Philip Loses His Second Life

Philip Linden in 2005 at the crash of the resident-made currency market, the GOM, wearing a fan-made protest t-shirt, "Kill Phil".

Reuters has the exclusive. I'm profoundly sad. It turns out it's not possible to have a Second Life : (

Eric Reuters asked me for my reaction and I said: I'm very saddened that it is not possible to have a "second life," that an engineer who becomes a self-taught entrepreneur and manages to attract venture capital and form a company with a revolutionary product can't follow it through to the next stage. I realize this happens with companies all the time, and the original visionary is replaced or the company IPOs, or merges or becomes a "studio" like Maxis with EA.com and Will Wright. But I think many of us somehow believed this would be different, that you could keep the visionary. Making him board chair seems odd. Facebook doesn't get rid of the kid genius Mark Zuckerberg, it brings in the gal from Google to do the grown-up sales work. Putting Philip as the board chair is like making him the Queen of England however; Tatero Nino just doesn't get it about American boards if she thinks "In a privately held company like this one, the board and the VPs are where the decisionmaking gets done.” Boards in fact are merely set up by CEOs to chose between two different decisions the CEO could make either way.

What I would have done to keep their mythology intact would have been to keep Philip as CEO of Linden Lab, an experimental goofy fun software company with a fun board of visionary Californians -- a "Lab". With mad scientists. And then had the Second Life Grid, that thing they made to do the international, more entreprise-level stuff be the real grown-up company. And actually, maybe that's what they *will* do -- quietly moving all the grown-ups to the Grid, and leaving the kids in the Life. That's what will happen to us, too!

Is this a good thing for the company? Well, not being a brutal, ruthless Silicon Valley IT corporate thug, I'd have to say it's a bad thing, because Philip is very charismatic and associated with precisely that notion that making new revolutionary products like Second Life is achieved by having new revolutionary management techniques too. Like the "love machine," and "distributed decision making" and the "Tao of Linden". I don't believe in those hippie crazy theories, but I am sort of fond of them and sort of root for them to work somewhere. But it turns out, well, no, they don't work any better than they worked in Haight-Ashbury back in the day...

I have another memory of Philip on his walkabout in Dore, this time, having shed his trademark bluejeans with the scripted flashing multi-coloured crotch and the rock tee with the big red lips and the shock of 60s hair with 70s sideburns. Now, he was wearing a red cardagan and khakis, and carrying a gulf club.

By day, Philip Rosedale was an engineer with a B.S. in physics, a computer nerd who had once horrified his Mom by rigging a garage-door opener to a panel in the roof of his family home and covering his bedroom floor with spare parts. He founded and sold companies, but they were nerdy, geeky little companies that merely helped him get his next geek job, which was finally Real and even at Real. There, he pioneered a thingie, that I think compressed real-life photos or video to stream it to the Internet.

It wasn't hard to think up a thingie after that which compressed virtuality, I guess, and so he made Second Life. And soon, by night, Philip Rosedale was Philip Linden, his avatar's name, the CEO of a company, just like the lowly Wal-Mart clerk becomes a DJ and then a bank president in Second Life. It was an incredibly powerful experience, unleashing enormous amounts of energy and creativity. Soon, Engineer Philip Rosedale, who might have spent his 30s coding the back end of web site systems that enabled people to put up home-made vidoes of their cats, as Philip Linden was attracting millions in venture capital, and making a virtual company, but one that would put in revolutionary new practices like "the future of work" or "distributed decision making" or the "Tao of Linden".

Philip worked incredibly long hours at his new Second Life job, finally quitting his day job because he was able to make a living at it with a very credible CEO salary. He spun out absolutely amazing networks. He was like the 19-year-old kid from a broken home and alcoholic mother in Finland, who made a "bank" on Second Life and got people to put real thousands of dollars in it, and launched a real estate and ad network all over SL -- until casinos were banned. Only...at his level, for Philip, this meant that the engineer with a B.S. from San Diego could get to Davos, could get in the New York Times, could get invited to Renaissance weekends with Bill Clinton. It's extraordinary heady stuff!

I first met Philip in the Dore welcome area when he was on a walkabout inworld about 3 years ago when I was fairly new. I had already faced so many frustrations as a new land owner and rental agent buying a sim and watching it get devalued by failure to provide even minimal zoning, and suffering griefing and club FPS thieves.

