We often ask ourselves if we should have been more aware of the signs indicating North Vault's execution issues during our investment.

After launching our first consumer product, we realized we had compromised on key design elements, which ultimately led to its poor performance in the market.

We realized that venture capital is a mediocre product for entrepreneurs, offering little more than money and occasional advice, which diminishes quickly over time.

Initially, we thought we were on the path to success, but I later realized that we were not converting users into paying customers because we were too focused on fundraising and PR instead of creating a product that people actually needed.

After getting into Y Combinator, we made early-stage mistakes by hiring without proper culture fit vetting and dreaming too big without focusing on execution.

We have bought businesses that initially seemed good but turned out poorly; we hold onto mediocre ones unless they present unsolvable problems.

During the disillusionment phase, we struggled to attract investment due to recent failures of other hardware companies, which made investors hesitant.

One of the biggest mistakes I made was relying too much on venture capitalists' advice instead of trusting my own vision.

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.