2025 Will Determine Whether AR/VR Bet Is Visionary Or “A Legendary Misadventure”

In a leaked memo, Meta’s CTO told staff that 2025 will determine whether its hardware & metaverse division is “the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure”.

According to Business Insider, the outlet the memo was leaked to, Meta CTO and Head of Reality Labs Andrew Bosworth shared the memo, titled “2025: The Year of Greatness”, to Reality Labs staff back in November.

Reality Labs is the division of Meta behind Quest headsets and their Horizon software platform, the technology side of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, and research & development of AR glasses and their sEMG wristband input device.

In the memo, Bosworth describes 2025 as “the most critical year in my 8 years at Reality Labs”, and tells staff they “need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR”.

“On paper 2024 was our most successful year to date but we aren’t sitting around celebrating because know it isn’t enough. We haven’t actually made a dent in the world yet“, he proclaimed.

Here’s Bosworth’s leaked memo in full:

2025: The Year of Greatness

Next year is going to be the most critical year in my 8 years at Reality Labs. We have the best portfolio of products we’ve ever had in market and are pushing our advantage by launching half a dozen more AI powered wearables. We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. If you don’t feel the weight of history on you then you aren’t paying attention. This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure.

I’ve been re-reading “Insanely Great,” Steven Levy’s history of the Macintosh computer. If you haven’t read it the book chronicles the incredible efforts of individuals working in teams of 1-3 to build a device that more than any other marked the consumer era of personal computing. What I find most fascinating about it is the way that even people who left the program on bad terms (it was not particularly well managed) speak about the work they did there with an immense sense of pride. There was a widespread cultural expectation, set by none other than a young Steve Jobs, that the work needed to be “insanely great.”

On paper 2024 was our most successful year to date but we aren’t sitting around celebrating because know it isn’t enough. We haven’t actually made a dent in the world yet. The prize for good work is the opportunity to do great work.

Greatness is our opportunity. We live in an incredible time of technological achievement and have placed ourselves at the center of it with our investments. There is a very good chance most of us will never get a chance like this again.

Greatness is a choice. Many people have ben at the precipice of opportunity and failed to achieve. For the most part they failed to even challenge themselves.

You should be doing the best work of your career right now. You should be pushing yourself to grow where needed and doubling down on your strengths. When you look back on this time I want you to feel like you did everything in your power to make the most of it.

You don’t need big teams to do great work. In fact, it may make it harder. One trend I’ve observed the last couple of years is that our smaller teams often go faster and achieve better results than our more generously funded teams. Not only that, they are much happier! In small teams there is no risk of falling into bad habits like design by committee. You should be so focused on results that being in a bunch of docs or meetings is too frustrating to bear.

The path is clear. You don’t need to come up with a bunch of new ideas to do this great work. Most people in the organization just need to execute on the work laid out before them to succeed. It is about operational excellence. It is about master craftsmanship. It is about filling our products with “Give A Damn”. This is about having pride in our work.

I will close with an Arnold Glasow quote: “Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.” 2025 is the year. Let’s be on fire.

John Carmack ‘Wearied Of The Fight’ As He Exits Meta

John Carmack left his role as “executive consultant” for virtual reality at Meta. Carmack occupied key roles over the last decade in pushing forward VR’s path toward consumer adoption, from exchanging hardware with Rift creator Palmer Luckey to becoming CTO at Oculus and continuing to work at Facebook and

Bosworth’s mention of filling products with “Give A Damn” is a reference to John Carmack, who often advised programmers and Meta staff to do so. When Carmack fully left Meta in late 2022, he even signed off his fiery exit memo with the phrase:

We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.

[…]

I wearied of the fight and have my own startup to run, but the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it actually is possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.

Make better decisions and fill your products with “Give a Damn”!

Meta leadership seemingly didn’t agree with everything Carmack said at the time. But just over two years later, Bosworth’s plea to Reality Labs staff echoes Carmack’s words, suggesting he was right yet again.