawaiian shirts, kind of flip-flops, the kind of, guy that he is and talks about this VR and how he now, how he made out of a glue foam core, this device. So basically what was happening is VR existed since the 90s and it was a little hype cycle and then was a crash and all from the 90s up until... Well, until we came about 2010, you could buy certain virtual reality devices, but usually they're very low resolution. Kind of small kind of screen in space. It usually didn't track you in space very well. Maybe it could give you orientation tracking. It would be swimmy. So it was very subpar, not great experience. And Palmer figured out that you can take literally a few dollar magnifying glasses, put in front of the cell phone screen. And with a bot, you actually can get a VR experience, which is like 90 field of view. So it actually covers a big part of your view. And now you can have these MEMS sensors, or gyroscopes and so on, which they put in phones. That really is a cell phone revolution, which made VR possible in a cost-effective way, which just happened. So by combining this, you can make a device for a few hundred dollars, which you can actually have a much more compelling experience. Now it was low resolution. You know, some things were blurry, but at least it covered and it could be responsive. So the story was that is Palmer. He is a super enthusiast. So since he was, I don't know, late teens. He's been collecting VR headsets, combining them. He briefly worked at a university VR lab. But he like super had like a hundred different headsets at home. He decided to make this and he was writing on forums, very engaged all the online media. And at some point he said, well, I made this headset. It's foam core, a duct tape. Magnifying god lasers, gyroscope screen, I can put it on Kickstarter so you guys, enthusiasts like a few hundred people he's interacting with can actually join and work with it. Like if you want to buy it. So he wanted to do this Kickstarter thing and sell this self-made do-it-yourself kit. And John Carmack, who is a creator of Doom, legendary VR person, legendary 3D graphics person, was in a break between his games, wanting to explore, well, where did VR do a passion project for a month between his kind of game jobs, essentially. What they do? And he bought a few devices and was like, there's this young guy, why don't I try to buy his device? So John Carmack calls up to, writes to Palmer, like, you know, I'd like to buy your device or if you can send me the parts. And Palmer figured out, this is John Carmack. He was like, okay, so it's sort of like if Jesus comes to you and you know, can you give me, can you sell me your clothes? You don't sell it to them. You just take them off and hand them over. So he hands over, sends the device to John Carmack. And then John, like, puts it and hooks it up and connects and writes the software for the gyroscope. And ultimately, this gets picked. And he asks Palmer, can I show it to a few people? And there's three behind closed doors. Palmer, like, sure. You know, like, people, by the way, will probably think I made it, but I'll tell them it's yours. So that's how the news comes out suddenly that John Carmack's... Duct tape prototype VR is the best thing of everything at E3, which was what was the news for that year. So basically, that's the news that Brendan picked up, which caused us to go and meet Palmer. 

Jon - 00:10:12: Wow, that's so crazy. Again, if I'm kind of threading things here, it's kind of like... How crisis. Was like, we're going to, you know, if we like this. We're going to, we'll say good things about you. In a similar fashion, John Carmack was like, can I have one? And can I talk to people? And then boom, just like, just like game changing. Like how we can like, just like, if our over, you know, overnight can just like, you know, raise so much awareness and just like really start like, basically, kickstart the market. And so you go and meet Palmer. You're like, let's start a company. Let's like, you know, it sounds like this was just a device. And then now you're like, let's actually create a real thing.

