October 2013
THE MORE IRIBE REFLECTED ON VALVE, THE MORE HE YEARNED FOR OCULUS to have a demo like that as well. On October 2, after getting permission from Samsung to share some specs with Valve, Iribe emailed Abrash and Binstock to offer a trade: “We can send over single 120 Hz and dual 90 Hz samples, dev boards with screens, and our schematics for the Note 3 driver” in exchange for “one of Atman’s VR room demos.”
“Interesting thought,” Abrash replied, saying he’d get back to Iribe.
“THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA!” LUCKEY SHOUTED ONE DAY LATER. THIS WAS THE first time he had ever raised his voice at Oculus, but he couldn’t help himself. Days earlier, the team had received a proposal from the firm Luckey had contacted about doing the ID for Oculus’ motion controllers (Carbon Design) outlining a process that would cost about $750,000. Luckey thought that was a good price—a great price, even—but instead of moving forward, Iribe and Mitchell had decided to pull the plug.
“Controllers are just not critical to Consumer v1,” Iribe told Luckey and then reiterated over email on October 4. “Controllers are simply not the top priority. They’re important and we want to have them, but there’s a high chance they won’t come until v2 . . .”
Not only did Luckey find himself on the other side of Iribe on what he believed was a critical decision, but he also found himself there alone.
“I am 100 percent behind holding off for consumer 1,” Malamed said. “That seems wise to me.”
“Good,” Carmack added. “I have never felt like this was a good idea for the first consumer device, and the effort has distracted from things I think are more important and easier, like ergonomic iteration and built-in audio.”
Meanwhile, in the midst of killing the controller project, Iribe heard back from Abrash about the trade he had offered with regard to the Note 3. Abrash thought this could work, but also wanted similar assets for Samsung’s S4. Iribe was amenable to that. Over the next week, Iribe and Abrash negotiated a trade. Valve—after signing an NDA with Samsung—would get Oculus’s driver specs and datasheets for the Note 3 and S4; and in exchange, someone from Valve would head down to Oculus and install their “VR room.”
With a deal now in place, Iribe enthusiastically emailed the team: though this enthusiasm was sincere, few at Oculus shared it. And worse: any attempt to curb Iribe’s enthusiasm would fall largely on deaf ears. Like this exchange between Iribe and Tom Forsyth:
FROM: Tom Forsyth
DATE: October 9, 2013
Just a quick reality check. I know the fiddy system very well—I wrote a fair chunk of that code (though Atman may have re-re-written it since). The precision and accuracy are significantly lower quality than are coming out of [Oculus’ nearly finished tracking system] . . . So while it’s nice to have a working system, it is a long way from any sort of “gold standard”. On the other hand, it’s nice to know that even with all its considerable faults, the wall-fiddy system gave you a good experience.
>>>FROM: Brendan Iribe
DATE: October 9, 2013
That’s all fine and dandy . . . but nothing I’ve seen works nearly as well as what I saw at Valve and we simply don’t seem to have the bandwidth to get it there . . .
Once again, Forsyth tried to kindly push back on Iribe. “There is some serious ‘grass is always greener’ stuff going on here. I’m trying to tell you . . . It’s not that Valve have magic tech, it’s that they’re careful about their calibration. We need to strike a balance somewhere between our mad rush to ship something and Valve’s mad rush to never ship anything ever.”
But again, Iribe was unmoved. Even though the demo that Valve put together cost tens of thousands of dollars and was absolutely unproductizeable, Iribe continued to praise its glory, as he constantly demeaned what was being done internally. Especially the proprietary tracking system that Oculus was putting together.
“For months now,” Antonov vented to a colleague, “all he says is ‘You don’t know what you’re doing!’ No, Brendan, ours is gonna be better. ‘Not better than Valve! They are so good! They are so smart!’ Brendan is seeing Abrash and Valve guys as these VR gods. Come on, what are you even talking about? We have brilliant professor Steve LaValle here and I’m working and Dov is working: we all have this thing going. Trust me. But he does not. Because I am not them. It makes me kind of sick.”
“I’VE GOTTEN SICK EVERY TIME I’VE TRIED [THE RIFT],” IRIBE CONFESSED TO AN audience of industry leaders at the first annual Gaming Insiders Summit in San Francisco.
Iribe had never actively hid this fact, but he hadn’t ever publicly announced it either. Today, however, he felt comfortable doing so. Because, after his trip to Valve, this was no longer the case.
“Every time until recently,” Iribe continued. “In the last couple weeks, I’ve tried a prototype internally where I did not get sick for the first time, and I stayed in there for forty-five minutes.”
This breakthrough, he explained, came from the team’s recent improvements to latency. The result of Oculus’s persistent quest to bring latency under five milliseconds. And as a result of the progress that had already been made, as well as that which seemed within reach, Iribe felt confident enough to proclaim, “We are right at the edge where we can bring you no-motion-sickness content.”
