June/July 2014
“WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THIS NEW GOOGLE THING?” JOE CHEN ASKED LUCKEY at the office.
“Google Cardboard? I love it . . .” he replied, before taking a big dramatic pause. “No, wait. I loved it. Back in 2011. When it was called FOV2GO!”
Chen finished laughing before asking what that was.
“FOV2GO?” Luckey said. “Have I really not ever told you about that? Oh, man, you should look it up. But basically Google Cardboard is in many ways a direct rip-off of FOV2GO, a project I helped work on when I was at ICT. The idea was to build an extremely cheap VR headset, not out of cardboard, but of foam core. And the first ones we built were for phones. This was when I was working on the Rift. But it was clear that phone sensors weren’t remotely good enough, the displays weren’t very good, and trying to run something universally on a bunch of phones is just not an optimal way to do it. I don’t think it’s going to be providing a good VR experience anytime soon.”
By this point, Chen was scrolling through old articles about FOV2GO. Yeah, it looked almost identical to Google Cardboard.
“If Google is claiming they came up with this on their own, then they’re bullshitting because we won the best demo award at IEEE. It’s a great concept, but not a great product. But hey, even if it flops, it’ll still be a good way for Google to show some extra ads to people!”
Chen nodded. “It doesn’t seem like a threat. But do you think it’ll poison the well?”
Luckey didn’t think so. His colleagues, however, were split on this. About half of Oculus thought it was a good thing—that it’d at least raise awareness about VR—and the other half thought it’d do damage to the mainstream perception of VR. And as with most cases at Oculus where the opinion was split, each half spent the next few days trying to prove why the other half were idiots. But on June 29, the playful banter was interrupted by a hot new topic that hit even closer to home.
“Did you see this?” Dycus asked Luckey, pointing out one of the many articles about Facebook’s “Secret Mood Experiment,” in which data scientists at Facebook manipulated what appeared in the newsfeed of 689,000 users to try and see if they could make people feel “more positive” or “more negative” through a process called “emotional contagion.”
“Yeah, I saw it,” Luckey said.
“The experiment was successful, by the way,” Dycus said. “What does Brendan think?”
Luckey didn’t know and didn’t expect to find out. Because at the time, Iribe was way too busy with what had been filling most of his days: aggressively scaling up the team.
One of the deal points that Iribe was most proud of suggesting (and receiving) during his negotiation with Zuckerberg was the ability to allocate up to $700 million worth of the RSUs (restricted stock units) to those he hired before the deal officially closed. In effect, this armed Iribe what he called the “ability to supercharge VR.” It also enabled him to hire those people without oversight from Facebook. So between when the deal was signed (March 25) and when it closed (July 21), Iribe licked his lips and went on the ultimate engineer-hiring spree.
One by one, lead engineers came down to Irvine. Not even for a job opportunity in many cases, but just to check out Oculus’s latest demos. And then one by one, Iribe would usher these unsuspecting recruits into his office to try and bring them onto the team. Oftentimes, since these were top-tier engineers, they’d say thanks-but-no-thanks—they already had a job they liked, one that paid them well, and they weren’t looking to make a move (some, simply, wanted to check out the demos).
“How much are you currently making?” Iribe would ask. And then after they replied with whatever the number turned out to be, Iribe would offer them something better—usually double or triple what they were making—and see if that changed their mind.
It almost always did. Gradually, Iribe grew the team from 60 to about 160 by the time the acquisition closed and he received this email from Zuckerberg.
FROM: Mark Zuckerberg
DATE: July 22, 2014
SUBJECT: Congrats
Congrats again on closing and I’m looking forward to working alongside you to change the world.
What you’re building is amazing and I’m excited to help turbo charge it so we can deliver it to the world sooner.
This is going to be a great adventure, and I’m excited to be on it with you guys.
Even more excited than Zuckerberg was Palmer Luckey, who was grateful to be acquired by someone who appeared to believe in VR as much as he. “Virtual reality is now an unstoppable force,” Luckey wrote to Zuckerberg. “I am crazy excited to work with Facebook on building the inevitable as quickly as possible.”