From Fortune Magazine, August 18:
The billionaire Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey says he’s living proof the American Dream is alive and well. He went from a teen college dropout who was living in a trailer to selling his first company to Facebook (now Meta) for $2 billion by just 21 years old—and he says that rags-to-riches rise could happen only in America.
“I was a 19-year-old kid working a minimum wage job with no college degree, living in a 19-foot camper trailer, and Peter Thiel gave me a million dollars when nobody else would to start Oculus,” Luckey told the Hoover Institution. “That’s not happening in China, I’ll tell you that.”
The now 33-year-old said “there’s a million complaints” about opportunity drying up in the U.S. “Oh, you can’t get a break in America. Blah, blah, blah, blah.”
Indeed, AI is cutting 16,000 U.S. jobs a month, and many Gen Zers can’t even land a summer job at an ice cream shop right now. But Luckey says his own story—and those of countless other founders just like him—proves that America is still the golden land of opportunity.
Palmer Luckey went from a homeschooled teenager building VR headsets to a $5 billion net worth
While homeschooled, 17-year-old Luckey started building a virtual reality headset in his family’s garage: the Oculus Rift VR headset.
After raising $2.4 million on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter two years later, he dropped out of California State University, hired a handful of employees, and rented an office space to launch his virtual reality startup.
Although Luckey missed the application window for the famous Thiel Fellowship, his prototype still caught the attention of PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, who invested in Oculus through his venture firm, Founders Fund.
Thiel’s investment paid off almost immediately. Just one year later, in 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion. But the partnership didn’t end there.
In 2017, Thiel and Founders Fund backed Luckey again, this time in a very different kind of startup: Anduril, a defense tech company building autonomous weapons systems and surveillance technology for the U.S. military. Founders Fund led Anduril’s first funding rounds, and the company has since grown into one of the most valuable defense startups in the world, now worth $61 billion.
His latest venture? Erebor Bank....
....MUCH MORE
And from Chicago Boyz, August 13:
In 2011 Peter Thiel started the Thiel Fellowship program to award several hundred thousand dollars apiece and mentorship access to extraordinary individuals willing to skip college or drop out by age 22. Recipients were expected to go straight to work in a mode identified as “extraordinary agency.” In 15 years Thiel has awarded several hundred grants. Success stories during just the first 5 years include:
- Laura Deming (2011) — Awarded at age 17 upon dropping out of MIT; Founder of Longevity Fund/age1.
- Dylan Field (2012) — Co-founder/CEO of Figma, a multi-billion-dollar collaborative design tool.
- Chris Olah (2012) — Co-founder of Anthropic.
- Austin Russell (2013) — Founder of Luminar Technologies; became one of the youngest self-made billionaires after the company went public.
- Ritesh Agarwal (2013) — Founder of OYO Rooms (hospitality).
- Lucy Guo (2014) — Co-founder of Scale AI and later Passes.
- Vitalik Buterin (2014) — Co-creator of Ethereum.
- Boyan Slat (2016) — Founder of The Ocean Cleanup.
I was led to investigate the Thiel program upon reading about Mach Industries, and up-and-coming asymmetric drone warfare success story. Its founder, Ethan Thornton, was raised near Boerne, Texas, in a family with military ties. He received a Thiel award 3 years ago when he left MIT at about age 19. Mach Industries now makes low-cost unmanned strike, counter-UAS, and related platforms. Its “Forge” flexible manufacturing model prioritizes rapid iteration, software-defined processes, and supply-chain control. It has raised nearly two billion dollars and focuses on solving bottlenecks like solid rocket motor availability....
....MUCH MORE
