One of Orange County’s most promising technology companies has moved to Silicon Valley.
Virtual reality headset maker Oculus VR Inc.—a startup that was founded in Irvine and based there when the company was acquired by Facebook Inc. last year for $2 billion—has shifted its key executives and engineering teams to its owner’s hometown of Menlo Park.
Oculus has been steadily making hires there since its sale to Facebook closed in July. It now has 250 workers overall, with most hired in recent months.
The shift to Northern California includes the company’s 22-year-old cofounder and visionary, Palmer Luckey, and Chief Executive Brendan Iribe. Both have been instrumental in transforming a cool concept steeped in science fiction into a burgeoning new platform for game developers, cinematographers, marketers, educators and other technologists.
The move comes on the heels of Oculus’ meteoric rise from its $2.4 million Kickstarter campaign in August 2012 to two venture capital funding rounds totaling $91 million to its sale, which capped one of the most dramatic technology stories in Orange County history.
Talent, Resources, Infrastructure
The allure of a deep pool of talent and the opportunity take advantage of Facebook’s enormous resources and infrastructure in Silicon Valley were the ultimate factors, according to Iribe.
“We did find it a pretty big challenge to recruit hardware engineers in Irvine,” Iribe said at a private meeting this month following a demo of the company’s latest prototype at the International CES convention in Las Vegas.
Oculus will keep its local office on MacArthur Boulevard, but Iribe declined to discuss the number of employees who will be there. It will primarily be staffed with a “small team” of software specialists from OC’s ripe talent pool in the segment that dates back to the region’s legacy in aerospace, gaming and business software fostered by the likes of Blizzard Entertainment Inc. in Irvine and Quest Software Inc., which was acquired in 2012 by Dell Inc. for $2.8 billion.
“We are committed to having offices in Orange County—a lot of developers are still there,” said Iribe, who has a home in Laguna Beach.
The company also operates a small office in Dallas and a larger outpost in Seattle, which came with its acquisition of Carbon Design Group last year.
Carbon, a product design and engineering firm that developed the Xbox 360 controller and other PC, console and medical devices, is handling final design of the consumer virtual reality headset model slated for release later this year and that will cost $300 to $400.
Oculus has sold more than 150,000 units of its DK1 and DK2 prototype headsets.
Some CES attendees waited in line more than an hour on the showroom floor for a sneak peak of the latest improvements to the company’s prototype Crescent Bay headset. Participants were treated to a roughly six-minute demo that took them inside a computerized world of flying vehicles; a dueling battle between mechanical robots and a rubber duck; and hundreds of feet above a bustling futuristic city that prompted several knee-buckling moments.
The finale pitted the viewer inside a battle scene between law enforcement and enemy robots that incorporated vivid 3-D effects and sounds in the mold of the breakthrough “Matrix” movies.
Facebook’s New Digs
Facebook is set to move into a new 435,000-square-foot headquarters that’s expected to house some 10,000 employees when it opens later this year, with outdoor cafes, barbecue pits and work benches among the perks.
Iribe said Oculus will continue to increase it presence at the 1-million-square-foot complex Facebook currently occupies at 1601 Willow Road, just down the road from the new headquarters—the two locations will be connected by tunnels.
“We’re going to stay at the older campus, and now we’re going to have a lot more space there,” Iribe said. “It gives us a really easy area to scale and grow the company.”
Iribe told the Business Journal that he and Luckey have eyed a move to Silicon Valley since the company’s early days.
“It was the right time for us,” he said. “Orange County is an awesome place to start a company. Silicon Valley is an awesome place to scale a company.”
