[lisasays]

My own threshold for "I created X" would be "I was solo dev, until it got legs of its own and started needing serious outside help." I don't know the story behind Oculus, but objectively Linux and a host of other famous OS projects do have origin stories like this. Yet for this project -- even by his own telling, it wasn't just him, but "me and Albert". Okay. Not to mention it was all done in a bigcorp environment -- which by definition means tons of support from all kind of people (even while others may be simultaneously blocking or competing against you).

That's why the "I created" self-description rings hollow in my book -- as it does in essentially every other corporate / large-org case I've heard of (whether done as self-promotion, or the puff stories we're told about people we're supposed to hire or have run our teams or otherwise).

And which is why even people like Steve Jobs, who of course "was" the products he was famously associated with -- never went around saying "I created this." Not because he lacked for ego, or because his contributions were not monumental. But because he was smart enough to understand that once things get to a certain scale -- this kind of attribution is both absurd, and entirely beside the point.