Jason Rubin on Meta’s strategy for the metaverse

When Jason Rubin joined Oculus VR in 2014, he was handed a copy of Ready Player One, one of the books that helped define the metaverse. As he was hired, Facebook acquired Oculus and he started to have some deep conversations about the  metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. 

For years, the metaverse strategy meant that the company was focused on virtual reality games. It has also been developing technology for augmented reality glasses, and when Rubin spoke to us a year ago, he was head of 2D games and cloud game streaming.

But after Facebook renamed itself Meta in October and CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined the company’s ambitions to build the metaverse with investments of more than $10 billion a year, Rubin emerged as the vice president of Meta content.