I said a month ago that I was looking for a new CEO to lead Linden Lab, and we’ve found one! His name is Mark Kingdon, and his Second Life name is “M Linden”.

As you might imagine in a new leader of Linden Lab, there are lots of great things I could say about him, but let me just pick a few and then encourage you to meet him in-world. He is a person with the rare and unusual combination of business leadership, creativity, and passion for Second Life that we were looking for. In terms of history, he has a background in art, economics, and business. He has been in successful and highly regarded leadership roles at two companies that are bigger than Linden Lab: PricewaterhouseCoopers and Organic. He is a well-loved people leader who is fearless and can weather challenges and change.

He is going to start on May 15th. Like I said when we started looking, I am not going anywhere, and will be working with Mark to help lead Linden and Second Life onward. I am really looking forward to working with him, as he has so many skills and capabilities that will help us and that I can also learn from - here are a few: He will have an intense focus on improving the in-world experience and stability and reliability of Second Life. He has extensive hands-on experience with user experience design, which will be critical in making Second Life an easier and better experience for more people. Finally, he has a ton of experience leading companies and products with global reach, which is now essential given that the great majority of Second Life usage is international and Linden Lab will continue to grow as an international company with offices in many locations.

I have to say I am also really happy at how we found Mark. We decided to talk in public about searching for a new CEO because we thought it was the right thing to do, but of course we were concerned that it was unusual for a company to talk about such a change before finding the right person. Generally, recruiting executive people involves lots of work in creating lists of potential candidates and calling out to them.

But I always also hoped that with our public message out there, maybe the right person would actually just come to us. The intersection of people who would hear that news, have the right skills, and also be passionate enough about Second Life to pick up the phone and call me and ask for the job - well that is a very small list. But I thought maybe it would happen and turn out to be the perfect person. It was!

We will schedule a series of inworld meetings in the coming weeks where folks can get a chance to meet and talk to him and me together.

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.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of collecting a Technology Emmy Award for Second Life, in the field of user-created-content. How cool! In accepting that award onstage, I said that I was doing it for two special groups of people. The first is all the Lindens: the more than 250 people who have chosen to join together in our now 8 year long mission to build and tirelessly support Second Life. The second group is the residents: the first hundreds and now millions of people who had the courage and passion to bring the virtual world to life by creating it and then believing that is was real. As I’ve said before, you are the engines of creation, and there will be many more awards yet to come. I can imagine a future where the most beautiful of such awards are pure digital. I’d love to see Starax’s version of an Emmy. For now, we’ll try and take good care of the good old fashioned gold one.

Anyway… onto some thoughts and updates. (more…)

Our mission is: “To connect everyone to an online world that improves the human condition.” Though work at Linden Lab can be hard and sometimes frustrating (and this week is certainly no exception with its downtimes), it is inspiring to pursue such a goal. What is interesting is that we recently changed the wording of this statement. The old version said “Create an online world having the exceptional property that it advances the capabilities of the many people that use it, and by doing so affects and transforms them in a positive way.” The difference between these two statements of mission isn’t huge, but I think important in looking at our history and then looking at how we need to change in the future to best fulfill that mission. Let me give you some thoughts on that.

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Starting about 10 days ago, we began randomly asking around 1000 people per day who log into Second Life whether they feel their experience is getting better or worse, with an additional option to give some keywords or a sentence about why they feel that way. The results so far are interesting and I hope will be quite helpful in helping us to prioritize our work.

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I am looking for a Technical Operations Jedi! Linden Lab is going through enormous growth and rapidly getting into operations challenges
that most companies have never seen. We are managing thousands of Linux-based servers in 2 locations, use over 6Gbps at peak, do 100M MySQL transactions daily, will soon need to have datacenters in multiple locations around the world, and are watching all these numbers grow at 10-20% monthly.

We need someone to lead us who has a passion for Second Life, has been deeply involved in technical and network operations at the largest scale, and loves to hire people. In terms of titles, this is probably someone currently at a VP or Director level. You will also need to have a strong technical background/degree.

You must be able provide high-level strategy and technical leadership, and your most important role will be expanding our elite operations staff with the best possible people. You should be passionate about hiring and hiring strategy, and have great ideas already about how to quickly get great people onboard. At the same time you will have to manage our global server infrastructure, which will require a sophisticated network architecture and a diverse set of facilities, NOC staff, transit providers, peers, and equipment vendors, in a variety of logistic and regulatory environments.

To handle all of this you should have hands-on experience with the very large-scale routing, peering, and partnering strategies we’re going to need to keep up with our tremendous growth. Planning, finding, negotiating for and then operating remote data centers should be something you can do in your sleep.

