• John Ternus, Apple's new CEO, has a background in hardware engineering.
• Oculus inventor Palmer Luckey unearthed a VR headset from Ternus's time at Virtual Research in the '90s.
• Ternus left the small VR company in 2001 before joining Apple the same year.

Apple's John Ternus is a 25-year veteran of the tech giant, but one of his first engineering gigs was at a lesser-known company building virtual reality headsets.

Defense startup founder and Oculus headset creator Palmer Luckey reminisced on X about a product that Ternus, who is set to become Apple's CEO in September, might've had a hand in during his early engineering days.

Luckey posted a photo of an old V8 head mount display from Virtual Research.

"From what I can tell, he was the lead mechanical engineer on the V8 I obtained when I was 16!," Luckey wrote, referring to Ternus.

"It was an incredible headset for the time," Luckey told Business Insider.

He described the headset as well-balanced and relatively lightweight, with a field of vision that was ahead of that of other consumer products at the time. It mainly sold to military flight simulators for around $50,000, Luckey said.

Ternus and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A user guide for the V8 published online suggests the model was released in 1998, when Ternus would've been working at the company. He was an engineer at Virtual Research from 1997 to 2001, and joined Apple later that year, according to his LinkedIn profile.

A patent filed in 1995 and issued in 1998, during Ternus's time at Virtual Research, describes a similar-looking product, a virtual display apparatus for use in a virtual reality system. It supported the attachment of video displays.

Ternus is best known today as Apple's hardware boss, notably for working on AirPods and the iPad among other products, and as the incoming CEO.

His appointment marks the return to a product-minded chief like Steve Jobs. Current CEO Tim Cook's background is in operations.

The tech giant made its debut in the high-tech headset market in 2024 with the Vision Pro, which received a lukewarm response from the public. Its $3,500 price tag and lack of a killer app didn't wow consumers. At that point, Ternus had been in the senior vice president of hardware engineering role for three years.

Despite an underwhelming response to the Vision Pro, execs like Cook and Ternus remain optimistic about the product and the future of VR.

"Vision Pro is an extraordinary product," Ternus said in a Tom's Guide interview earlier this month. "It's like we reached into the future and pulled it into the present."

• Anduril president Matthew Steckman said that defense tech companies have to "create a monopoly."
• There are only one or two programs in each category that are big enough to sustain a business, Steckman said.
• "If you capture them, you have a business, and if you don't, you have no business," he said on "20VC."

Defense tech is winner-takes-all, according to Andruil's president.

Anduril has quickly become a market leader, spawning a venture capital frenzy. The industry is also notoriously competitive, with companies duking it out for lucrative government contracts.

On the "20VC" podcast, President and Chief Business Officer Matthew Steckman described the company's strategy. They'd need to win in key product categories, he said — and maybe monopolize them.

Every defense product category has one big or two big programs, Steckman said. He used the example of small drones, for which there are "very few" programs that would create enough revenue to maintain a business.

"If you capture them, you have a business, and if you don't, you have no business," Steckman said of these programs.

Defense tech companies must shoot for the moon, he said. It's this "addressable market question" that most companies in the sector get wrong, he said.

"You have to create a monopoly," Steckman said. "We knew that."

Anduril's strategy, then, was to create strong underlying technology that could keep them competitive in multiple markets. The company calls this Lattice, the tech that consumes data, interprets it, and then manipulates robots around it, he said.

Those technologies apply to 20 different markets, Steckman said, each "different parts of the defense apparatus."

It's clearly paid off. The company is reportedly raising its next round at a valuation of $60 billion. Some venture capitalists with FOMO are paying premiums for their shares. One compared it to buying Taylor Swift tickets.

Want to work there? Your best way in might be winning a drone-racing competition. In April, the company will reward one winner with a job and a $500,000 check.

After Steckman posited his theory of monopolization in defense tech, host Harry Stebbings asked: Why, then, are there so many drone companies?

"There will definitely be one winner," Steckman said. "The challenge for investors is actually figuring out which one it is."