Facebook’s Leaders: The People Responsible For VR And AR Strategy

We’ve been following the development of VR headsets at Facebook since its acquisition of Oculus VR in 2014.That’s when Facebook, under the direction of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, bought the two-year-old Oculus VR startup. In the process, they hired Oculus employees John Carmack, Nate Mitchell, Michael Antonov, Brendan Iribe, Palmer Luckey, and a long list of engineers and researchers working on the Oculus Rift PC-powered VR headset, as well as the Gear VR phone-powered system. They also made significant new hires like Michael Abrash, formerly of Valve.Since then, hundreds upon hundreds of people joined the VR and AR teams at Facebook. Facebook itself ballooned to some 34,000 employees at the end of 2018, up from 23,000 a year earlier. In the build up, though, Oculus founders like Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe left Facebook as a layer of Zuckerberg-approved management was installed to lead the VR/AR efforts. We’re investing a lot in this because, frankly, we haven’t to date been a hardware company or an operating system company. We think that we need to build up a lot of different muscles in order to be competitive and be able to succeed in that space and to be able to shape that space.One of my great regrets in how we’ve run the company so far is I feel like we didn’t get to shape the way that mobile platforms developed as much as would be good.