"What qualifies you for this job?" I asked bluntly. I have a feeling at that point nobody had ever asked Philip that question. Not even his board members.

"I have an engineering degree," he said. "And I'm a self-taught entrepreneur." "Self-taught?" I echoed, a bit skeptically. I wasn't here to flatter Philip with all the fanboyz: I had just spent a real $1,500 US on a simulator that now had King Kong in the water in front of it.

Philip went on to enthusiastically explain his dream, and it was convincing enough to stay. I did say in the Herald at one point that I felt a little bit like a man in a short red jacket with gold piping on the shoulders was taking my ticket to a movie or a carnival ride, but you know, it's been the ride of my life.

Somebody in the Welcome Area with a giant knife ran it right through him. He ignored it.

"I hope we can remember these days," Philip said, and I was chilled, as I knew that he meant there were some very big changes coming that were going to change the fantastic Second Life world as we had known it.

What he meant was the corporate invasion, which he kept telling us wouldn't be a corporate invasion because we wouldn't have to see them, they'd stay cooped up on their islands. Of course, they sucked out all the talent of the world by paying them higher than any of us indigenous entrepreneurs could and they led to first media overhype, then media hatred. What survives now is Intel Inside and sunflowers...

And Reuters, of course! They got to break the exclusive story of Philip's stepping down.

Few people believe me when I tell them I can see into the future. I've never been able to see more than a few days or weeks, and half the time, what I see doesn't make sense, and if it does, I don't believe it, and don't do anything about it, so it's a totally worthless gift lol.

But witnesses inworld can attest to my logging on to Second Life February 22 late at night overwhelmed with a feeling that something bad was going to happen to Philip, and my dated notecard also attests February 23. So I read the Tarot, with the party hat he had made, and also his Compass. Here's what the tarot said:

The Oracle of The Past whispers: The money safe indicates riches; if shut side is toward the person, it denotes loss by speculation.
The Oracle of The Present whispers: The scythe presages disappointment and when near the coffin, early death.
The Oracle of The Future whispers: The book presages the discovery of a mystery affecting the person for the better, in a degree governed by the distance.

I suppose when the new CEO comes in -- who could be anybody from Ginsu Yoon to John Z (this is a cult, and they like to advance their own, remember that at least one third of Lindens are former residents) -- I imagine the first thing he might recount at a board meeting is that things got so goofy under Philip, that a known Woodbury griefing goon could hack into the Lindens' corporate Facebook network and pose as an employee of the Linden Governance Team -- and the Governance team could laugh for 3 months about this and keep friending the guy anyway. Oh, except...the new board chair is...Philip lol. This might take awhile...

If someone from outside the Cult is brought in, they might *especially* notice this but I would suggest that one indication to watch as to whether the new broom is going to be a grown-up and sweep clean is to see what kind of Facebook friends the Lindens wind up keeping.

Comments

[Taemojitsu]

"All good things, come to an end..."

This is why sadness comes to permeate everything in life, even if that sadness would not exist without happiness. I suppose it is how you react to things ending (or whether you notice them ending at all) that says what kind of person you are.

Three years does not seem long.. and yet

[John Lopez]

I'm curious what sort of new CEO you would like to see and what kinds of policies you hope will vanish and what new policies should be created.

[Khamon]

Are you implying that Philip plays Linden Lab as a game just as we play Second Life? Or are you saying it outright?

[Lucien Franciosa]

Nostalgia is great, but the Second Life you write about hasn't existed since the first large corporation moved in...and then moved out. The future of Second Life is not the silly frontier of nerds gone wild, a refuge, but rather Phillip's dream has always been that it was the place that would touch the general population and general business. Web 2.0. And that, IS about big business and a CEO that can guide it from the sand box to .. reality. That's of course just my opinion. This step was necessary for the growth of SL. Sad from a nostalgic point of view like high school graduation can be. Exciting for the future.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

The Avatarian Oracle says, to me, on this subject:

> Put on yellow leather clothing and make an agreement.
> Work hard, because things need a push.
> Luck is not going your way.

I did ask it a couple of more times as it happens, but it explicitly told me to go away.

