David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…So, what would have happened otherwise? We’re kind of in this section right now but if Oculus doesn’t land at Facebook, what happens to it? Well, that's a really good question. Because they’d raised a lot of money really quickly but it was going to take a lot more money to get to where we are now and clearly, I think if Facebook doesn’t acquire Oculus, there’s a chance that maybe Valve continues to partner with Oculus and doesn’t go off on its own. However, given that they did and if they had and Oculus was still a lone independent, they would have had to do something because we saw with the execution that Valve had, when you bring the resources and the huge amounts of money that a corporation like them can to building new technology like that, they were just going to blow Oculus out of the water. Oculus probably only was able to hang out because they had Facebook’s resources. So I think it’s hard to imagine Oculus remaining an independent company, a fully independent company without needing to. I guess as we’ve talked about with both Snapchat and Uber and Didi, it is possible to raise huge sums of money these days. But I think it’s not just about the money too. It’s about being able to get the right OEM partnerships. Think about how many years and how much effort Apple has invested in creating their supply chain. The idea that a startup would be able to do that within a competitive landscape is hard to imagine these days. Actually, here’s a great quote from Palmer Luckey. He said, “I’d say we are 5 years ahead of where we would have been without the acquisition, pointing to the resources needed to improve the hardware technology as well as encourage software developers to build games and videos to watch on it. There’s a strong argument to be made. We would never have gotten there in 5 or even 10 years.” There’s a great point that the Facebook brand boosted the network effect that developers are making stuff for it too.…

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