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Keep Calm, Carry On
I just now read that Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, is looking for a CEO to actually run LL:
We’ve decided to search for a new CEO, and I wanted to briefly talk to everyone here about the reasons for that decision.
I feel that the most important contributions I have made and will continue to make to Second Life are related to building both the product and the company through my direct contributions to vision, strategy, and design. As we grow, the role of our CEO will increasingly be to hire and grow the right team – to lead and help the company scale – to thousands of people and tens of millions of users of Second Life. I believe that we can hire a fantastic person in that role, and also give me the ability to totally focus myself on the job that I do well. I bet this will be the most interesting job opening in the technology world.
As to title, I will become chairman of the board. I will be 100% involved and fulltime at Linden Lab. Second Life is my life’s work, and I am not going anywhere! I will focus on product strategy and vision, continuing to design the right kind of company, and being an effective communicator and evangelist about Second Life. As a community member, you will probably see more of me in-world.
Again, this is a decision driven by my desire to best grow SL and match my job to both our needs and my passions. We don’t have a specific timeline, and I don’t expect my job to change while we are looking for someone.
We’ll organize some further conversations in SL on this topic soon, and as always, feel free to talk to me about this if you run into me in-world.
GigaOm refers to this as the end of the “Burning Man” days — lore has it that Philip got the general trope for SL’s “you just ask ‘em?” attitude from a visit to the Burning Man art event — and maybe that’s right.
There are a number of problems plaguing SL. Grid reliability, the inevitable flaky crossings from sim to sim, the clunky user interface, the wildly inconsistent reaction to abuse reports, and more importantly the matter of how exactly a virtual world provider in America handles matters of international law.
I have hopes that a more sensible and consistently enforced Terms of Service — Second Life Rights? — is developed and enforced. The matter is simply that Phil is bowing out of the day-to-day running of SL and acting as a visionary. This new CEO will be more pragmatic.
I don’t know what this will mean. But unless SL gets purchased by Time Warner or Disney, all I can do is reiterate: Keep Calm and Carry On.
Posted in Second Life (News,Op-Ed) by R Cruickshank 15/03/08 08:34 PM Tags: opinion, second life
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