How I Did It: Philip Rosedale, CEO, Linden Lab
Published February 2007
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEWe always believed that such a place, such a platform, would be something that you could reasonably charge money for. If it provided the opportunity for other people to make money, you could reasonably charge some fraction of that.
Second Life was just unfundable. It was just the dumbest idea ever. Mitch Kapor [the founder of Lotus Development] was the only person who got it. Mitch invested in 2001 after I had invested about a million dollars of my own money. I think some of the early angel investors were largely investing in me. They thought I seemed to be a capable, balanced, good-engineering-background entrepreneur, so I could figure out something.
But we could convince absolutely no one that what we were doing made any sense. People said the technology can't possibly be made to work smoothly because there are too many problems with building a simulation combined with broadband, combined with streaming, combined with rendering, talking to many computers at once, the whole idea is just completely impossible.
The second thing they said was, This is not for ordinary people. Even if it is compelling, there will only be a few crazy people that want to do it. And then you guys will be dead.
Oh, and user-created content had never been a fundable idea. Now, everybody's doing it. But in the beginning the idea that random people were going to build a three-dimensional world was just impossible for people to understand. A lot of applications, and all 3-D applications, were top-down designs, where some master designer built all the content and you just wandered around in it. And we were saying, You [the world's residents] are going to build everything. You are going to build these walls. And everybody was like, That's terribly stupid. Nobody got it.
There were six very quiet years. It wasn't discouraging the first couple of years because we were just having fun. When we got to be 20, 25 employees it got pretty stressful. What we didn't really think about was if the content alone is what compels other people to come and join, then you have a pure word-of-mouth exponential growth model, and that means you are going to have to wait a long time for the plane to take off.
It was discouraging as we grew and we started to make some progress, to the point where residents were making stuff. And the investors would still just say, You have got to turn this thing into some sort of video game. It needs to have a purpose. They wanted us to make it like something that had come before it so that they could value it.
When we couldn't grow it as quickly as it needed to, we had one round of layoffs. There were 31 of us and 11 of us left. That was in late 2003, when we pretty well thought we were dead.
And then we did one discontinuous thing: We recognized that there was a core of people who were really starting to want to build the content and invest in it and really value it. And we said, What you have in Second Life is real and it is yours. It doesn't belong to us. We have no claim to it. Whatever you do with Second Life is your own intellectual property. You can claim copyright on it. You can make money.
We said the same thing about land: Land is yours to own and resell. We had been reading Hernando De Soto's The Mystery of Capital and Jane Jacobs and all these books about innovation and ownership and why great places are great places. And we said, Let's just make this a real world. Let's let it have a real economy and let's make property have real value. There was a lot of buzz around that. The investors could see this thing starting to go. In early 2004 we got a couple million bucks more.
I think I felt like we were going to make it maybe in early 2005. I felt like the fundamental network economics of buying and selling stuff was irreversible.
Our approach to engineering was this: Tell everybody in an e-mail every week what you are doing, then make some progress of some kind and tell everybody in an e-mail how you did it. That was our organizational scheme. We said, Everybody is smart here. Identify what you are going to do today and get it done.
That evolved over time into the work system that we have today. We have this huge database of stuff to do. You choose your own work from it. So groups are formed more organically. I am pretty critical of traditional business styles. The biggest way you avoid that is you continue to make everybody entrepreneurial, which is easy to say--everybody says garbage like that in big companies. But the way you really are entrepreneurial is that you have to set your own strategic direction. That's what entrepreneurs do. You have to take risks and you have to expect to be held accountable.