Michael - 00:10:57: We need to make games, ecosystems, because really it was a very particular device with very particular track, hard coded to John's piece of software, which we didn't even have the Source code to. Right. So what happened then was we met Palmer and I actually haven't seen the demo yet, but ultimately we had discussed it. By now Palmer had the job from Sony to move to Japan and make like over a hundred K for, you know, 19 year old. And Brendan had to convince him like, you know what, we can start a company instead. I could pay you. I could, I think he wrote the Palmer check right there. It's like, you don't need to, go to and work for somebody else. And in the end, I only got to see this device and demo like a week and a half later. I think it was like literally 4th of July weekend, like the day that had fireworks. We were like, I first saw it as I looked around. It was very compelling because you could actually see like you're someplace else. You couldn't move forward and back, but it was very encompassing. So I was very convinced we should do this. And then Palmer wanted to do this Kickstarter. I didn't know much about Kickstarter then. But essentially, it's a crowdsourcing platform. I think, you know, listeners might know about it. It's much bigger now. And I was skeptical. And we decided to put it to the test. And there's a few things where like Brendan and the team decided to go out a bit more than I probably would have imagined. Like we had got a young video crew to actually make a good Kickstarter video and we recorded it. We got, we found a person called Jack McCauley who was, became another co-founder who could actually manufacture things in China because you want to have good relationships. You're going to make devices. So we filmed this thing at his studio. And we wanted to put the Kickstarter, and the question was, what's the minimum? Because the way the Kickstarter works is if you don't hit your minimum, you don't get anything. But if you hit your minimum, then you get the money, and now you have to ship whatever it is you're promising. In our case, it was mostly headsets. And then we went around and we met because Palmer had a couple of connections with John Carmack. And we had a lot of connections with game industry because in our Scaleform days, we worked with Unity Game Engine with our UI. We worked with Unreal Engine. So we knew all those guys. So we went to show them, like, here's what we want to build, say a good thing. So we recorded the videos about these things, which all got into the Kickstarter video. So I really knew nothing about the power of, like, social media or the videos. I was like, okay, we're setting a minimum of $250K. Seems like a lot. I don't know why suddenly a lot of people would want to buy, like, so much in a month. But, okay, you guys decide. I thought it was high. And then, of course, I think Brendan and Nate knew more about it because Nate had a marketing background from his family. So he was the one who wrote a lot of content for the- Like, how to position it. And he talked to a few reporters and like when they get engaged with Reddit and essentially will launch this Kickstarter and it gets picked up by Reddit. Now reflecting it because there was a mention of John Carmack there. There was like Michael Abrash was a game legend. There's Unity and Unreal people in the same video. It sort of makes sense why if you get all those people in one video, it probably would be interesting to gamers. 

Jon - 00:14:35: Yeah. 

Michael - 00:14:37: So this thing gets picked up and like, and just the numbers is going up. So we sell like. I don't know, first hour, like $200,000 of these things. They're selling a million dollars worth of these headsets, which we haven't made in the first day. And I think it closes to like two and a half million in a month. So we basically out of, and we literally still like, first day of launch, we're still working in Gaikai. And I think we quit like two or three days later, because we didn't expect this to be a thing. So like we thought that something might happen, but we didn't know. So suddenly we had a company in our hands, and we had to ship like several thousand units, like nine months from now, of a device we didn't have, and software we didn't have. So basically the right of way started working on the software for tracking and the graphics and putting together a team. And we dove right in. 

Jon - 00:15:35: That's amazing. And when you guys were just first starting, what was the price per unit on the Kickstarter at that time? 

Michael - 00:15:42: That's $300. So it's quite accessible. 

Jon - 00:15:45: That's a lot of units. And at scale, too. So like, okay, you now have... 

Michael - 00:15:50: I have something like that, I think.  

Jon - 00:15:52: You have a crap ton of orders now. 

Michael - 00:15:54: Yes. 

Jon - 00:15:55: That you need to fulfill. Talk a little bit about that. Like, all right, it's time to get to work. You obviously had to get this thing polished and deliverable. So talk a little bit about that experience. 

Michael - 00:16:09: Well, there's really two parts we promised to ship. One is the device, which was a lot of manufacturing. So the person, the co-founder, Jack, who had a connection with a Chinese manufacturer, Berway, who was willing to take, well, this is actually a very small order. The thing about Chinese manufacturers, they don't want to make 7,000 of anything or 20,000. Like 200,000 or 7 million, sure, you'll have a lot of manufacturers. 7,000, it's like, they have to believe that you'll be able to sell more in the future. So he knew he's built a guitar healer controller before. So he had went through that experience. So he- And we had another co-founder, Nirav, was from Apple who knew IMUs, the trackers for positional tracking orientation. He worked in electronics. So those guys were working in electronics and manufacturing. And for me, it was the SDK and the team. So he wanted to make sure we can actually look around in space and draw that in the world and actually gave programming interface, software development kit, SDK to people. So that was my job. So, and we didn't have any of the John Carmack's code. And I've never worked with gyroscopes that IMUs in the beginning, in that point. So basically, I just had to go and figure out our first three to four months, how to even get orientation tracking to work, which I think took like two, two and a half months, which was probably a month and a half longer than we all hoped. But it worked. And ultimately, we did it better than they originally. But, and then integrate the stereo rendering. Because in VR, you have to display for each eye separately. And you integrated with games. So by that point, we started pulling in people. We got two or three people from Scaleform, our previous company. So we just made them offers. And so we knew the team. So we were kind of in the right place in the right time from a perspective of, we've worked with these game engines. We've done this in user interface format. Now we're just transforming the world to do this VR thing. But it is the same tech stack. So I basically put together the team to do graphics. To set up that tracking. And that was a major deliverable. So it basically just worked nonstop all around the clock to make demos. And the team also like partnering with other people. It was created, created this self-reinforcing media slash deliverable work hard thing. So, and a lot of excitement. 

