What Is Mod Retro?
Palmer Luckey says Mod Retro is an online community he started when he was 14 or 15. It was an internet forum for people who modified vintage game consoles and computers, built handheld units, and improved their performance. A few thousand members were active, with volunteer moderators and administrators and him at the top. Running it taught him how to build an organization, market it, and get people to believe in the work.
The problems were the ones that show up when you run a company. Two people can both be brilliant and very good at what they do, and still hate each other and disagree. He had to mediate the conflict or separate them so both could contribute value, without them hating him, losing faith in the broader project, or killing each other. Sometimes he reconciled them. Sometimes he put one person in one place and the other somewhere else, and made sure they did not realize he was doing it. Managing what he calls the two assholes problem is not, on its own, the key to a successful business, and it gets harder once it is a three-body problem. The same pattern and a hundred things like it were what he learned at Mod Retro.
He carried the lessons into starting Oculus and into his other companies. He also had a job starting when he was 14, which taught him how the real world works, and he believes kids should get a job.
