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- Palmer Luckey says relying on Silicon Valley talent left him with "mercenary-minded" hires.The Oculus founder now recruits nationwide, especially veterans, to build a mission-driven team.His $30 billion defense startup Anduril pitches "work that matters" over Silicon Valley perks.
Palmer Luckey says he learned the hard way that relying on Silicon Valley talent can be a trap.
The founder of Oculus VR and Anduril Industries recalled how, after Facebook (now Meta) acquired Oculus in 2014, his other company's hiring funnel narrowed almost exclusively to Bay Area engineers.
Many, he said, were "very mercenary-minded" and more interested in résumé building than mission.
"After moving to the Bay Area, I found that I could only hire people who already were in the Bay Area," Luckey said in an interview with Lulu Cheng Meservey on her YouTube channel on Monday.
"We ended up with this pretty narrow funnel of often very mercenary-minded, very, very, tech-in crowd thinker type people."
That experience shaped how he built his defense-technology startup, Anduril. Instead of drawing only from San Francisco, Luckey deliberately recruited nationwide, especially armed forces veterans.
"Military vets do not want to live in San Francisco either," he said. "They don't want to pay $2 million to live in a crapshack."
The strategy also helped shape Anduril's culture. In 2019, two years after its foundation, Bloomberg labeled the company "tech's most controversial startup."
He said that drove off "the careerists, the lily pad jumpers, the mercenaries" who weren't interested in working somewhere that might hurt their ambitions.
By casting a wider net, Luckey said he believes he built a workforce motivated by impact rather than perks.
As he put it: "We have work that matters. We have work that's critical. You'll get to work on lots of cool things with lots of cool people. And you'll get to make a difference."
From VR pioneer to defense-tech mogul
Luckey, 33, founded Oculus VR at 19 in 2012 and sold it to Facebook in 2014 for about $2 billion. Two years later, he was fired after backlash surrounding his political donations to a pro-Donald Trump group, which ran a billboard showing Hillary Clinton and the text "Too Big To Jail."
In 2017, he co-founded Anduril, which is now valued at around $30.5 billion and supplies the US and its allies with drones, AI software, and battlefield technology.
Anduril has become one of the most closely watched defense startups in the US, winning billion-dollar Pentagon contracts and expanding overseas.
For Luckey, building a workforce beyond Silicon Valley isn't just about culture — it's a strategy he believes is key to scaling a company that, as he put it in a February blogpost, is working "to solve our nation's most important problems."