Jon - 00:18:45: Yeah. That, I mean, it's kind of like building the plane as you're trying to fly it. You're just like, all right, let's go, go, go, go, go. And so you eventually fulfill, you have a bunch of orders. You got it to a place where it's like, okay, we can actually ship these things and have it actually getting into people's hands. Like, were you guys just crowdfunded or did you guys decide to go, like to start scaling this thing above and beyond that with like I guess, institutional capital? Like, where were you guys like heading once you fulfilled that first order?  

Michael - 00:19:17: So the thing about Kickstarter is... If you're making hardware, you usually cannot fund it with just the money you make from Kickstarter. Because what happens is the cost of what it costs to ship you is usually very close to what it costs you to build it. 

Jon - 00:19:33: Mmm. 

Michael - 00:19:34: So if you ship it, then you don't have any money to operate to actually develop it. If you develop and operate it, you'll have no capital to actually ship it. So you have to have other money. And if you try to price it, whatever it is you're selling at the price, which takes care of both, it'll probably be too expensive and you won't get any users. That's sort of the hardware triangle of matter from Kickstarter. So if you're going to do hardware, you have to have external capital in addition to it. In our case, we're very lucky that we, because of scale from variable to just fund ourselves. So Brendan and I and a couple of early Scaleform Investors did an internal seed round, which was basically match Kickstarter, another two and a half million. So that gave us roadway to operate for next six months or whatever, nine months or a year. So we just sent self-funding. And then we got external investors for a round of around 16 million, just around the time we were shipping the Kickstarter, the units nine months later. So, it was, and that kind of enabled us to grow. 

Jon - 00:20:45: I love what you kind of, you kind of talked about like the Holy Trinity for hardware on Kickstarter. It's like. 

Michael - 00:20:53: A set of rules. You know.  

Jon - 00:20:56: Yeah, a buddy of mine is actually in the middle of, or he makes a device and basically, how would I describe it? So when you listen to music on Spotify, when there's visuals. And you can basically play the visuals onto this little, it's basically a piece of wood with like kind of like LEDs like across. And so you add visual to music. And he's like, I'm just like, I'm not a hardware person. So I was like learning from him like what it takes to like actually the cost of like actually making this thing, getting it out the door, like talking to China. And I was like, holy crap, the margins are thin. Like they're super thin. And he's like, yeah, like I have, he's like, I build these by hand. And like, I can't afford to, you know, I'm just building this by hand in my home. And then you're exactly, I think he had the same exact experience that are like, he went and he went and tried to get some quotes on what it would take to like do a proper manufacturing. And they're like, oh, this is far too many. Like I can't fulfill this order. This is like too much. So I got distracted. You now raise a bit of institutional capital to really scale this thing. Talk a little bit about that next phase of that ramp for Oculus. Like, you're like, okay, we're not living paycheck to paycheck on, on a Kickstarter. We can actually like invest in the operations of this thing. Talk about that phase. 

