Palmer Luckey - Inventing the Future of Defense

“We spent a ton of time engaging with the press, engaging with game developers, engaging with computing companies because we were trying to shape the way that this technology would be received. Anduril, when we started in the first few months, we hired more lawyers and lobbyists than engineers. That was because we were actually more concerned about the shaping of the institutions side and compliance with the institutions side than the building of technology side.”— Palmer Luckey

Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship · Leadership & Management

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Hired more lawyers than engineers initially

“When I was starting 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.”— Palmer Luckey

Creativity & Innovation · Technology & Engineering · Strategy & Decision Making

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Don't study failures; study discarded successes

“I hate to admit this, but Anduril, when we started, we hired more lawyers and lobbyists than engineers in the first few months. We were more concerned about the shaping of the institutions side and compliance with the institutions side than the building of technology side. We felt good on the engineering side. We were going to build Lattice, we were going to build these products on top of it.”— Palmer Luckey

Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship · Leadership & Management

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More lawyers than engineers at launch

“Is it oversimplifying it to say that more inventors should work backward from existing systems? I think you need to think about existing systems in terms of the institutions and the people and the traditions and the politics, yes. The technology, probably no. It's good to trust people when they tell you what their problems are, but don't trust what they think the solution is.”— Palmer Luckey

Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship · Creativity & Innovation

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Compete 2 years ahead, not with today

“There are 4 things that need to be true when we do something. First, it has to be something that the Pentagon cares about. If they don't think it's a priority, it's probably not something that is going to get fixed in the near term. If I think something is a priority and the Pentagon disagrees, that's not an engineering effort I need to deploy. That's probably a persuasion effort. Two, has to be something that Congress cares about. They have the power of the purse.”— Palmer Luckey

Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship · Leadership & Management

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4 gates: Pentagon cares, Congress funds, we excel, others fail

“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 US Department of Defense or electronics retailers. There's a lot of outside-of-the-box people who almost divorce themselves from the timeline of the boring corporations and the large government agencies.”— Palmer Luckey

Strategy & Decision Making · Leadership & Management · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Impact requires engaging conventional systems

“When I find an idea like this, I go into 1950s-era Department of Energy documents regarding potential energy futures for the United States. I always find it interesting when I go into an area that I don't understand to try and understand it better. I want to go back to the future and say, what were people saying back then? What are the ideas that people aren't even discussing right now?”— Palmer Luckey

Creativity & Innovation · History & Geopolitics · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Back to the future: mine pre-orthodoxy thinking

“With the Vision Pro, they are not trying to make a mass market product. What they are doing is trying to make a VR headset that everybody wants, even if it's not one that they can afford. They want to make VR something that everyone understands that they want in their lives. They see people using it and say, wow, I want that for myself, but I'm too poor. If that is what Apple can accomplish, they will have no problem down the road when they make a lower cost version.”— Palmer Luckey

Business & Entrepreneurship · Strategy & Decision Making · Psychology & Behavior

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Create desire before affordability

“The incentives on the government side are out of whack. Government bureaucrats don't get fired for doing things the way that their predecessor did them, even if that's the wrong way. The incentives on the private contractor side have been created by government, which largely is awarding cost-plus contracts, which incentivize contractors to have high costs, to build the most expensive systems they can justify, to never reuse work.”— Palmer Luckey

Economics & Markets · Strategy & Decision Making · History & Geopolitics

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Cost-plus incentivizes waste and non-reuse

“When you do something like a Thiel Fellowship, you create a lot of surface area for people to come after you. You have all these people who are now affiliated with you, tied to you, trading on your name. That's true whether it goes well or goes poorly. And there's an asymmetry of value in that. Probably if it goes poorly, it is going to blow back a lot more than the benefit of it going well. What if SBF was a Thiel Fellow? Do we even need to talk about what the media coverage would look like?”— Palmer Luckey

Psychology & Behavior · Strategy & Decision Making · Economics & Markets

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Direct affiliation creates asymmetric downside risk

“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. Unlike VR headsets, where I think there's a clear, tractable roadmap to solving the problem, there is not a clear path for AGI. I suspect that whatever ends up working is going to be a bit different than what people are betting it is today.”— Palmer Luckey

Strategy & Decision Making · Technology & Engineering · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Build AGI-ready systems; let others solve AGI

“Marketing is not just about your end user. It's about all the people you need to work with. At Oculus, we were marketing primarily to game developers we needed to partner with, and then to end users. You have to convince them one by one individually by the millions. 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. Your other audience is politicians who pay for your stuff. And the third is your actual customers.”— Palmer Luckey

Business & Entrepreneurship · Strategy & Decision Making

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B2G: one-to-few vs. B2C: one-to-millions

“If you can make synthetic long-chain hydrocarbon fuels, in other words, synthetic gasoline, synthetic diesel, synthetic jet fuel using carbon from the atmosphere, you take water, crack it into hydrogen and oxygen using some kind of energy source like a nuclear power plant, and then bond it with carbon to make hydrocarbons. If someone can figure out how to do that cheaply enough, first of all, it's an incredible carbon capture mechanism.”— Palmer Luckey

Technology & Engineering · Economics & Markets · Strategy & Decision Making

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Synthetic fuel at $1/gal destroys EV investment thesis

“Today, if you say, what's the best way to help the environment in the United States? It's actually very calcified. There's very little consideration for things that are better than what currently exists. Preserving the status quo is the ultimate good. There's very little consideration for what is better for people, what would be better for more animals.”— Palmer Luckey

Philosophy & Reasoning · History & Geopolitics · Culture & Society

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Orthodoxy shifts from expansion to preservation

“I don't think the United States should be subsidizing all educational pursuits equally with no regard for whether or not they are of national interest. The United States should not be saying we will give you equal student loans and allow you to put yourself equally in debt on the taxpayer dime to get a degree in studying ancient French theater versus being a mechanical engineer. The need is so obviously disparate that the position seems crazy.”— Palmer Luckey

Economics & Markets · Strategy & Decision Making · Culture & Society

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Subsidies should align with national interests

“I had a background of thinking this way before I started Oculus. I ran an internet game console modification forum called ModRetro. The whole purpose of ModRetro was to combine modern technology with retro game consoles. We were taking old game consoles, cutting them up, removing old legacy components that could be replaced with better modern versions, and then building them into handheld portable devices.”— Palmer Luckey

Creativity & Innovation · Technology & Engineering

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Early practice in old-new combination thinking

“The kindest thing anyone's done for me: my wife put up with me not proposing to her for over 10 years. We met when we were teenagers at a debate camp. I had told her when I'm done with Oculus and we get through the consumer launch of the Rift, then that's going to be the right time. But because I had been fired from Oculus, I was just enraged. I had 100 chips on my shoulder. I was waking up with my fists clenched every day saying I am going to prove to them that I'm somebody.”— Palmer Luckey

Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

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10-year engagement delay enabled Anduril intensity

“With Oculus, the clarity of purpose was pretty obvious. We are trying to bring VR back from the dead and use it to the fullest extent to allow anyone to experience anything. The idea of anything that a person is capable of experiencing, any joy, any experience, any beautiful sight, any educational thing, we want to make that possible for people to experience in VR. That was the endgame: to make the height of human experience accessible.”— Palmer Luckey

Leadership & Management · Business & Entrepreneurship · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Mission: democratize all human experience