20VC: Anduril Founder, Palmer Luckey: "I Am Here To Build a $50Bn Company", How Palmer Evaluates His Relationship To Money Pre & Post Oculus' $2.3Bn Exit & Why The US DOD Needs To Be More Like China in It's Approach

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The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2020

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Palmer Luckey is the Founder @ Anduril Industries, founded on the premise of radically transforming the defence capabilities of the United States and its allies by fusing artificial intelligence with the latest hardware advancements. To date, Palmer has raised over $385M with Anduril from Founders Fund, a16z, Elad Gil, Spark Capital, Lux Capital, General Catalyst and 8VC to name a few. Prior to changing the world of defence, Palmer founded Oculus VR where he designed the Oculus Rift. Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook for $2.3Bn in 2014.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Palmer made his way into the world of startups, made his way from trailer to selling Oculus for $2.3Bn to changing the defence industry with Anduril today?

2.) How does Palmer evaluate his own relationship to money? How has that changed since his $2.3Bn Oculus exit? How does Palmer assess his relationship to risk? How does Palmer approach the correlations between money, risk and happiness?

3.) What were some of Palmer's biggest takeaways from his time scaling Oculus? How have they informed his mindset with Anduril? What worked? What did not work? How has Palmer changed as a leader? How does Palmer approach personal development? How does he optimise for it?

4.) Palmer scaled Oculus to 1,400 people in 1 year, where do organisations break with scale? Why does Palmer believe, "you never want to play yourself"? Where does he feel his biggest weakness is as a scaling leader? How does Palmer approach hiring at scale yet maintaining culture?

5.) From a defence standpoint, why does Palmer feel the US needs to be more like the Chinese? Why is the DoD so poor at investing in innovation? What does it take to sell into the DoD really effectively? Why have the only 2 successful defence companies been founded by billionaires?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Palmer’s Fave Book: The Three-Body Problem

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the 20-minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so excited for this week of episodes.
0:04.3	The shows are actually connected.
0:05.8	Today, we're featuring a founder that I've wanted to have on the show for a long, long time.
0:09.5	I also think these are probably two of the best shows we've done.
0:11.8	Truly, they are so, so good as guests.
0:13.7	And so to the show today, and I'm thrilled to welcome Palmer Lucky, founder andyril Industries, founded on the premise of radically transforming the defense capabilities
0:21.7	of the United States and its allies by fusing artificial intelligence with the latest hardware
0:26.8	advancements. To date, Palmer's raised over $385 million with Anderil from the lights of founders
0:32.2	fund, Andresen, Elad Gill, Spark, Lux, General Cadill, and 8VC, to name a few.
0:38.8	And prior to changing the world of defense, Palmer founded Oculus VR, where he designed the
0:43.2	Oculus Rift.
0:44.2	Oculus VR was ultimately acquired by Facebook for $2.3 billion in 2014, and today's schedule
0:50.5	was such a team effort, so I want to say huge thank you to Joe Lonsdale, Elad Gill, Trey Stevens, Brian Singerman, John Luttig and Ben Shelf for some amazing questions
0:59.5	suggestions today. I really do so appreciate that. But before we move into the show today,
1:03.4	I want to take a moment to mention HelloSign, a great example of a company that found success
1:07.6	in building a product focused on user experience. HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request
1:15.7	legally valid digital signatures and agreements.
1:18.2	They raised a total of $16 million in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an
1:22.7	impressive $230 million.
1:24.9	Check out HelloSign.com forward slash 20VC to join the thousands of companies and
1:29.8	founders who value fast, secure and simple e-signatures. And I do have to mention another incredible
1:35.6	product-centric business, Digis. Digits have spent the last two years building this incredibly
	...

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