Michael - 00:22:19: Well, the main of, kind of thing we had to do next was to actually get somehow to consumer unit and there were a couple of really big technical challenges so first of all our first devices they were you could look around and it had this big blurry screen so the blurring was an issue so it was a technical issue how do you make it not be blurry when you turn your head And the second part was the tracking. So... Looking around, you can use a gyroscope, and it's pretty accurate. It has some drift, but generally speaking, you can look right, left, and it tracks it. Now, tracking things in space doesn't work so well. There's an accelerometer, but it's double integration of very small values. The error accumulates, you just fly away in space. So you actually cannot use one of those microchips to just track position in space. So you have to have a lot more advanced solution. There's a couple of approaches. Optical tracking is the most obvious one. So we had to figure out how do we make it so you can move right and left in space, and actually everything is in the right spot. Because if you don't do that, it doesn't feel well. It doesn't feel real. People get dizzy. And it's just not the same as being in the real world. So we had to do that and then figure out how to ship. So that's where the capital investment went. So that was probably one of the riskiest and hardest projects, in my life in the sense that I actually kind of hard believe we made a decision and shipped a version of positional tracking within like nine to 12 months from nothing. Not in a prototype form, but to build a whole software stack. Because first of all, we started not knowing how to do it. Then we hired a couple of people who had a very smart guy on sensor fusion who was a professor at sensors and robotics. We got a very smart PhD who knew computer vision. But we had no idea how to track it. And we actually were friendly with Valve, which is another company, a company who were doing at the space. They were friendly with us before Facebook. So they would share little bits of technology. And they had this big headset which had lots of fiducials. So different blocks. Fiducials are like white and black squares will help you track with a camera. They had that. And then they had, another solution where they took a room, and they pasted wallpaper with these fiducials. Also, they did it all around the wall and put a camera out. So you could walk around and look in the room and actually move in space. But the problem was that... You're not going to ship people a room and you're not going to put wallpaper and the other traditional thing didn't work. So we're trying to figure out so this is a solution like we actually decided to go with this infrared LEDs built underneath the chases so you don't see them but the camera sees it And we were trying to figure out how to reorient it in space. So the complexity of hardware went through the roof because we had to add an external camera and the controller and the way to map the LEDs. And actually one of the challenges that I worked with was actually, well, if you have an LED, how do you know where it is? Because there's lots of LEDs. You have to reconstruct the object. So we actually had like this decoding blinking pattern I was using and stuff. So kind of figuring out how are we going to do it and actually do it took like five or six months. We were like, we actually had no idea. And Brendan Seale was kind of like, we need to ship this. I'm like, we can track this like horizontal thing a little bit. But you have to like turn around at an angle and everything needs to work. So if you like have these, you turn it sideways and you still need to work. So we had like- 

Jon - 00:26:17: Oh my God. 

Michael - 00:26:19: So at the end of the day, it actually made it work. We had the LEDs and a headset with tracking and computer vision to track them all in space and integrate. And it was working. And the first demo, I think it was called the Crystal Cove prototype. And literally, there was this one young guy who was wiring each LED to the board in this device, which we showed to reporters. So if you open up, it was like a web. I don't remember how many, but it might have been 24 or 36 LEDs, each have two wires connecting. 

Jon - 00:26:53: Oh, my God. 

Michael - 00:26:54: And this thing, which also has to have a board of the IMU and the screen all like mapped and hand assembled in a prototypes. Anyway, so we ultimately figured out how to scale it much nicer. But that was the hardest. And getting the software stack to actually do that right. I think that that was probably my hardest tech achievement, which to get this SDK and then actually get that software integrated and working in space. And it was amazing when it worked. It was brilliant for the first time. You could look at something from all sides. It's just phenomenal.  

Jon - 00:27:29: That's so cool. And you mentioned working with Valve on this. Was this kind of like, were you guys collaborating on this or just shooting out, trading notes, figuring out, what are you guys doing? Here's what we're doing. Like, some brainstorm session. Like, what was that relationship? 

Michael - 00:27:44: So they had like a much better funded lab and they started on this VR thing like a couple years before. And so they're further along, but they didn't plan to have a commercial device. So when Palmer and this Kickstarter came out, it was suddenly something they could see that users could use it. So they could see benefit from it. Yeah. So they actually shared a bit of technology with us just on like ideas around electronics. Like they had this. Flashing the screen approach, which prevented blurriness. And so we kind of replicated that. And then they were sharing the positional software stuff ideas. But as it was a discussion, do we use our tech or their tech? And they wanted some licensing terms, which were not, you know, it started to get into that, like, what do we get from them? So we never ended up getting any software from them. And also our team was strong. We had our own simple solution we understood. And then they had theirs, which is was, we saw it as more complicated. And we had like, like, which, you know, our team wanted to do our own thing. 

Jon - 00:28:47: The, there's like the saying, it's like build or buy almost. And you guys are like, we're just going to build this. 

Michael - 00:28:54: We're going to build it. There were moments when Brendan, the CEO, wanted to get Valves because he was very impressed with their team. And it was actually caused a lot of pain internally. We always had to go competing with them and we were much behind, but then we caught up and our solution was more elegant for the time being, in terms of compared to what they were suggesting. So we ended up building our own whole thing and showing it. And then that's when the Facebook conversation also started because we got another round of funding because, what the big thing is we were now ready to ship the big device. Now it's going to be more expensive because of the cameras and we needed to build it up for manufacturing. We couldn't just sell a few thousand units. We needed to sell the lots. You need to have inventory. So capital requirements increase. And then you needed to have money to build games because we don't have games. You have to have build the ecosystem. So there's like this huge amount of capital, which we kind of need to launch something for it to be more than just a very niche device. So that's where more capital came in. 

