Nate Mitchell

Nate Mitchell is a product executive and one of the co-founders of Oculus VR, the company that developed the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. He was vice president of product at Oculus from its founding in 2012, became head of Rift in 2016 and head of VR product at Facebook in 2018, and left Facebook in August 2019 as the last of the Oculus co-founders still at the company. He then co-founded and led the game studio Mountaintop Studios, which closed in March 2025.

In June 2025 Mitchell joined Sesame, the conversational AI and smart glasses company led by fellow Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, as chief product officer. As of October 2026 he holds that role and writes for the company about its planned eyewear.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Every role, date, figure and quotation checked against the cited sources, including his Sesame chief product officer role as of October 2026. About review dates.

Education and early career

Mitchell graduated from Dickinson College in 2009 with a degree in computer science. A 2014 University of Maryland profile of Iribe reports that Iribe first hired Mitchell as an intern at Scaleform, the startup Iribe founded with his longtime business partner Michael Antonov. Scaleform's first product, GFx, was licensed widely in the games industry, and Autodesk acquired the company in February 2011. Dickinson College describes Mitchell as a former senior software engineer at both Scaleform and Gaikai, a cloud gaming startup.

After the Scaleform sale, Iribe moved to Gaikai in Southern California, and Antonov, Andrew Reisse and Mitchell soon followed. Sony bought Gaikai within a year. The same profile quotes Mitchell on the effect of Iribe's departure from Scaleform: "The energy left the building so fast you wouldn't believe it."

Career

Oculus VR

In 2012 Iribe, Antonov, Reisse and Mitchell agreed to form Oculus VR with Palmer Luckey. Lists of the company's co-founders vary between sources: Road to VR names five core people at the start (Luckey, Iribe, Jack McCauley, Antonov and Mitchell), while a 2025 Road to VR article names Mitchell, Luckey, Iribe and Antonov. Mitchell later recalled that the team had not been certain the 2012 Kickstarter campaign for the Rift would reach its original goal of 250,000 dollars.

As vice president of product, Mitchell spoke for the company in interviews. In a March 2013 interview with Engadget alongside Luckey, he said Oculus was fulfilling Kickstarter rewards before opening pre-orders, and that "hardware is really only as good as the content it runs." Neither he nor Luckey would estimate a consumer release date; Mitchell said that "a big part of it is waiting for great game content to be available." Facebook announced its 2 billion dollar acquisition of Oculus VR on 25 March 2014.

In January 2016, after the initial pre-order run of the consumer Rift sold out within hours at a retail price of 599 dollars, Mitchell, then co-founder and VP of product, told TechCrunch that the company was selling the hardware at cost to help start the VR ecosystem. "It's about getting the Rift into as many hands as possible," he said. In 2016 Forbes included him, aged 28, in its 30 Under 30 list for games, describing him as co-founder and vice president of product at Oculus.

Head of Rift and head of VR product

According to his own account of his career, Mitchell became head of Rift in 2016. In that role he spoke for the company when Oculus cut the combined price of the Rift and Oculus Touch by 100 dollars each to 598 dollars in March 2017. He told TechCrunch that Touch adoption had been "very good", credited software techniques such as Asynchronous Timewarp and Asynchronous Spacewarp with lowering system requirements, and said macOS support for the Rift was not on the roadmap for the next six months.

He became head of VR product at Facebook in 2018. In March 2019 Oculus introduced the Oculus Rift S, built with Lenovo and priced at 399 dollars for a spring 2019 launch; at a private press event Mitchell described it as an "evolution not a revolution" over the original Rift. The same week, the Khronos Group announced the OpenXR 0.90 provisional specification at the Game Developers Conference; its press release carried a statement from Mitchell, as Oculus co-founder and head of VR product at Facebook, saying the companies planned to provide "runtime support for apps built on OpenXR 1.0 on the Rift and Quest platforms later this year."

In April 2019 Mitchell responded publicly after hidden messages were found printed inside Touch controllers. UploadVR reported that "Big brother is watching" had appeared inside development kits, while "This Space For Rent" and "The Masons Were Here" had reached finished units. Mitchell wrote that "easter egg" labels meant for prototypes had accidentally made it onto the internal hardware of tens of thousands of Touch controllers, that they were inappropriate and should have been removed, and that "the integrity and functionality of the hardware were not compromised." Road to VR reported that the affected controllers were the Touch controllers bundled with the Rift S and Oculus Quest.

Departure from Facebook

In August 2019 Mitchell announced in an internal memo to employees and in public posts that he was leaving Facebook after seven years at Oculus. The news was first reported by The Information. He said he would be "taking time to travel, be with family, and recharge" and would remain part of the VR community "with a much smaller role to play." Road to VR noted that his exit completed the departure of the original Oculus founding team: Jack McCauley had left in 2015, Luckey in 2017, Iribe in 2018 and Antonov in May 2019.

Mountaintop Studios

Mitchell co-founded Mountaintop Studios in 2020 and served as its chief executive. TechCrunch reported in February 2021 that the studio, which had emerged in summer 2020, had raised a 5.5 million dollar seed round from friends and family of its founders to make a player-versus-player shooter. In August 2021 it raised a further 30 million dollars in a round led by Jon Lai of Andreessen Horowitz; 80 Level named Matt Hansen, a former colleague of Mitchell, as his co-founder.

The studio's free-to-play tactical shooter Spectre Divide launched on PC through Steam on 3 September 2024. It reached PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S in February 2025. In March 2025 Mitchell announced that the studio was out of funding and would close, and that the game would go offline within 30 days, because "we haven't seen enough active players and incoming revenue to cover the day-to-day costs" of the game and studio.

Sesame

Mitchell announced in June 2025 that he was joining Sesame as chief product officer, describing the move as "getting the band back together" with Iribe, former Oculus hardware architect Ryan Brown and other members of the original Oculus team. Sesame lists him among its leadership. TechCrunch identified him as chief product officer when the company announced a 250 million dollar Series B round on 21 October 2025.

On 6 October 2026 Mitchell wrote the company post introducing its planned glasses. In it he said Sesame was "designing the glasses and assistant as one product" and designing its assistants to "be the operating system for the Sesame glasses", and that the collection would be made in Japan. The post gave no launch date for the glasses. Janko Roettgers of Lowpass reported that Sesame planned to launch the glasses in 2027.

Recognition

In 2024 Dickinson College gave Mitchell its Outstanding Young Alumni Award. The college also lists him as the first Executive in Residence of its Burgess Institute for the Global Economy.

See also

• Oculus VR
• Brendan Iribe
• Palmer Luckey
• Oculus Rift