I accepted an invitation to speak at All-In because I wanted to get some truth on the record. After years of lies, personal attacks, and celebrating my firing, Jason Calacanis kept telling people I refused to be on his podcast because of something he said about Oculus. No.
I refused because there is zero upside in rewarding people who spread lies about you. I told Jason so directly the first time he tried to get me on his podcast, right after Anduril hit unicorn status of course. No apology for treating me like shit when it was popular to do so.
All-In was a chance for me to explain this. Founders should push back very aggressively on talking heads who try to destroy them. Don't make the mistake I did, which was waiting until after they have poisoned investors, employees, and media against you.
And the rebuttal/"context" added by Jason to my video (which he waited over a month to finally post) is lame. Restates misinformation, pretends this was one podcast rather than spread across 2016/2017, says he has no regrets about his attacks and that I should have used my name.
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The Taylor Lorenz/Washington Post correction scandal isn't the isolated incident apologists claim. When I was fired, her story said I had announced I was leaving Oculus. This was false - it wasn't my choice nor my announcement. Her only source: Facebook PR. WaPo later
published a story claiming I hid political contributions using shell companies and refused to comment. This was also false - it was a single donation from a regular company, and they didn't reach out to me until 5:54 AM, seven minutes before print. When
I publicly called them out for this, they said the note regarding comment was technically true, and that they would only edit the story if I provided WaPo with detailed financials proving my helicopter business isn't a shell corp. Then they deleted everything with no disclosure.
I recently spent two weeks in federal court successfully defending myself from someone who tried to turn my willingness to help out a fellow (pre-Oculus) VR forum member into a billion-dollar payday. You don't know this because nobody is reporting on the unanimous jury verdict.
For 99.99% of even hardcore VR industry followers, this never happened. Hundreds of stories were written when the lawsuit was filed, dozens more covered minutia of the case as it progressed. The verdict got a single paywalled legal newswire entry.
Not even the tech reporters who were literally sitting in the courtroom as the verdict was read wrote anything. One can only conclude that the media apparatus around this case was only interested in reporting an outcome where Palmer/Facebook/Oculus lose.