Palmer Luckey reflects on lessons from founding Oculus and Anduril, arguing founders must "make themselves obsolete" by hiring people who are better at individual tasks than they are. He recounts being the de facto best optical engineer at Oculus due to poor hiring, labels that dependence a failure, and contrasts that with Anduril where he set the expectation he should be replaceable. He advises founders to prioritize hiring and delegation, accept non-technical managerial duties, and avoid starting a company solely to keep doing technical work they enjoy.
Chapters
The one other thing that has been interesting for Anduril compared to Oculus is that I learned something very early on that we've kind of applied across our whole company. When I started Oculus, I thought I was really good at everything, and I was. But I was only the best at a lot of things in our company because I had been negligent to my hiring process. So for a while, I was the best optical engineer in the company by far. But I realized at some point that was not something to be proud of. That was a failure. I'd failed my company. I'd failed my investors by making myself a critical dependency for any of our products. And the reality is, I'm actually not a very good optical engineer. I was just the best in Oculus. And so whether it's doing electrical layout or mechanical design or optical engineering, or doing the financials, doing hr, doing any of this stuff, you have to make your goal, this idea that you're going to make yourself obsolete, even at the things you like doing. And everyone wants to make themselves obsolete, the things they hate doing. People love to hire the guy who's gonna help them manage their schedule. They love to hire the person who is going to handle talking to the press. People love that. But nobody likes to hire the guy who's going to do the thing that you like doing. And that was really tough for me at Oculus because I had to give up doing. I realized that I was basically playing house. I was sitting around doing things that way better people could be doing faster, more effectively. And that helps me. That helps my investors, helps my customers, it helps my employees. And so that was really tough for me at Oculus to let go of those things. At Anduril, I came in from the beginning, I said, guess what, guys? I am useless. You all need to be way better than me or we're going to be screwed. And I think that that's actually been a way healthier mindset. And I give my managers the same mindset. I say, hey, your job is not to do things. It is to get them done in the best way possible. If that means you do it, then you need to do it. You don't get to pass the buck if that means that somebody else needs to get hired to do it. That's what you need to do. And even if you like doing it, this often ends up with a situation where I started a tech company because I love technology, and I don't get to work on technology anymore. I get to work on bullshit. But that's actually exactly where you should be when you start one of these companies. I tell young people this all the time, I love programming, so I want to start a software company. So you. No, you don't. Go work for somebody else. If you like programming, you really love programming, go work for someone else who will pay you to be a programmer. Don't go and become this guy who's actually going to be making brutal hiring and firing decisions around people's performance. And you're going to be dealing with government compliance offices, and you're going to be dealing with marketing and talking the rest. None of that has anything to do with programming.
