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.

We decided to optimize for quickly establishing the virtual reality ecosystem to understand what works and what doesn't in VR, which required us to take risks and build products rapidly.

Leaving Apple to join Oculus was a significant leap, as Apple was rapidly growing while Oculus was a scrappy startup focused on building virtual reality technology.

We spent two years without salaries, focusing on our first headset and exploring the potential of wearable computing, which is now a hot topic in tech.

When we launched on Kickstarter, we were just five people, none of whom had experience in consumer electronics, so we spent six months in Asia developing the first prototypes of Pebble.

We manufactured our first 100 units by hand, which allowed us to quickly iterate and fix problems as they arose during production.

Brex pivoted from a VR hardware headset idea to a credit card for startups, achieving product-market fit quickly and raising hundreds of millions in just two years.

In our second venture, Carrot 6, we improved the time from our first line of code to our first paying customer from infinity to six months, but realized our growth pace wasn't sufficient for a large, impactful company.

In our first year, we faced significant challenges, including a tough go-to-market transition and hiring the wrong team for our stage of growth.