Hacker News Reader

Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

My only fear is the Oculus management/investors. They could be great, but they seem not so great so far. An investor took over as CEO already and started calling himself a co-founder? That's a huge red flag. The real founder Palmer Luckey seems like the prototypical hacker-founder. Naive and noobish maybe but probably less so than most and obviously super passionate.

I wonder if John Carmack wouldn't be better off just launching a competitor to Oculus. Wherever he goes the magic will follow, and it'd be nice if he was the ultimate boss like he was at id Software.

I'd just really hate for him to get bogged down in a bad environment, kind of the way Linus did with Transmeta, and be forced to resign at some point and start over after wasting years of productivity.

The A16Z guys can probably help avoid any massive stupidity, so that's a nice benefit to this investment.

View on HN

Weird. It really seems like the management team is incredible. A CEO with multiple wins under his belt (and whom the founding team has worked with in the past) and who has raised almost $100M for the company? The brilliant inventor that invented the Rift – and John freaking Carmack? and Marc Andreessen on the board?

And their investors are Kickstarter, Spark and a16z. Isn't literally the ideal thing to prove the concept with the crowds, then take money from a vc with a proven record of successes, and then take more money from another vc with a proven record? (I wonder if they had any other term sheets for their b)

Wherever he goes the magic will follow, and it'd be nice if he was the ultimate boss like he was at id Software.

It's quite arguable that the best time for id was back in Romero's time, through Quake 1. Carmack was an excellent steward technologically, but from a business standpoint I think they were far outstripped by Epic in terms of being a business based on technology licensing.

As much as I'm a fan of Carmack, and as much as Romero's rockstar antics of the late 90's disgusted me, you're right.

Carmack is not one of the business guys, but he creates massive opportunities for them. That's the magic the GP is referring to.

Sadly they were also outstripped by Epic in terms of games. Id didnt really have a hitgame for a decade while Epic had the hugely popular Gears of War series and their success with Unreal was on par with Quake.

While i also believe that Ids best time was in the 90ies when Romero was there, its not that he made anything noteworthy since he left.

An investor took over as CEO already and started calling himself a co-founder? That's a huge red flag.

Except it isnt. Brendan Iribe has been working in the Computer graphics/games industry for ages, co-founding Scaleform (video game UI system) and then working as chief product officer for Gaikai (really impressive video game streaming technology). Oculus also has other co-founders who worked in the same companies. The fact that Luckey, who is 20 years old, gave the CEO role to Iribe makes perfect sense. This is not the next social networking website after all, they want to transform the world with hardware products.

A "prototypical hacker-founder" may well need someone to come in and help with the business stuff. Scaling a hardware business is a lot different to a software one.

And I'm not convinced Carmack likes being in charge. He might well he happy if he can just hack.

It's actually an important question, where should your smartest and most creative employee go; CEO or CTO?

I think for a lot of companies (is tech startups) CTO would be the right answer.

So long as the CEO stays the hell out of the way

Don't forget their COO is Laird Malamed who helped with the Guitar Hero hardware. They have already been able to do the right thing with their initial batches and it looks like this is the right step forward for mass-producing the hardware for the consumer version.

Palmer choose Brendan as his partner to help transform Oculus from a project into co-founding a company because they wanted to work together. To characterize him as an "investor" seems strange since he is an entrepreneur. And suffice to say Brendan, Palmer, and Carmack are voting with their time.

Carmack has been talking about working on it for for well over a year now - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw-DlWwlXHo. When I saw that last year, I thought it was already his company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com