Camper to Billionaire Journey

Palmer Luckey shares his journey from living in a camper and making minimum wage to selling Oculus to Facebook.

"When I started Oculus using my own money, I was working a minimum wage job and living in a 19-foot camper trailer. I was 19 years old. I had almost no money, literally had a few hundred dollars in my bank account because I spent all the money I made putting myself through school and working on virtual reality technology.

I had a minimum wage job and was fixing computers on the side. For a while, I'd been buying broken iPhones, fixing them, unlocking them, and selling those for spare cash. I burned a lot of money on my hobby.

When we started Oculus, we didn't pay ourselves very much. We decided nobody in the company was going to make over $100,000 - we called it the 100K club. We were paying the CEO $100,000, I was getting paid $100,000, and to me that actually felt incredible. I was like 'wow, $100,000, this is absolutely crazy, I can afford anything.'

Then just a few years later, we sold to Facebook. The deal was in the healthy hundreds of millions of dollars, with a five-year vesting schedule because I was a key guy. We also had an earn-out that was hundreds of millions of dollars if we hit certain targets, which we achieved in less than two years instead of the allocated four years."