The founders of Anduril and Helsing did not come from defense primes or military service; they both came from modding forums, virtual reality experiments, and an animation lab. Today, we are going to dive into the stories of Palmer Luckey and Torsten Reil, the founders of Anduril and Helsing, who both built the most valuable defense startups in both the United States and Europe.  

The Homeschooled Kid

Palmer Luckey grew up in Long Beach, California, homeschooled by his mother. His bedroom was a laboratory where he built railguns, Tesla coils, and lasers. He saved money fixing broken iPhones and scrubbing boat decks to fund his early obsession, collecting every discontinued virtual reality headset he could find. He was buying antique virtual reality headsets that previously cost $100,000 for pennies on eBay or at government auctions.

When he was seventeen, he cold-emailed Mark Bolas at USC's Mixed Reality Lab, asking for an unpaid internship. A year later, Luckey had built a prototype unlike anything the industry had seen, a headset with a 270-degree stereoscopic field of view, sub-20-millisecond latency that eliminated motion sickness, and a price point achievable with off-the-shelf smartphone components.

In April of 2012, John Carmack, the creator of Doom and Quake, heard about the new headset and emailed Luckey for a prototype, which Luckey immediately sent to Carmack. That email was his breakout moment, Carmack was so impressed that he demoed the prototype at E3 and called it "probably the best VR demo the world has ever seen".

Sony, right after the E3 demo, offered Luckey $70,000 a year to develop it in their R&D lab. He was sleeping in the garage at his parents’ house, surviving on frozen burritos, but decided to turn down their offer. Instead, he launched a Kickstarter to further develop his headset, and he raised $2.4 million from nearly 10,000 backers in just a few days.

In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg personally flew out to meet Luckey, tried on the headset, and sold him on a vision of independence: Oculus would run its own show while plugging into Facebook's money and infrastructure. Luckey decided to sell Oculus to Facebook that year for $2bn, a staggering outcome for a 22-year-old who was recently sleeping in his parents’ garage.

For nearly two years, Oculus managed to operate underneath the Facebook umbrella somewhat smoothly; however, in September 2016, a reporter revealed that Luckey had privately donated $10,000 to a pro-Trump political group, and Facebook panicked. The company drafted an apology and made Luckey sign it, pulled him from public life, and attempted to freeze him out.

In early 2017, Luckey was fired, with a significant portion of his acquisition payout still withheld. The cruelest detail: Facebook's internal investigation found nothing he had actually done wrong. When Zuckerberg was pressed on the firing under oath, he denied politics played any role. When his own board asked him the same question, he said, “I don’t know”. It is ironic that the man who built the portal to the “metaverse” was kicked out before Facebook rebranded to Meta.

Just months later, Luckey co-founded Anduril. Anduril was founded with the original goal of providing real-time battlefield awareness for soldiers, leaning into the Oculus DNA.

The German Biologist  

Torsten Reil was born in Germany in 1973 and later moved to the UK when he began studying at Oxford. He became a doctoral researcher in neural systems, programming computer simulations that mimicked human and animal movement.  

While at Oxford, biologist Reil realized that mathematically modeling the neural pathways for human movement could create digital characters that learned to move on their own. Instead of manual keyframing, he gave characters a simulated nervous system and used genetic algorithms, borrowing from evolutionary biology, to refine virtual neural networks. This "natural selection" approach resulted in animation that reacted dynamically to the physical world, like a real-time, non-pre-recorded response to being hit by a car, an especially incredible discovery because the breakthrough came from a biologist, not a computer scientist.

In 2001, he dropped out of his PhD and founded NaturalMotion as an Oxford University spinout. NaturalMotion technology became an industry standard and powered many of the world’s most popular video games, ultimately leading to Zynga's acquisition of NaturalMotion for $527 million in 2014.

When Reil founded Helsing in 2021, he was driven by a fear that democracies were running out of time. Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 had planted the seed, but what truly convinced him to act was watching two things happen simultaneously: the world's best AI engineers refusing to help their own governments, and the legacy defense industry proving it couldn't build world-class software on its own.

In 2018, over 4,000 Google employees signed a petition forcing the company to abandon Project Maven, a Pentagon contract to apply AI to drone footage analysis. This was some of the world’s brightest minds refusing to assist the U.S. military, the talent the military needed the most. Reil looked at that episode and saw not a moral victory but a strategic catastrophe: “If we want to live in open and free societies, be who we want to be and say what we want to say, we need to be able to protect them… if the best Google engineers are not prepared to work on this, who is?” (Wired).

He and his co-founders had already convinced themselves that a Russian invasion of Ukraine and a Chinese move on Taiwan were both imminent, and that Europe, in particular, had no answer for them. His mission, stated plainly, was to close that gap: "to make Europe safer… to be able to point at the difference that we've made in terms of the geopolitical security of this continent".

Why Gaming Talent?

The simplest answer to why gaming founders are reshaping defense is this: gaming spent the last three decades being one of the most magnetic industries on earth for exceptional technical talent. During the long stretch of post-Cold War peace, many of the best systems thinkers and most ambitious engineers weren’t drawn to defense. The energy, speed, and exciting problems had shifted to other industries - for many to gaming. They were drawn to id Software, Valve, and a thousand modding communities in between.

Palmer Luckey said the defense industry "has been resting on its laurels since the Cold War" and while it did, gaming was quietly becoming one of the most important laboratories for dual-use technology in human history. Innovation was taking place where people spent their time.  

Takeaway: The consequences of the talent migration away from critical industries are only now becoming visible. Real-time rendering, physics simulation, computer vision, low-latency sensor processing, and autonomy are all capabilities that were refined first in gaming before becoming critical infrastructure for everything else. Peter Thiel has argued that Silicon Valley's greatest failure has been its collective refusal to apply its best talent to national security. Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir, said, “The heretics who built the arsenal of democracy left for Silicon Valley, and the Pentagon lost its front door" (Invest Like The Best). Gamers are some of the first to answer the call to help build in our time of need across the West.

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