Jon - 00:29:59: When you guys were start first talking with Valve were you was the thought that like the Oculus would be able to hook up to like Steam and like games on the developers on Steam can just like basically use the Oculus and then obviously all the SDKs that you're creating was that kind of in the kind of in your in your head? 

Michael - 00:30:17: That will be the idea. once it's actually works. yeah. 

Jon - 00:30:20: Interesting. Yeah, that's, I played a lot of Counter-Strike, growing up like 1.6. And and like Source and GO, so I was like, thinking about just how this, I'm familiar with the ecosystem, and kind of like all of that. So very cool, so okay, you finally cracked, like the, I can't imagine how nervous, I would be very nervous. Where like, this problem is really freaking hard, and when you're and Brendan comes in, he's like we need to ship this thing, you're like, need a little bit more time. But you got there, you got there you presented it, it was like impressive. And you're now like, okay, this is like prime time, we need to get this in a, at scale, we need to scale this thing from the like, this finished product. And you said Facebook was starting to have conversations, like how far along like, on that, now you're trying to scale this thing. Did Facebook come in and basically were like, hey, we're going to accelerate these conversations? Or did you already... Full motion, like we're getting the factories to just like start really turning these things out before Facebook? 

Michael - 00:31:21: Well, we raised a second round of capital, which was in winter. So this was another, I think, 10 months in after the first one. And this was 75 million, which would have been enough to get a good amount of inventory and manufacturing, but not everything we needed. Not enough to really build an ecosystem, but enough to kind of like do meaningful things. And that was from Andreessen Horowitz. And that's what happened is Andreessen connected Mark Zuckerberg to Brendan. And there was this moment where Mark Zuckerberg came into our office and wanted to see a demo. And we gave him a demo. And I think they also looked at the Valve demo. And so he got interested in this industry, probably because the Facebook was behind on phones, on mobile phones. They really caught up and executed well. But there was a moment in time where they were behind. And they felt like if virtual and augmented reality becomes a thing, they didn't want to be behind. They wanted to be at the front of it and not be dependent on the Google’s and the Apple to lock their app out or not. And that type of thing. And it was also really compelling new. Interactive experience. So we didn't really expect it, but it did happen that like when he saw the demo and suddenly an offer came to require us. Which was the first offer that we got. Basically, like literally a month after the fundraise and as our positional tracking tech was starting to work.  

Jon - 00:32:59: Very cool. And so this is your now second rodeo of an acquisition. How did this experience compare to your Scaleform acquisition? Anything different? And did you guys approach it differently? 

Michael - 00:33:12: Very different. 

Jon - 00:33:13: Not very different. Okay. 

Michael - 00:33:15: Well, first of all, I didn't want to sell. We were just only months. We are under two years in. This is like a year and a half. And I thought that my personal perspective was we should, before we consider any kind of acquisition, I wanted to ship consumer units and actually try it on our own. And I think the rest of the team were trying to figure out why it's so expensive to build everything we want to build. But I think the first offer came in and it was a very compelling offer, but we decided to not take it. This was an offer for $1 billion, which is in some sense insane for a company started just a year and a half ago. And we had this conversation. I was a strict no, but other people were not certain. And we decided not to take the offer. So that was the first round. And that kind of paused everything for a bit. And then two months later, an offer of double the size came in. And I think that's the point the team really felt like it's too much to say no to.  

Jon - 00:34:22: Yeah, totally. 

Outro - 00:34:26: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast with Michael Antonov. Join us for Part Three, where Michael shares the origin story of Oculus, how a chance meeting with Palmer Luckey led to the co-founding of the company, how their Kickstarter campaign took off, and the challenges of rapidly scaling a hardware startup. He also reflects on building the first VR development kits. Navigating early stage fundraising, and why the team's game industry roots gave Oculus an unexpected advantage. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a friend. See you next time! The Biotech Startups Podcast is produced by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Search for The Biotech Startups Podcast wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. Excedr provides research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support paths to exceptional outcomes. To learn more, visit our website, www.excedr.com. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening. The Biotech Startups Podcast provides general insights into the life science sector through the experiences of its guests. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from the podcast is at the user's own risk. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not the views of Excedr or sponsors. No reference to any product, service or company in the podcast is an endorsement by Excedr or its guests.