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Second Life Grid » What is Linden Lab?


What is Linden Lab?

Linden Lab is a privately held company founded by Philip Rosedale in 1999 to create a revolutionary new form of shared experience as rich and complex as the real world. Through its online service Second Life®, Linden Lab offers a truly collaborative, immersive, and open-ended 3-D virtual environment created and inhabited by people from around the globe.

Linden Lab is funded by a group of notable investors including Mitch Kapor, Catamount Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Ray Ozzie, Omidyar Network, Globespan Capital Partners, and Bezos Expeditions.

The Basics

“What would feel like success? Not money — But I will look back and say, did we do as much as we could to reach as many people as possible? Can we reach a billion people? That would be cool!” — Philip Rosedale, USA Today, 6/05/07
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Linden Lab’s mission is to connect us all to an online world that improves the human condition.

Linden Lab has an egalitarian work style and company ethos that is described as “The Tao of Linden.” It emphasizes transparency, collaboration, and distributed decision making. Linden Lab’s employees (who are sometimes referred to as “Lindens”) are encouraged to choose their own work, collaborate extensively, communicate their intentions, make weekly progress, and do it all with style.

A Brief History of Linden Lab

Linden Research, Inc., was originally located on Linden Street in San Francisco, CA. Commonly referred to as Linden Lab, the company now has a distributed office structure with a main campus in San Francisco’s North Beach district and additional nodes in the US cities of Mountain View, Seattle, and Boston. Linden Lab is currently expanding its operations into Europe and Asia. The company employs a wide variety of developers and administrators who work on Second Life and related services. Originally, Linden Lab’s goal was to develop virtual reality interface hardware. While significant progress was made in this direction. The small developer team refocused its efforts on creating a virtual environment instead, and the software project “Second Life” (originally named LindenWorld http://www.slhistory.org/index.php/ Linden_World) was born.

Some Product Milestones

Second Life was released for beta testing in 2002. In June 2003, Second Life went live to the public and immediately garnered interest from the tech community.

In October of 2003, Linden Lab introduced Second Life v1.1, an updated version that included more detailed and realistic 3D landscapes, an improved mapping and navigation system, an economic system that allowed groups of residents to jointly own and govern land, and the ability to create and drive a variety of vehicles.

In November of 2003, Linden Lab changed Second Life’s Terms of Service to recognize the ownership of in-world content by the SL Residents who make it. This enabled residents to retain full intellectual property protection for the digital content they created.

In June of 2004, Second Life Version 1.4 was released with a variety of new features enabling Residents to more fully develop and personalize their identities and online experience through sound and motion: custom character animations, live streaming audio support, XML-RPC, and a profile option that enabled Second Life couples to make their relationships official.

In December of 2005, Linden Lab celebrated 100,000 registered users of Second Life. Positive word of mouth, a community of enthusiastic residents, and national and international press fueled an extraordinary growth rate. In October 2006, Second Life hit 1 million registered users, and by July 2007, that number had climbed to 8 million with as many as 48,000 concurrent users online.

Linden Lab, Second Life and its related services continue to expand.

Executive Management Team

Linden Lab's senior management team brings together expertise in physics, 3D graphics and networking. Team members have previously worked at leading entertainment companies such as Electronic Arts, Midway, Disney, THQ, Acclaim, Hasbro, and Mattel, as well as many Web 2.0 companies.

Philip Rosedale - Founder
Rosedale served at RealNetworks as Vice President and CTO. In 1999 he joined Accel Partners as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence and began the basic research that would become the technology behind Linden Lab. Rosedale holds a BS degree in Physics from the University of California at San Diego.

Mark Kingdon, CEO
Kingdon served as Chief Executive Officer of Organic Inc. a leading digital communications agency, building its reputation as a groundbreaking, innovative provider of user-centered design. While at Organic, Mark built the company’s social media and social computing services and launched the company’s emerging platforms practice. He received an MBA from the Wharton School of Business and a BA in Economics from UCLA.

Robin Harper - Vice President, Community and Support
Harper was the Vice President of Marketing at Maxis, a division of Electronic Arts (EA), where she established SimCity as one of the most recognized brand names in entertainment software and was named one of the marketing 100 by Advertising Age/Newsweek. She holds an MBA in marketing from the University of Chicago.

Joe Miller - Vice President, Platform & Technology Development
Miller's previous senior executive positions include posts at Atari, Koala Technologies, Epyx, Convergent, and Sega of America. He was a founder and CEO of the Knowledge Universe Interactive Studio, a co-founder and president of CyberVision, Inc., and president of MindQ Publishing. Miller's product design company, Perilux Group, was engaged to develop several award winning products now offered by LeapFrog, Bright Things, Apple, and Fitniks.

Marty Roberts - General Counsel
Roberts was Deputy General Counsel of eBay Inc., where he managed regulatory affairs and legal operations. Previously, he was General Counsel of Shopping.com, where he helped lead the company through its IPO and subsequent acquisition by eBay, and of LookSmart, where he handled the company’s IPO and many corporate transactions. Roberts received his law degree from the University of Alabama School of Law and a BA in English from the University of Virginia.

Cyn Skyberg - Vice President, Customer Relations
Skyberg has worked in the customer relations field for 15 years, and has been with Linden Lab since 2005. Prior to working with the customer relations team at Linden Lab, she held a directorship at the San Jose Museum of Art and a senior management role at the Portland Art Museum. Skyberg has a BA with honors from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Cultural Anthropology.

Ginsu Yoon - Vice President, Business Affairs
Yoon was general counsel at Airespace and a principal at KTB Ventures. He practiced law at Venture Law Group and at Kirkland & Ellis in New York. He received an A.B. degree from Princeton University and a J.D. from New York University School of Law.

John Zdanowski - Chief Financial Officer
Zdanowski was CFO at HouseValues and co-founded Affinity Internet, Inc. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Syracuse University, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson University.

Resources

For further information about Linden Lab, contact Lewis PR at secondlife(at)LewisPR.com