As Luckey cast about for advice, a forum acquaintance introduced him to Brendan Iribe, (NW: So reach out to people! Don't just stay inside your own head.) a gaming entrepreneur who, at 32, was a relative veteran. Iribe had trouble tracking Luckey down—at the time Luckey was worried about government surveillance and he refused to use a cell phone—but they eventually connected and arranged for a dinner at STK, a steak house in Westwood. Luckey showed up late, wearing sandals and an Atari T-shirt, and began talking at a full sprint. “O.K.,” Iribe recalls thinking, “this is going to be fun.”
Iribe and three of his friends who had worked with him at two video-game software companies—Nate Mitchell, Michael Antonov, and Andrew Reisse (who died a year later in a hit-and-run accident)—offered to help. Iribe told Luckey he would lend Oculus a few hundred thousand dollars and help him create a promotional video for a Kickstarter campaign. As an act of good faith he wrote a $5,000 check, no strings attached.