so you've mentioned forums and I'm a big Forum sky like I still I remember you know BBA I wasn't like before whatever was before BBS that's not me but I've been on forums and I love forums and you talked about amen the Bitcoin talk forums I went and read a bunch of your early posts on the what was the name of the like odd retro no no no the the headset one that I had mtps 3D yeah exactly your old post there I went and like stocked them just to be like because I like to
see the origins oh my God it's fun like what are the like archaeologists for like the internet I like to go find the original [ __ ] and so um you know I saw you posting there and you're like hey I'm trying to build this thing I'm thinking about doing this you did a bunch of like kind of really cool crowdsource stuff I think you even like asked read it like you know should I buy that should we buy Vive or something like that you did a bunch of cool stuff on forums and I thought
about that and some of them like I when I learned poker I learned it through forums yep if you think about today like if who's the secret the 16 year old version of you today what forms do think they're hanging out in what's the thing because when you were doing this is 15 years ago like VR still early and you were early early same thing with Bitcoin you were early early and so what do you think are the interesting forums today that people are hanging out and that you think will play out over the next
decade or so and and also what are what are what are some of your favorite pockets of the web and and forums that you're hanging out in I mean much to my chagrin I like I love forums too I think they are more or less the Pinnacle of asynchronous communication like if you are doing collaborative product all of the incentives are correct like so so I like I ran a forum the mod retro forums it was a forum for people who modified vintage game consoles in particular with a focus on turning them into handheld self-contained
units so cutting apart Nintendo 64s and Super Nintendos and PlayStations and then replacing like the Power Electronics with modern Power Electronics running them off of the latest lithium battery technology although it was Nike had back when back when I started started you know working on Portables putting in LCD screens that were designed for portable DVD players and the like and building these self-contained units and uh it the forums are interesting because your your currency is is attention but you can only get attention by getting people to come in and you know respond and engage with
you and so there's a strong incentive to update people on what you're doing to to write really interesting things and to you know get people regularly coming back and engaging with your stuff I mean that's the dopamine high right it's other people care about what I'm doing today it's been so algorithm you know algorithmically driven that you don't have the same incentives in terms of long-term sustained engagement and uh you know collaborating with people there's a lot more incentive to do things on your own do one big push in a form that will cause ordinary
people who are not necessarily technically competent to you know watch it for at least three minutes so that it's seen as you watch it long enough and I like I think the pockets which is what you asked like there's great pockets on YouTube there's great pockets on Reddit there's actually a lot of private Facebook groups so like one I like I'm a member of a of a Night Vision Group where people build their own night vision night vision goggles and it's got a couple thousand people but it's it's a private group and very very much
not virally driven uh you know it's not like the tick tock tick tock techno heads it's not like the YouTube techno heads but man I I really miss forums you know mod retro we had a core group of a few thousand active members that were that were doing stuff in the Heyday and we were doing a few a few million page views a month uh and you would you never see those ratios these days you know of of of engagers to to to Watchers one thing that um that uh I thought was actually really interesting
I don't know wait I've interrupt I have to interrupt one last thing I forgot um actually a huge fraction of the people that I hired for Oculus in the early days were volunteer moderators on The Mod retro forums like you people always you know they hire their Network right they hire the people that they know that they can trust and that they know are competent and that was my network when I was a teenager it was other it was other loser gamer teenagers on the internet and so we like that like we some of our
lead electrical people our lead Hardware people our lead mechatronics people uh we're all people who had been moderators on mod retro in fact the first person I hired for Oculus was was one of the other moderators and I I actually uh sent him a message said hey what are you doing uh what are you doing what are you doing this fall and he said oh I'm pla I'm starting starting College I said no you're not you're gonna come work for me and I literally I like I told him that on a Friday and I literally
drove out in my minivan to pick him up from his mom's house on Monday and he had all his stuff in like four boxes and I picked him up we got in my van and we drove to The Condemned motel that I was living in I mean it was it was it was wild I mean that and that that was that was my network so it's always funny when people are like oh you know your network is your net worth you know look yeah we're you got all the scanned for kids you got the ivy
kids and we were just a bunch of Internet losers and we did better than any of them you're like um I'm hiring hmd alumni they're like oh is that Harvard Medical no no no head mounted display Forum alumni it was actually the guy that I was hiring uh is his name is Chris Dicus and he had never built a head mounted display but he was he was very accomplished on these horribleizing scene consoles and I knew he was very competent I knew exactly like you you talk about a job interview where you meet someone for
you know whatever they're you know maybe an hour or something but I had been seeing this guy's work published on the Forum over the course of years and so I knew he had I knew he had skills and I knew he had work that's exactly we me and Sean have hired so many people on Twitter and I tell people all the time like I want to get a job I'm like man if you just like you need to post your thoughts so people understand your texture and your tastes and your character like that is significantly
better doing it there and then just dming someone and then they're just gonna click their profile oh this person is tweeting all this like interesting Insight that aligns exactly well and that's harder to fake too if you if you have somebody who has a history of building things for themselves of doing things because they want to not because they're getting paid to that you can't fake that the way that you can fake an interview it's easy like oh I'm passionate about X Y and Z well show me your years of work that you've done for
no money showing that you really are and I mean we still hire a lot of people like that at Andrew like uh we we we have benefits that are intended to uh lure people like that like one of our benefits we have is that we will buy anyone in the company any tool they want for their personal projects as well as work projects and that's the type of thing where people who don't have personal projects who just you know they show up to their to their wage machine and they clock in and they clock out
they're not attracted by that but the types of people who want to create for the sake of creation those to those people that's a it's a golden ticket on that note we did the same thing my co-founder he's a lot like you like 15 at age 15 started working at a.com during the.com boom it was like you know I had a job and it was like what the hell is going on and always was just doing his own thing and so he used to buy um like 3D printers and Robotics and we're building thing like
social apps it's like we didn't need any of this stuff and I was like what are you doing like why are we doing this he's like because hey I want it like I want to come to a space and like when I'm done with work I'm just gonna go downstairs to their lab and I'm gonna build like a drone or I'm gonna like take this Raspberry Pi and like shove it over here and figure something else out and he's like also that's also how we'll get great people like I want to work with other hackers
like that who like to Tinker on this stuff and he's like he's like he's like he had had an exit so he's like you know doing very well his last company went public and so he was like you know when I was like 16 18 21 like I just couldn't afford the like the thousand dollar thing that you would need to have he's like I just got lucky that the dude down the street would let me come over and play with his thing and that's like that was like a a life changer of a moment
he's like so I just want to do that for people like I just make it free anybody can come in and anybody can use this stuff and he was totally right even though like our CFO was like hey we can't justify this he's like don't worry I'll pay for it all out of pocket and it was like and I know and I know that struggle you know what like and it doesn't even have to be a thousand dollars I mean I remember there were times where the thing I needed it would cost like fifty dollars
and it was just like it was it was inconceivable that I could afford it I mean like honestly Oculus owes more to the iPhone than anything else I mean like if the iPhone wouldn't have existed there wouldn't have been broken iPhones for me to buy unlock repair and sell on eBay like because I made tens of thousands of dollars as a teenager on that on that side hustle like if if that had not happened then Oculus probably wouldn't exist today that's amazing I want to um ask you a bit about Andrew but before before
