Talk about Luckey.
Meet Palmer Luckey, a 21-year-old flip-flop-wearing college dropout who announced on Tuesday that he has agreed to sell his 2-year-old startup, Oculus VR, to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for $2 billion.
“Even in my wildest dreams, I never imagined we’d come so far so fast,” Luckey wrote on the company’s blog about the deal.
Now, at an age when most college kids are still years away from their first real jobs, Luckey is running a company that Zuckerberg hailed as a leader in the next “major computing platform” of virtual reality.
Oculus, which got its start on crowdfunding website Kickstarter in 2012, sells goggles that let folks step into video games rather than play them on a screen. The goggles, which are still in the development stage, can be purchased only on the company’s website, for $350.
The technology attracted Zuckerberg for its potential beyond games.
“Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game … just by putting on goggles in your home,” he said.
Luckey was attracted to technology from an early age, his friends and family said.
Luckey’s sister Ginger recalls her brother showing kids how to make a clock out of a potato at the park. “He was always doing things like that,” she said. “He was king of the nerds,” she added jokingly.
“He would always be here tinkering with cell phones,” added Sheila Mattox, who works at the Alamitos Bay Yacht Club, where Luckey used to take sailing lessons as a kid.
“He’d be tinkering all the time,” Mattox recalled with a chuckle. “We are very proud of him.”
Luckey, the eldest of four children, grew up in sunny Long Beach, Calif., in a beach-front home on a narrow peninsula wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Alamitos Bay. His dad, Donald, was a car salesman and his mom, Julie, was a stay-at-home mom who home-schooled her kids.
Luckey took college courses when he was still a teen, including some at the local community college but — like Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and many other tech billionaires — he never got a degree.
While Luckey didn’t reveal how much he would personally pocket from the deal with Facebook, as the company’s founder he’s sure to get millions. Facebook has agreed to fork over $400 million in cash and about $1.5 billion in stock to merge with Oculus.
Oculus executives didn’t return a request for comment on how the money would be distributed.
It’s a far cry from the trailer Luckey once called home. When he was 18 and working on Oculus, Luckey moved into a trailer parked in his parents’ driveway, where he lived for two years, his sister said.
“This is my brother. He lives in a trailer,” Ginger recalled telling friends visiting their house.
Despite his newfound fame and fortune, Luckey is still a regular 21-year-old. Girlfriend Nicole Edelmann just landed a job as an “attractions cast member” at Disneyland Resorts in Anaheim, Calif., according to her Facebook page.
And he recently donned flip-flops to give a presentation at DICE, a Las Vegas gaming conference.
“We’re pretty stoked,” Ginger said of her brother’s success.