[Prokofy Neva]

John Lopez, well there's no shortage of prior examples. How about taking a page from the EA.com book and introducing...milkshakes? Also McDonald's kiosks that don't fulfill your hunger and Intel computers that get proken and can't be fixed except by someone with high Mechanic.

Probably for Second Life, this will mean letting the Linden Dept. of Public Works continue to take over the mainland, closing the auction, closing the LindEx. Too much liability! Why, it's only feted elitist creativity that ads value anyway, not all that private property and user-generated stuff from amateurs.

Khamon, Second Life is not a game, though you can "play" it. Virtuality is an amazing thing. It enables you to have green hair and sell virtual trees made out of nothing and make real money. Don't knock it.

Actually, these pleistocene layers of Second Life aren't destroyed, they just move further underground with each tumultous upheaval, and spring up in odd places later.

I *am* the general population and I *am* business. I'm not a nerd. Second Life is Second Life. It needs to be visionary and energetic and creative.

Why would I want to play nerd and Web 2.0 and make Facebook APIs? They're stupid.

That's the high school. The creation of a virtual economy out of nothing is the real stuff.

[Prokofy Neva]

Philip has a blog up on this now:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/03/14/changing-my-job/

[Ciaran Laval]

Philip has a whole different feel about him than any other Linden. He just commands respect, when Philip speaks the whole "Your world, your imagination" mantra seems credible. No other Linden can do this.

I'm somewhat uneasy about this, yes I know startups go this way but a clinical replacement who is more business minded, which ironically is what I've called for (but not as CEO) could well take the fun out of everything.

If we're speculating about who will take over from within (and of course it may not be a promotion from within) then the front runners would have to be Ginsu, Zee and Robin. They are the people who are less technical and more customer oriented.

[Khamon]

My suggestion for the past many months has been to fork a world management company headed by Robin, a software development company headed to not Cory, and a GRID promotion company headed by Philip with all three falling under the umbrella corporation of Linden Lab.

The only point most Lindens have contested was my insistence that the GRID company inherit the Second Life name; but that's only based on their own press, not my idea.

[Khamon]

Oh and you're correct Prokofy, I misspoke. Second Life is not a game; it's a GRID project. The wora'uld that we used to call Second Life and now has no name is not a game either; it's a hobby. I should've asked "Are you implying that Philip pursues Linden Lab as a hobby just as we occupy ourselves with Second Life? Or are you saying it outright?"

Thank you for correcting my glaring error.

[Prokofy Neva]

Ok, yes, thank, you, yes, I am implying that Philip pursues Second Life as a hobby. I guess my rental company is a kind of "hobby" to, but I do make a bit of real money from it that I pay real bills from, so, well, it's right up there with crocheting doll clothes to sell on ebay, a hobby and a little business, I guess.

And yes, my best playmate in this hobby, Philip Linden, has now left that virtual building...

[Prokofy Neva]

A hobby because he put his own money in.

I didn't put my own money in, I made it. But actually, to get started, I took the proceeds from my first hobby, The Sims, which I sold on ebay for $158, and used it to buy some land in Refugio off the auction.

[Prokofy Neva]

as for your forking idea, hmmmmm, let me think about that. Hmmmm. Not sure.

[John Lopez]

What you don't want to see is clear. Unlike the sarcasm, the radical loss of SL's market differentiators would be unexpected, even from the most clueless new CEO.

[Prokofy Neva]

It's discussing to watch the smarmy little fangirlz on the forums. The suck-up Nika Talaj tells everybody that this is "normal" and that CEO's "always" are made into Chairmen of the Board when companies grow, blah blah blah.

Except...that's not true. Perhaps in the hothouse of Silicon Valley which isn't like the rest of the country. In many places, you get rid of the CEO, and he's gone. You put in a new CEO, from outside the country. You don't put him on the board ! lol. My God, what an idea!

Robin coming on and burbling that Nika is "right" is just proof that poor Robin has drunk too much of that Kool-Aid. They aren't going to make *her* the CEO, most likely -- these people aren't, like the rest of the country, ready for a black man or a female as president.

But...they'll put in Gene Yinso or someone like that from within. Everything will go on as is. Desmond also says someone will step up, not in...Robin, if she is unable to find a better offer at a better virtual world, will go on assuming this incredible load of labour from these children and infantile men.

