We live in strange times, when a concept straight out of a B movie can become a billion-dollar business. Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and Anduril Industries, and Ben Lamm, founder of Colossal Biosciences, two young billionaire geeks, have joined forces in a new company, Warhound, with the goal of creating the ultimate war dog.
The idea is to combine Colossal’s genetic-engineering expertise with Anduril’s defense technology to design, breed and train canine units for the military, law enforcement agencies and emergency-response teams, reducing dependence on dogs bred in Europe. According to the Financial Times, the company behind these future four-legged “RoboCops” is already valued at $1.2 billion after raising $200 million in seed funding.
Luckey, usually seen in Hawaiian shirts, cargo shorts and flip-flops, is one of those Silicon Valley prodigies whose story begins in a corner of his parents’ home, specifically in a trailer parked in the driveway. The eldest of four children, born to a car salesman and a mother who chose to homeschool him, he grew up reading science fiction by Jules Verne and Anne McCaffrey, became fascinated with anime, and developed an early passion for electronics and engineering.
At 15, he was taking courses at Golden West College in Huntington Beach. Two years later, he enrolled in journalism at California State University, Long Beach.
By then, Luckey was getting by in his parents’ trailer on a diet of burritos. He modified old gaming consoles to make them more portable and shared tips and experiments with fellow hardware and video-game enthusiasts on a forum he had founded himself.
One day, as he later told Tablet Magazine, he stopped asking what the next upgrade for his gaming PC should be and focused instead on the ultimate leap: virtual reality. He bought discontinued headsets and equipment in search of ways to improve latency and motion tracking, paying for them with money he earned cleaning boats.
He later worked as a cable technician on a project at the mixed-reality lab at the University of Southern California. Then, in 2012, at the age of 19, he built a prototype for a low-cost virtual-reality headset, the Oculus Rift. Video-game designer John Carmack got hold of one and showcased it at a trade fair later that year.
Luckey turned to crowdfunding, setting himself a target of raising $250,000. He ended up bringing in about $2.4 million. In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg, still convinced that virtual reality would be the next major technology boom, bought the company for $2 billion. Two years later, after controversy over his financial support for a pro-Trump group, Luckey was fired.
His favorite character from one of the anime series he watched as a child was the adopted son of an arms magnate who seizes his father’s empire and turns it into a giant immersive-gaming company. Luckey did the opposite, moving from virtual reality to military technology.
In 2017, just months after leaving Meta, he founded a company with four partners focused on developing military hardware and software. They called it Anduril, after the sword carried by one of the heroes in The Lord of the Rings.
His partner, Ben Lamm
Ben Lamm’s parents divorced when he was five. He was raised by his mother and grandmother between Texas and Arkansas. Summers were spent travelling with his father, who worked in international trade.
As a child, he paid other neighborhood kids half his allowance to mow the lawn for him. During high school, he worked at a Chili’s restaurant.
“I hated it so much I bribed the hostesses to not seat my section and, therefore, I made no money,” he later told Dallas Magazine. “I learned: The only way to succeed is to find a job/career you love.”
He studied Finance and Accounting at Baylor University in Waco and, during his final year of college, founded his first company, Simply Interactive, which specialized in e-learning software.
By the time he launched Colossal Biosciences in 2021, Lamm had already founded and sold five companies. He and his team hope to bring the wooly mammoth back to life within the next decade. Last year, they announced what they described as the revival of an extinct wolf species, although some experts later challenged that characterization.
Colossal pairs its ambition to revive extinct species and help preserve endangered ones with a business model built on commercializing its technologies and launching spin-off companies.
He is afraid of flying and, as he told Men’s Health, keeps a notebook by his bed to jot down ideas that come to him when he wakes up. He is a dog lover; he has two, named Barbie and Ken, and one of the things he hopes to do before he dies is discover a lost civilization.
“Raiders of the Lost Ark is my favorite movie of all time. Jurassic Park is one of my favorite movies of all time. Neither one of those two should surprise anyone,” he told the Austin Business Journal.
Married with two children, Lamm has a fortune that Forbes estimates at nearly $6 billion.
Luckey’s wealth is in a similar range. In 2019, he married his longtime girlfriend, whom he met at a student debate competition. He describes himself as a radical Zionist and, despite saying that having fewer than 2.1 children would make him a traitor to the nation, has only one child.
He is unconcerned with whether people see him as likable or cool. “I do care that they think that I am moral. I do care if they think that I am a reliable partner who is not going to stab them in the back,” he told Fortune.
Lamm says the best advice he was ever given was not to take advice. As he recalled in Dallas Magazine, Alex Seropian, the founder of video game company Bungie, once told him that “life’s too short to work with assholes,” a lesson that has made him “think twice.”
Now he and Luckey will put that approach into practice together.
A Pentagon veteran takes the helm
Neither Luckey nor Lamm will run Warhound day to day. Instead, the pair have recruited David Spirk, the former chief data officer at the U.S. Department of Defense, a former Palantir executive and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, to serve as chief executive officer.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition
