How I Did It: Philip Rosedale, CEO, Linden Lab
Published February 2007
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEWe have this thing we built called the Love Machine. The Love Machine allows anyone who works here as a Linden employee to send anyone else a brief note that says "Thank you for doing this for me." There is a little webpage where you can go to send an e-mail, and then you get a little e-mail that says "Love From Philip" in the subject and it's got text in it. Now, you think, what's the big deal about that? Well, all of that stuff goes into a database. Your review carries that. Everybody is sending love to each other. It creates a positive collaborative environment.
Most businesspeople communicate in a mostly negative way. If people are encouraged to be entrepreneurs and take risks, they can also become combative and competitive. You have to balance that. So we built the Love Machine for balance. We joke that some day we will be more famous for the Love Machine than for Second Life.
We use a lot of the ideas from The Wisdom of Crowds. We vote internally on tasks. And when you get something done you can say, "Oh, I got 17 votes on this." And again, you use that as part of your review.
We also use anonymous spot surveys for a lot of stuff. So I send out surveys saying, like, "Should we get rid of me as CEO?" Or I send out several options: "We should get a new CEO: now; when we have 200 people; when we have 500 people; never."
There were some nevers. I think people didn't figure I was good for a thousand-person company. I actually think I am, but I'd be fine not doing it, either.
We don't even have a concept of budgeting here, really. For example, we don't have a travel budget. If you travel you have to send an e-mail to everybody that says how much you spent and why it was worth it.
As an entrepreneur in high school, I thought starting a company was about a process where you do all these official things to create a company. I was so proud of my business license. I hung it on the wall. Now I've realized that a company is a culture and a model and a business surrounding an idea or ideas.
People are starting to do business meetings in Second Life. When I looked at that originally, I was like, Why would anybody do a business meeting or a conference call in a virtual world? What a dumb idea. Actually, it is not. You are more likely to speak the truth to me in Second Life than you are in a real business meeting.
An enormous amount of intellectual energy is going to move into this world, and some of what we are doing in the real world will therefore be displaced. You can imagine New York City being kind of like a museum. Still an incredibly cool place to go, but with no one working in those towers because work, creative work, where you are engaging with other people face-to-face, you are going to do in a virtual world. It's going to leave these cities [gestures toward downtown San Francisco] and move into digital worlds. It is easier to do things there.