And...is anybody else waiting for the huge bubble of Silicon Valley itself to pop, oh, like New York as a fashion center or like the old Trenton Makes/the World Takes? I mean, everyone thinks bubbles pop because SV itself pops them, and nobody ever thinks to realize SV itself may pop.

It's always a sign of poverty in countries when the poor families have to have lots and lots of children. They do that because they have to sacrifice kids to infant mortality, childhood accidents, farm work, factory work, prison, the priesthood, whatever. They have to make enough to survive. And SV is so frenzily having children -- start-ups -- now that you have to wonder when, like Albania, it will collapse.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

They don't _know_ who will be CEO now. In my judgement.

The standard announcement is always "X is stepping down and Y moving up", which reassures investors and interested parties that there is some continuity and that somebody knows what is going on. I know that LL does not always correspond to typical behaviour but, that far, I would expect them to.

Not announcing the heir means either that they really don't know how to announce anything - possible but I think not the case here - or that they just don't know who it is going to be.

I have a feeling that it _won't_ be Robin, or at least not for long.

[Prokofy Neva]

Ordinal,

I agree. This announcement is a sign of distress. It's not normal. You don't announce the CEO is stepping down and beginning a search, outside a very close circle until you HAVE that new CEO coming within 30 days.

It's just not done. I've never seen it done, anyway.

So it shows stress. Disagreement. Debates. Problems. People having to make an intervention.

Don't forget Philip put his own money in. He's a venture capitalist to. So he has stake with which to argue. This is more of a collective, a cult. It's not about performance and a board saying "we need to have X sub or Y revenue or else you are toast".

It's much more complex and emotional. I suspect there were emotional things happening. Corey was not heard from for ages before he quit. He dropped from sight. Philip has not really been visible since about August 2007 at the SLCC and then for a day at VW 2007 in October 2007, and then perhaps an inworld conference here or there or somthing, but not really hugely visible. Not doing interviews all time as he was. Not doing office hours.

And damn, I be a-testifying!

When I read this today, my first thought was of our conversation the other night - where you told me about this worrisome strong feeling of something about to happen regarding Philip.

Yes, kids, it's true, that "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

coco

(When I read about it on another forum, I mean.)

[Prokofy Neva]

Oh, right, YOU were the one I told that too. I couldn't recall, as I had somewhat similar conversations about such spiritual matters with a few people, but had only told THAT particular thing to you. So, well, yeah, there it is. I saw it coming, I see stuff ilke that, but what good is it? It's not like I can call up the person and say, hey! Um, something is going to happen to you! lol Because, they may know already.

[Ric Mollor]

I will also agree that something bad seems to be in the air at Linden Labs. There hasn't been an announcement of a new CTO and now the CEO is stepping down without naming a replacement.

Though Second Life currently appears to be financially self sufficient, actions of this sort certainly aren't the type that would reassure investors. Additionally potential suitors could easily be scared away by such a lack of leadership planning.

Perhaps the sale has already been made and Cory and Philip are stepping aside to make way for new management?

[Prokofy Neva]

Ric,

No, I don't think any sale was made, I don't think it works that way at all.

And I don't think they replaced Corey deliberately because they don't really have to be in a hurry to do that if they have a VP of platform and all those code monkeys and whatnot. At one level, Second Life is a fabulously complex intellectually challenging new revolutionary machine. At another level, it's just a giant server farm with spaghetti code to run it that is messed up in a lot of places that a lot of young kids with enthusiasm just have to keep unravelling and pasting together again.

No, there's a crucial decision to make that they couldn't make yet. I think it has to do with the big fork from contiguous world and big grid or what Khamon Fate calls The Grid All Hail the Holy Grid and the concept that grid can be something that you...can put an "s" on Gridssssszzzzz.

At VW 07, I asked Joe Miller right to his face very bluntly (and I felt I had a right to do this since it was MY tenant's artwork gracing HIS company's big display as a backdrop to his speech and Philip's keynoter, for which she didn't get any recognition!):

Why don't you just open up a second or dozens of new grids for bling-free use with a new clean patch? Separate grids? That don't connect? For licensed use by companies or universities? Is that not physically possible?

