Palmer Luckey sold Oculus VR to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, just two years after launching the company from his garage.
After leaving Facebook, Luckey shifted from consumer tech to the defense world, founding Anduril Industries to build AI-powered surveillance towers, autonomous drones, and software platforms for the U.S. and allied militaries. In parallel, he launched ModRetro, a niche hardware venture focused on reimagining classic game consoles with modern engineering rather than nostalgia alone.
Today, Luckey straddles three unusual legacies at once: a VR company that helped redefine immersive computing, a defense contractor reshaping how Western militaries buy and deploy technology, and a retro-hardware lab rooted in the same enthusiast culture that first drew him into building machines.
Jakub Pachocki, born in Gdańsk, Poland, won the Google Code Jam world championship in 2012 before going on to become OpenAI’s Chief Scientist.
Sam Altman has called him “easily one of the greatest minds of our generation.”
Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room in 2004 as a simple directory for college students. He quickly expanded it beyond campus, dropped out to build the company full-time, and turned a student side-project into the world’s largest social network.
Over two decades, Zuckerberg has steered the company through the rise of News Feed, mobile, Instagram, and WhatsApp. More recently, he rebranded Facebook as Meta and shifted focus toward AI, betting on long-term platforms beyond the phone screen.
Today, the product he started at 19 remains one of the most used social apps on earth — Meta reports over 3.5 billion people use at least one of its apps every day across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads, and others.
The top universities for producing startup founders.
Ranked by the number of undergraduate alumni who have raised venture capital in the last decade.
Source: PitchBook
Founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, ElevenLabs has since grown from a $2 million pre-seed to an $11 billion valuation.
This post breaks down the pre-seed deck that ElevenLabs used to raise $2 million in January 2023 - the round that launched the beta platform and set everything in motion.
In 2007, Marc Andreessen popularized the term “product-market fit” in a blog post titled “The Only Thing That Matters” - defining it as “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” He argued it was the single most important factor in a startup’s success or failure.
This post looks at how long it took 28 of the world’s most recognised companies to get there. From immediate fit to a decade in the making.
Source: Lenny’s Newsletter
