Palmer Luckey

"I started working on VR in my parents' garage because I believed it was the future. Everyone thought I was crazy. Turns out they were right about me being crazy, but wrong about VR."

"The best people want to work on hard problems that matter. Defense is full of hard problems that matter."

"Everyone in tech talks about changing the world, but most of them are building advertising companies. We're building things that actually protect people."

"The best way to predict the future is to make it. But you have to actually make things, not just predict them."

"The defense industry has been doing the same thing for decades. They're not trying to build better products; they're trying to build products that satisfy procurement requirements."

"The government is not going to innovate. It's never going to be the source of cutting-edge technology. That has to come from the private sector."

"If you want to change an industry, you can't just be incrementally better. You have to be fundamentally different."

"Silicon Valley has a way of thinking that if you're working on defense, you're working on something evil. I think that's fundamentally wrong."

"The United States needs to maintain technological superiority. That's not optional if you want to keep the peace."

"People underestimate how much of success is just being willing to work on something that other people think is impossible or stupid."

"I'd rather try to do something great and fail than do something mediocre and succeed."

"The traditional defense contractors have no incentive to move fast or build better products. Their incentive is to keep programs going as long as possible."

"Hardware is hard. That's why most people avoid it. But that's also why there's so much opportunity."

"You can't just build technology and hope someone figures out how to use it. You have to build complete solutions."

"Move fast and build things. Not just break things - actually build things that work."