Philip Linden's Blog
I spoke Wednesday at Bryant and Stratton College’s in-world graduation for its online students, which I thought was a great Second Life moment. So rewarding to see Second Life starting to be really useful for education. I did the new thing of actually writing some thoughts down as a speech and then reading it – I have never done that before. So I’m sure I probably sounded a bit wooden to the students listening, but I wanted to really give some deeper thoughts on the event. Anyhow, here is what I said:
“I heard it said recently that engineering students entering college today will learn computer languages which will be outmoded and no longer be in use by the time they graduate. This is a remarkable suggestion: because as an engineering student graduating fairly recently, in 1992, I learned languages which served me well and in fact some 10 years later formed the basic building blocks of this digital place where we stand today for your graduation. But as both a futurist thinker and in my own experiences at my own company, I couldn’t agree more: In the past 4 or 5 years I have seen the rise of whole new computing architectures unlike anything that existed when I was in school. New technology platforms rise up and are built upon, rapidly obscuring the lower layers like sediment. We don’t build software for computers anymore, instead we build Facebook and IPhone apps. And those whole platforms didn’t even exist when Second Life launched in 2003.
It is this building of one thing on another that makes technology so exciting and terrifying. Each advance creates tools or a platform that is used to make the next advance possible, and at least twice as fast as the one before. Whether you are talking about computers, or batteries, or cell phones, or bioscience, we are now in the knee of the curve – the place where this acceleration suddenly becomes noticeable. The crazy thing though, is what happens next. The curve goes from rapid growth to an almost vertical climb toward infinity. The company that took 2 years to start in the 1990’s takes a month today, and you can imagine a place like Second Life reducing that to 2 days. The IPhone that we marvel at today – well in less than 10 years time that same amount of technology will fit inside one of your cells. What will the world look like with changes of that magnitude? Honestly I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else does either.
But fighting or ignoring these technology changes is like standing in the water at the beach and letting the waves hit you… can you remember doing that as a kid? If you were strong, you could brace yourself and stay standing as the smaller waves crashed by you and the sand slid away under your toes. But we live now in a time when each set of waves is twice as high as the one before, and to resist these larger waves, to pretend that they aren’t there or that you can stand against them quickly becomes hopeless. Our hope and future lies instead in letting go of the bottom, surrendering ourselves and our pasts, and letting these waves carry us where they may, working instead to catch our breaths and try and figure out where we are going. This isn’t an easy thing. It is frightening. In whatever world that is to come, we won’t yet know our own value or where we stand. How we will make money is uncertain. Our friends, lovers, and co-workers won’t be the neighbors we grew up with, but instead will be people from all over the world, people our parent’s probably would never have even seen or met.
This college, and many of you as students, are from the United States, a country which at this very moment faces a serious economic crisis. It seems unbelievable but possible that the US dollar could soon lose it’s status as the reserve currency – the gold standard – for the rest of the world. The banks and industrial giants that drove so much historical growth in the US economy are declaring bankrupcy. So much change after decades of constancy! But does this mean that as the most recent children of the US educational system that you have already become as outmoded as the computer languages I mentioned earlier? It does not.
By standing here at a formal graduation ceremony in the midst of a strange new virtual world, you are the embodiment of what I believe is the greatest and most unique part of the American Spirit – the willingness to take great risks: to learn, to change, and to accept uncertainty. This same spirit is what made at least some of your parents delighted and not dismayed to learn that you were going to be part of a virtual graduation. I have traveled the world, and nowhere but here in America have I seen this persistent willingness to do new things and take chances. You could be ridiculed for graduating as avatars, for wearing digital caps and gowns, but you are unafraid and in fact excited, or at the very least, amused. This spirit, the one that made you willing to stand here today, will make you winners in the times to come. As technology makes the future less and less certain, erasing the borders between countries, and rewriting the economic landscape, you can and will prevail if you strive to be as changeable and adaptable as your avatars. Don’t trust the specific things you have learned, because they will change faster around you than you can imagine. Trust instead that you have learned how to learn, and that by taking chances and letting go, you can ride the waves that are coming. Graduating here today, in Second Life, is good evidence that you can.”
Hi all!
For those wondering generally what I’ve been up to, I said in earlier transition announcements from CEO to Chairman that I wanted to get back into engineering and the design of Second Life in a more hands-on way. So I am now working with two other great engineers as one of Linden Lab’s technical teams. In early December we decided that a good first project to work together on would be improving the performance and experience of using the web-based SL map, and also changing the architecture to be able to handle a much larger number of sims/servers. And, I have to say I’m having a great time getting back into development.
Hopefully, the general direction we are going with the map can help to make place and proximity more meaningful in SL. It should be fun to explore the map: to look at what is near your home, to drill down for more detail, to randomly surf around and jump to places that look interesting from the air. We always felt that this would be a big part of the appeal of SL, but the practical challenge of rendering things far away combined with the weaknesses of the existing web and in-world maps have made this more an aspiration than a reality.
More specifically, we’ve just released some improvements to the SL web-based map (http://www.slurl.com) that should be immediately noticeable. First, the map should load faster and be smoother when you use it. Secondly, you can now single-click on any location on the map and teleport directly there. The map is also accurately updated much more rapidly then the former map – so changes to the Second Life Grid or content should now be visible within about 2 days. Finally, the map images themselves look smoother and are more accurate when compared to the actual in-world content, and you can now zoom out and see how big SL has really become!
We’re not done with this project! We also intend to update the SL viewer to read its map tiles in the same way as the web map, meaning that you will be able to zoom and move around on the in-world map in a manner similar to the webmap, with much better performance than before. Look for a viewer release candidate next with those changes.
For SL developers, and the more technically interested: We are now serving map tiles directly from Amazon S3, and have changed the file naming convention to hopefully make it much easier to develop other 3rd party maps based on the tiles we are generating. More documentation on using the webmap API is available on our wiki. The map generation process is much more scalable than before, and is able to image the entire SL grid of about 30K regions in less than 2 days with just 4 dedicated machines. In general, the architecture approach of generating tiled images on sims into a public repository like S3 seems like the right approach for both performance and openness – it anticipates the ability for individual sim owners/operators in the future to create their own maps (or not make them at all!) and upload them to a common shared filespace on which multiple mapping systems can then depend.
Note: If you have built a map that depends on the old mapping API, we will leave the old tiles accessible for another few weeks, but will not be updating them in the future. You will need to switch to reading tiles directly from S3. We will post more information about this changeover on the wiki.
Also, here is a link to the forum for more discussion or any questions.
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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