He said that of course it was. And obviously even a dummie like me can see that if you have code, you can open up a second server farm, with a central asset server, and make a second second life. And a third. You just don't have to connect them. Why do they HAVE to be connected?

And he said, that would go against our founder's vision. He said this reverently and quickly, like a Moonie talking. It's a cult.

And that's what I mean. There are obvious solutions. Open this grid in China. Open that grid in Nigeria. Open this third grid in Columbis, Ohio. Just don't try connecting them all because then they won't work. Make some other website or lite client or thingie that keeps communication among the grids and make Linden Lab the portal to the grids. But give up this foolish idea that we have to have millions of people connected. We don't.

Once some of this ideological mist begins to dissipate, they will be free to do more with the product. Of course, THEY conceive of it as "open sourcing" so that all these other people can host it on their own grids. But that's retarded. That won't work. They will lose money that way. They won't get those people back.

And I can't imagine they have any different a debate than what I'm telling you here among themselves. It just takes a more technical form:

Zero Linden: but we *can* reticulate the splines and have them operate at a speed of 1230987MGH at 1,000 bcm.

Andrew Linden: That won't stack, Zero. There's a limit to configurating the OVN on to the 1/20 mm recepticles.

Philip Linden: As I've always said. This is a hologram. It has to appear at every instance with every agent over every simulator simultaneously.

Phoenix Linden: But what we're finding is that above 50,000 concurrency, it's svp98y and 2/1 oh about 388 inl;akhh.

Philip: Ok. I hear you but 12h4 has often been able to be ratched up as far as ()*!!![op[.

Andrew: Philip, we've been over this. It can be done. But at a price. It has to be throttled.

Well, you get the idea : )

[Taemojitsu]

Aww, that's cute.. it's nice of you to lay it out so plainly, Neva. So it really is, at heart, a community issue.

Poor Phillip :( The future of the grid aside, it does sound like it was the conflict between him being an idealistic human-oriented person and the fact that as the size of an organization increases it becomes impossible to lead it the same way as when it was smaller. Someone who is very idealistic and, well, has very much heart, will dely recognizing this as long as possible; but when they do, honesty requires them to announce their inability to expand to the role.

Being a visionary guider on the board is better than either leading your company to destruction because not being able to cope with increased scale, or not being involved at all, after all.

[Taemojitsu]

Philip has his vision. It's hard to deviate from a vision, but maybe you can learn from other, similar examples in life. From my own experience, then: the playerbase of the largest virtual world on the game side, WoW, is fractured into hundreds of different servers; those servers are grouped up by 10's or 12's for group interactions (PvP) that benefit from a larger drawing pool, but servers are mostly self-contained.

The WoW *community* however is by no means fractured. The exact same quests and monsters that you find so repetitive and boring from their predictability, for the same reason it's something that one player of the game can expect another player to have experienced, and given the variability and room for expressiveness in the combat mechanics also have had fun doing. This serves as a common bond just like you can identify with someone who's watched the same TV show.

Second Life by its nature tho doesn't have the exact same kind of common similarity of experience, because by nature as a resident-created world SL has much more variability. Usually this is a good thing, assuming high quality of content.

There is a second bond in the WoW community tho: mutual discussion and sharing of opinions. The WoW forums are sometimes called one of the worst places on the Internet for the trolling and stupidity that takes place there, but compared to other places it is mild, and there is a great deal of intelligent discussion that also takes place on those forums.

This sharing of opinions reduces uncertainty in the same way that experiencing a common gameworld (instead of parallel worlds) does.

I don't know how easy it would be for SL to change, or whether it would fracture the community, or if it was planned then how to minimize the negative effects, etc. But maybe Philip will see this alternate model as an opportunity, and maybe find something to learn from it.

It does seem to be an important problem after all.

[Ciaran Laval]

CEO's announcing they are stepping down before a replacement is found is not unusual and Robin's comment to Nika was more to do with agreeing that the sky isn't falling.

Philip chose to inform Reuters about this, let's not forget that when Cory left the information was leaked, so maybe Philip decided he would choose to inform Reuters before someone else informed the blogsphere.

The odds on Robin stepping up have drifted dramatically. I'd say she's no longer a front runner.

In all of this people are ignoring what's going on with Mitch Kapor, he's a big investor.