$2 billion in 2 years? At 21? Is he just Luckey?

Actually, yes: Palmer Luckey. Luckey just sold his 18-month-old company, Oculus VR, to Facebook for $2 billion.

If you’re busy growing a business (for longer than 18 months, and you’re older than 21 years old) without $2 billion to show for it – you might ask what’s going on here…

Is the Luck in Luckey’s name more reality than virtual reality? Here’s my take on it: The rapid success Luckey has had IS down to Luck – but the kind of luck we can create.

I’ve always seen Luck as the product of four things, and here’s the journey Luckey had through all four:

L.U.C.K = Location, Understanding, Connection & Knowledge
LOCATION

Location is about being at the right place at the right time – where you try and solve a need that you have. Luckey’s need was finding a good pair of virtual reality goggles. He remembers when he was 16, in 2009,

“My goal actually wasn’t to make something. It was actually just to buy something – I assumed there must be something out there that was really good that I could use for gaming.”

Luckey took odd jobs to buy all the virtual reality goggles he could find:

“I started to collect them and bought a lot of them from government auctions and industry equipment liquidation sites and all kind of fun places. I took them apart, looked at how they worked, tried to learn what do they do
right, what do they do wrong… and over time it became clear that the only way to make something that was really good would be to throw out the design book that everyone else had used and start from scratch.”

Like a lucky footballer knowing that luck starts when you get on the football pitch, Luckey decided to get on the pitch and play the game…

UNDERSTANDING

It’s one thing to get on the pitch. Another to kick the ball. It takes understanding to know where the flow is and where to kick it. Luckey had heard of Kickstarter and, at 19 years old decided to use crowdfunding to test his idea.

As he recalls, “My plan was to do a Kickstarter for about 100 of these things… I figured it would be a really cool thing to have a couple of VR nerds toying around with.” He posted a video and fundraising campaign for a prototype on Kickstarter in August 2012 to raise $250,000. By September, he had raised $2,437,429…

It was time to get serious, quit journalism college, and start a company…

CONNECTIONS

You can get on the pitch and kick the ball, but you can’t win a game until you have a team to kick with. Luckey regularly posted in online forums with other Virtual Reality enthusiasts. It’s where he collected his team:

“I actually started the forum called ModRetro. It’s an electronics enthusiast community that focuses on modifying vintage game consoles. I started that site when I was 15. ModRetro was actually founded by myself and one of the people that currently works as an engineer at Oculus. So we’ve stuck together.”

Luckey got a big name supporter in a similar way. Game Developer, John Carmack (who’s behind games like Quake and Doom) met Luckey through these forums. As Luckey remembers,

“He started posting because of his own virtual reality project… But he ended up seeing my head-mounted display work and asked me, ‘Hey – is there any chance I could buy one?’ He’s John Carmack! I just gave him one instead – you can’t turn him down.”

That led to Carmack demoing Luckey’s headset with a version of Doom 3 at the big E3 Electronics show in 2012. From there, interest took off and Luckey attracted a team and further funding. Today Carmack is CTO of Oculus VR.

KNOWLEDGE

Being on the pitch, kicking the ball and having the team to win with still doesn’t mean you’re going to win – Especially not at the $2 billion level. But when you build your knowledge and know how to play and the stakes you are playing for, things can rapidly multiply.

With the exponential growth in data flow online, it’s only a matter of time before the entire Internet becomes an immersive, intelligent, virtual 3D experience. The visionary companies with the deep pockets, like Google and Facebook, are already positioning for this. Luckey’s early start with virtual reality, with rave reviews of his prototype at recent shows, has made him an attractive buy.

Just 18 months after his Kickstarter campaign and before a working retail version of his VR goggles has even been launched, Mark Zuckerberg this week bought his company for $2 billion.

How can you grow your L.U.C.K. today, by investing more of your own time in growing your location, understanding, connections and knowledge?

That was Luckey’s success. He didn’t have any head start over you or me. As he says, “My dad was a car salesman, my mum was a stay-at-home mum. I was home-schooled for a long time. I’m a pretty regular Joe.”

He even sees his spectacular journey as being equally unspectacular:

“There’s no Facebook-style story… No tales of parties and crazy stuff going on that was really a highlight. It was just kind of a slow plod towards making this thing a reality.”

And that’s how success becomes a reality.

Or, in his case, a virtual reality.

Fast Forward your Business 2014 slides

I just wanted to say how grateful i am  to each and every one of you who came for our Australia FFyB event and making the tour such a success!

The feedback has been amazing!

We love to hear such inspirational stories from people that are already out there in the Business world making great things happen!  Here are the slides from the FFyB Australia tour.

If you were unable to join us in March, I invite you to join me and leading changemakers for one day where you will learn the very latest of what to do and how to do it to transform your business in 2014. I guarantee this will be the most important, helpful and practical event for you to grow your business this year.

Below are the dates for our Fast Forward your Business Global tour. My next FFyB Tour is in Japan & Taiwan in June followed by US in August and UK in September.

This is the one event to catch up with the very latest strategies and systems to fast forward your business. Over 8,000 entrepreneurs have attended the Fast Forward annual tour.

In 2014, everything in business will get an upgrade. This is the event where you get to upgrade YOU.

No matter how talented or hard working you are, there will be people this year (who are not as talented, experienced or even as hard working as you) who will get 10 times your results. How? By learning and using cutting edge
strategies to keep up with the times.

A Special Invitation to join me in Bali

My new book “The Millionaire Master Plan” has its USA launch this July…

So I’m running a one-off 4-day behind-the-scenes event in Bali to share what I’m doing and how I’m doing it – my step-by-step strategy on building a global community and a bestselling brand.

Here’s the details: http://www.millionairemasterplan.com/launch/

I’m calling it the “Millionaire Master Plan Academy”, and I can only run it once, as we are in the midst of launching our marketing campaign for the book – so you will be getting an insider’s view of what I’m doing as we’re
doing it. That includes:

5 simple things:

1. How I secured an agent, a team, and a six figure advance from a New York Publisher in a tough market, and the steps you can take to set up your own book for success.

2. The steps we used to develop a $10 million launch plan, and how you can create the perfect launch plan for your message that adds more money with less stress.

3. How we have attracted strategic partners to reach 20 million people on the launch of the book, and why we are building a community (not a list) to support our message.

4. The things we are doing (and more importantly, NOT doing) in our marketing and social media strategies for maximum success, and how you can build your brand without wasting your time.

5. How to use my philosophy of flow to follow your own path of least resistance.

I’ve got some amazing tools to share with you, including our new Millionaire Master Plan test and 64 Wealth Vector cards, so you can take back your learning to your team.

If you’re looking to work smarter and grow faster in 2014, join me and our launch team for 4 days this May:

What: Millionaire Master Plan Academy

Where: Our Vision Villas Entrepreneur Resort, Bali