If you are interested or know someone who might be a fit, please contact me directly: my email is philip_at_lindenlab_dot_com. If you aren’t experienced enough to take on this role but still can help with Technical Operations, please take a look at our website and apply for one of the jobs
there: http://lindenlab.com/employment

There are two big reasons why you should consider joining us at Linden Lab: The first is that you are literally able to help create a new world, which is an unbelievably rewarding experience that you simply can’t have anywhere else. The second is that Linden Lab is run in a different way compared to most companies - you have an unusual degree of personal freedom which is extraordinary and empowering. By organizing ourselves differently, we created an environment in which everyone is a strong contributor to strategy and direction. Although the experience of working at Linden isn’t a fit for everyone, check it out. If you end up joining us, you will regret every day you missed by not being here earlier!

To apply for a job with Linden Lab, visit our site at http://lindenlab.com/employment, and follow the directions from there. We need people with a variety of different skillsets and levels of experience. If you don’t see something that fits your skills or experience, apply and tell us what you would like to be doing.

As an interesting alternative, if you are part of a small, independent group of people who enjoy working together developing software, regardless of where your group is located, consider challenging us to hire you as a whole team and potentially open an office in your city. In our approach to development we’ve found that often the best team is a well-bonded group of several people with complementary skills, and additionally we have (in part through Second Life!) great tools for coordinating remote teams. So if you’re part of such a team, consider asking us to come and visit you.

Given the recent tremendous growth of Second Life, I thought it might be of benefit to describe, as best I can, the mission of Linden Lab. Few Second Life residents today will remember the early days of the Second Life environment and community, or know that Linden Lab is a 7 year old company with a rich and interesting history. While such rapid growth is, in the words of investors, a “high-quality problem”, it is a problem nonetheless. New residents entering Second Life are choosing to commit their time, aspirations, creativity, and dreams to the creation of a shared virtual world. And very unlike the physical world, this virtual world is a place which, at least for the present, has an architecture and business model controlled by a small private company. The power that Linden Lab has to influence the fabric of Second Life is very great, and so I feel we have the responsibility to communicate, as clearly as possible, which way we are headed. Ultimately, I believe that the clearest possible way in which we do this is in our actions, not our words. But I also think that an attempt to provide a statement of intention which can serve as a guidepost by which to measure our efforts is both useful and ultimately part of the value that I, as founder and CEO, should be delivering in my job. Moreover, if I can communicate a clear vision, then perhaps you, as readers, residents, or employees (and in some cases all of the above) will more easily forgive us when we make the mistakes that in our best efforts we will still sometimes make in following this mission.

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Congratulations to the whole SL community and all of us at Linden Lab on reaching 1 Million residents signed up!! Second Life is growing because together we are all building content, welcoming new people, expanding the community, and adding new capabilities to the system. It is amazing to be a part of such an experience - I can’t possibly imagine any job I’d more love coming to every day. We’re trying hard to find a moment here at the office to celebrate…

Now, on the not-so-mushy side, our performance and experience right now for new users is not good! We’ve been able to handle 10,000 new residents or more every day (which is a mind-altering 10x increase since April of this year), but right now the media coverage we are getting is taking us to unreal levels of new users - we will probably sign up more than 50,000 new people today. The new user system is fairly scalable, but it will take us a few days at least to adapt to this level of load. As a result we’ve got slow website performance, way too many people on the orientation islands, and an overloaded set of new user landing points in the main grid.

So, if you are new Second Life user, please accept our apologies and understand that this isn’t the ‘normal’ Second Life welcome experience. You will see slow performance and huge groups of people while we race to install new orientation islands, welcome areas, and other things to make your experience better. Bear with us, and keep coming back! Once you get further out into the world your experience should get better. Ask for help whenever you can from others - there are lots of friendly people out there.

In 1994, I remember reading the writings of VRML pioneer Mark Pesce, and being struck by something he said - that the community of the 3D internet/metaverse would begin with the ‘beating of drums’. I think he was struck by the idea that the drum circle, with it’s ability to immerse people in a collective rhythm to which you contribute your own beat, was a lot like what we would do in an unrestricted 3D world. I always loved that image, and it has stayed with me through many years of building SL, informing a lot of design thoughts. So I just love it when I come upon a real drum circle in Second Life, and that is just what happened to me last week. Here I am drumming with a bunch of people, on amazing instruments that I think were mostly built by Robbie Dingo, who is such an incredible builder.

Finally, I have to include this snap of Lewis Nerd, joining us on bagpipes and wearing a custom made Philip Linden / JumpTheShark T-Shirt. I love Second Life!