During our first year, we operated virtually and squatted at MIT while trying to generate enough funds to pay ourselves a stipend.

During the first two years at Oculus, we experienced rapid changes and learning, managing to get our first development kit into customers' hands in just six months, which is not typical for hardware development.

I started working on wearables six and a half years ago because I wanted to create a more affordable smartwatch, as I didn't want to spend $400 on existing options.

One of the biggest mistakes we made at Oculus was moving too quickly on a shoestring budget, which put pressure on us to make progress before running out of money. Ironically, we also had effectively unlimited resources, but that actually slowed us down, halting our iteration speed on VR headsets for about three years.

It took three years before we had a product that was actually used to solve problems, and during that time, many team members were exhausted and close to quitting.

The trends in wearables are returning, with companies like Apple and Google entering the market, but we focus on creating a product that integrates seamlessly into users' lives.

We decided to create our own hardware device instead of licensing our technology, believing we could do it better ourselves. Building consumer hardware as a startup was considered totally insane in the early 2000s, with very few successful examples to follow.

We started the company in 2008 while I was still a student at Waterloo, and we didn't ship our first product until 2010, which was a long process.

We launched our first product, an alpha-grade smartwatch, and learned valuable lessons from customer feedback, including the need for a firmware upgrade to show the time.