Episode 35: Oculus

Ben & David transcend the barriers of “real” reality, and dive into Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg’s geek-eutpoia vision of the future of gaming, social, and maybe even the entire internet: strapping goofy-looking goggles to your face. Is VR for real this time or are we living through another Virtual Boy moment? Tune in to find out!

Sponsors:

• Anthropic: https://bit.ly/acquiredclaude25
• Sentry: https://bit.ly/acquiredsentry
  • The Acquired Meetup (in SF!): https://bit.ly/sentryacquiredmeetup
• WorkOS: https://bit.ly/workos26
  • Full Acquired Unplugged Videos: https://acquired.fm/unplugged
• Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26

More Acquired!

• Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodes
• Join the Slack
• Subscribe to ACQ2
• Merch Store!

© Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC

Topics covered include:

• Oculus’s origins in 2010 as a twinkle in the eye of the then-17 year old VR wunderkind, Palmer Luckey, who started by prototyping VR headsets in his parents’ garage in Southern California
• Palmer’s time interning at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, and chronicling of his own VR efforts in the Meant to be Seen 3D internet forums
• Legendary game developer John Carmack’s own interest in virtual reality, his intersection with Palmer on the MTBS3D forums, and how he acquired and popularized one of Palmer's first early prototypes of the Oculus Rift (which was literally held together with duct tape!) by demonstrating it onstage at E3 2012
• How former Scaleform cofounders Brendan Iribe and Michael Antonov teamed up with Palmer after E3 to create the company Oculus VR
• The newly-formed Oculus’s wildly successful August 2012 Kickstarter campaign, including video endorsements from both Carmack and Valve founder Gabe Newell
• Oculus’s subsequent venture capital fundraisings, and catching the attention of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg
• Facebook’s acquisition of the company in March 2014 for $2.3B
• The Zenimax lawsuit filed against Oculus and Facebook following the acquisition
• Valve (home of the most incredible company handbook of all-time) and Gabe Newell’s subsequent pivot from supporting Oculus to launching their own competing VR efforts with the Vive
• Team changes at Oculus post-acquisition

Followups:

• SNAP: still a public company

Hot Takes:

• Intel’s $15B acquisition of Mobileye (with reference to Ben Thompson’s analysis of the deal and Smiling Curves)

The Carve Out:

• Ben: Kara Swisher interviews the Pod Save America team at SXSW
• David: Adam Gopnik asks Are Liberals on the Wrong Side of History?