Naturally, these words stoked the interest of game execs, developers, and reporters on hand. Over the next twenty-four hours, stories like “Oculus: Motion-Sickness Is Solved” (IGN) and “CEO Promises Oculus Rift Won’t Make You Sick” (Forbes) would spread throughout the tech community. This was great, exactly what Iribe had hoped would happen, but even better than that—even better than what would happen when these stories went live—was what happened as soon as Iribe stepped off the stage and turned on his phone: he received a message from Brian Cho, one of the partners at Andreessen Horowitz.
Cho was at the Summit and had been intrigued by Iribe’s talk. If motion sickness really had been solved, then perhaps Andreessen Horowitz could play a role in Oculus’s series B. This was music to Iribe’s ears; he had wanted to be in business with Marc Andreessen since the start of Oculus. Before that even. Since the ’90s, really, when Andreessen—fresh off IPO-ing Netscape—appeared on the cover of Time magazine for a piece about the so-called Golden Geeks.
Shortly after receiving Cho’s email, Iribe wrote back to say, “We have a new prototype in the office which you guys really need to see. It ties everything together for a comfortable experience that proves VR is very close to mass market ready.” From there, Iribe reconnected with Chris Dixon and then directly with Andreessen: “We’re ready to engage,” he wrote.
GIVEN THE WHIRLWIND OF DRAMA THAT THE PAST COUPLE YEARS HAD BEEN, IT was rare that any single development—positive as it may be—could propel Luckey past his default cautious-but-contagious enthusiasm toward a state of over-the-moon giddiness. Nevertheless, this did happen from time to time, and whenever it did Luckey savored sharing these developments with close friends. Which is why, on October 28, Luckey had a big smile on his face as he emailed Patel the following news: “It is back.”
“What is back?” Patel replied.
“The McRib,” Luckey answered, referring to McDonald’s famously elusive barbecue-flavored pork sandwich.
“No fucking way,” Patel wrote back, skeptical of this big delicious news.
But instantly, when Luckey replied that he was “eating one right now,” Patel knew that the news must be true. Because some things were just too sacred to joke about. For Luckey and Patel, the McRib was one of those things.
As magical as the McRib tastes, something even bigger happened three days later: Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Brian Cho, and a fourth partner (Gil Shafir) visited Irvine and left telling Iribe, “We are fully converted believers.” So much so that on November 5, Andreessen even emailed an old friend—Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to ask, “Have you seen Oculus?” Assuming not, Andreessen then proceeded to tell Zuckerberg about what he’d just experienced. “Blew my brain wide open,” he said. “The key seems that they have added John Carmack, co-founder of id, co-creator of Doom and Quake and essentially the inventor of 3D computer games and one of the all-time great hackers as their CTO. He is completely obsessed with every detail of it. I wanted to just give all my money to him on the spot.”
It’s rare that a firm would pass on Series A opportunity, and then later participate in future rounds of funding. But Dixon, who managed the relationship, told Iribe he wanted to “correct that mistake.” He and his partners wanted to do so in a big way: leading a $75 million Series B.
In fact, it was so important to them that this work out that Marc Andreessen put Iribe in touch with Mark Zuckerberg to put in a good word.
“What do you see as the ‘killer app’?” Zuckerberg asked Iribe during a short reference call on November 19.
“Gaming,” Iribe replied. “But it’s gonna be huge for Communication too.”
They proceeded to talk about the past—about Andreessen, about whom Zuckerberg couldn’t have had nicer things to say.
Not that Iribe needed much (or any) convincing. From the get-go, Andreessen Horowitz had been the VC firm he most wanted to work with. If anything, Iribe wanted more insight into what changed their mind about Oculus. And part of the answer had to do with a phrase Dixon coined called “the Bat Signal Effect.”
“The way I think about it is like this,” Dixon began. “Let’s just take Elon Musk. There were all these people around the world who wanted to build electric cars. Like [for example] there was some smart MIT grad who was working in the Innovation Group before whose dream was to work on electric cars. And the only place to do it prior to Tesla was to work at a regular car company. In some back room. They don’t really take the project seriously. And then you maybe see this person—Elon Musk—is starting this company and you’re intrigued, but you’re not sure where it’s going. But then maybe you see that they sold some cars, or raise some money, or recruited some talented person [laughs], and you realize that this sort of Bat Signal goes out. And they realize: all right, this is going to happen; my dream is going to happen. And then all these people come out of the woodwork and you become this company; and the company becomes kind of the talent magnet for all these people. This sort of latent body of talent out there. It’s not as if SpaceX and Tesla created all these great space engineers and electrical engineers; they were just sidelined. They just weren’t the protagonists, right? It took these entrepreneurs to come and unlock that, right? I think that’s a lot of what happened with Oculus.”
After leading Oculus’s Series B—giving them enough funding to cover DK2 and finance stuff like Luckey’s controller project—so began a mutually beneficial relationship between Dixon’s firm and Oculus.