Anduril Industries

Founded Oculus VR in 2012 and designed the Oculus Rift, widely credited with reviving the consumer virtual reality industry. He sold Oculus to Meta Platforms for ~$2 billion in 2014 and departed in 2017. That same year he co-founded Anduril Industries with former Palantir colleagues to apply Silicon Valley product-development velocity to autonomous defense systems. His hardware background and willingness to engage the Pentagon directly distinguishes Anduril's approach from traditional defense primes.

Earned a B.S. in Operations Research from Cornell University, where he co-led the university's DARPA Urban Challenge autonomous vehicle team alongside future Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm. He joined Palantir directly from Cornell and spent nearly a decade there, rising to Director of Engineering and building the Foundry product now deployed across government and enterprise. He has served as Anduril's CEO from day one, overseeing growth to a $31 billion valuation and major DoD platform contracts including the Integrated Visual Augmentation System.

Studied Arabic and Security Studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service after being motivated by the 9/11 attacks. He began his career as a computational linguist serving the U.S. Intelligence Community, then joined Palantir as an early employee leading intelligence and defense growth and international expansion. In 2014 he became a Partner at Founders Fund focused on defense and government technology. He co-founded Anduril in 2017 and serves as Executive Chairman while continuing to invest at Founders Fund.

Holds B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in Mechanical/Aerospace and Systems Engineering from Cornell, where he co-founded the university's DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge autonomous vehicle team with Brian Schimpf. Before Anduril he was a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton advising the Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Navy, then spent nearly a decade at Palantir deploying the platform in Iraq and Afghanistan and running key customer relationships. He was also a Principal at Mithril Capital Management before co-founding Anduril.

Holds a B.A. in Electrical Engineering from Rice University and an M.B.A. from USC. He worked on augmented reality headset technology at Epson before joining Oculus VR as one of its first employees, leading hardware development and developer relations for the Rift. He later enlisted in the U.S. Army National Guard as a paratrooper in the 1-143rd Infantry Battalion (Airborne) before co-founding Anduril in 2017, where his product and hardware experience bridges Silicon Valley consumer technology and fielded defense systems.