A lot has changed since the last time I talked to Palmer Luckey, the 23-year-old creator of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset.
We last spoke over the phone back in 2013 when the Oculus Rift was still a runaway Kickstarter project, back before the team showed Mark Zuckerberg a prototype. Zuckerberg loved it, calling it "one of the coolest things I've ever seen," and Facebook ended up paying $2 billion for Oculus a year later.
That means Luckey is now a multi-millionaire — Forbes pegs his net worth at $700 million — and I point out how surreal that must feel, reaching that level of wealth a few short years after giving up his journalism studies to pursue virtual reality full time.
"This may sound — everyone says this — but it’s not about the money," says Luckey, who's wearing a blue polo shirt and fidgeting with a bottle of water. We're sitting at a round table inside of a small demo room deep within the Oculus booth at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Luckey was studying to become a tech journalist when he decided to pursue his vision.
"I didn’t get into tech journalism for the money, I didn’t get into VR for the money. When I was in tech journalism, I thought I was taking a break from school after Oculus took off. That seemed like the riskier path at the time. Like ‘I’m almost done with my degree in tech journalism, am I really going to give up my career in tech journalism for this wacky VR thing?’ Well that sounded like a lot of fun, so I’m going to go do that."
The journey has just begun
So Luckey dropped out of college and the gamble paid off, but Luckey's personality — quirky but genuine, laid-back but you can still tell his mind is thinking a mile a minute — is a refreshing break from that of the usual Silicon Valley tech startup founder. This is the guy who originally planned to simply sell the plans for building the Oculus Rift to virtual reality enthusiasts so they could build it themselves, the cheapest way at the time to get the technology into people's hands.
He's no longer hacking together prototypes in his garage. Now he's working within the Oculus headquarters on Facebook's campus. He lives nearby in a large house he shares with six other people —"All but one is from Oculus," he says — and things have been steadily ramping up over the past year.
Two weeks ago, Oculus reached a major milestone as pre-orders for the consumer version Oculus Rift went live. The site was flooded with people willing to fork over $600 for a chance to get in on the ground floor of virtual reality. While he says he can't talk about any solid sales numbers because "financial disclosure stuff," the shipping date for new pre-orders has already slipped from March to July.
I ask Luckey what's going through his mind at this point, does he feel any weight lifted off his shoulders?
"Launching pre-orders is relatively easy compared to shipping a product. So it’s not like ‘What a weight off your shoulders!’, when in reality, taking pre-orders is the point where you are finally making an actual, solid commitment to when you’re going to ship, and how much you’re going to ship for, and you can’t stumble between when you do that and when you’re supposed to ship. It’s actually not a weight off of my shoulders at all."
So the stress levels are actually getting kicked up a notch?
"It's impossible to do that," he says, laughing before adding "but it's a good time, don't get me wrong."
A controversial price tag
