Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe Surprisingly Steps Down To Lead The PC VR Division
Facebook owned Oculus has been running with a tight knit group at the executive level of the company. They’ve engineered and created many innovative things during the time Brendan Iribe was CEO of Oculus. But to many people’s surprise, Brendan has stepped down as the CEO of the VR company to lead the PC based VR division.
In an open letter Brendan Iribe states the following:
Looking ahead and thinking about where I’m most passionate, I’ve decided to lead the PC VR group—pushing the state of VR forward with Rift, research and computer vision. As we’ve grown, I really missed the deep, day-to-day involvement in building a brand new product on the leading edge of technology.
You do your best work when you love what you’re working on. If that’s not the case, you need to make a change. With this new role, I can dive back into engineering and product development. That’s what gets me up every day, inspired to run to work.
Jon Thomason, who recently joined the Oculus team, will lead the mobile VR group. Together we’ll work with Mike Schroepfer, CTO of Facebook, to find a new leader for the Oculus team.
I’m thrilled to be on the front lines of creating the next leap forward in VR. We’ll continue investing deeply in research and development in computer vision, displays, optics, graphics, audio, input, and more to create the breakthroughs that will unlock new form factors and experiences. We’re going to move faster at solving the grand challenges of virtual reality.
I’d like to thank everyone who’s come along on this fantastic journey. We’re going to push VR far beyond the boundary of what’s possible today, and I couldn’t be more excited to run to work every day and build the future of VR with all of you.
Facebook and the Oculus team will be looking for their next CEO to run the company in the coming months. Brendan Iribe has been at the helm since 2012 and will continue to work for Oculus going in to the future.
With all of the experimentation going on in the VR industry, it makes sense to see the company making diversifications to their focuses.