https://virtualrealitypop.com/might-meta-rise-again-a-silicon-valley-story-1ed804395936

It’s the kind of story they tell in Silicon Valley. A young man, brash and confident, emerges out of somewhere prestigious, maybe Stanford, or Google, with an idea so disruptive, yet expected and logical, it seems inevitable. In this case, the holy grail is screen replacement, the end of the monitor. By 2021, the hero predicts, Augmented Reality will be nothing but a strip of glass before our eyes, allowing the real and imaginary to co-exist and even mingle. Our desktop will travel with us. We’ll never look down at our hands again. It sounds intuitively right, like an idea whose time has come.

In this case, the hero is Meron Gribetz, who came to Silicon Valley via the Israeli Defense Force, with a short stopover at Columbia University where he started Meta in his dorm room while studying computer science and neurology. The Meta prototype was hacked together from Epson 3D glasses and an Intel 3D camera. An early Kickstarter raised $194,000. Gribetz was selected by Y Combinator. The company raised a 23 M Series A round from investors which include celebrity VC Tim Draper. Things were breaking Meta’s way.