Nu Vibez and Roleplay Guide Magazine - August 2014 | Page 89

I SEE PIXEL PEOPLE- p2

An Interview with CEO,
Ebbe Altberg

crea ve space where people can be
entrepreneurial if they want to.

Let's all get off our high horses and give
them a rest. It is me to stop whining
about Second Life and Linden Lab, and
me for a reality check!

They always believed that such a place,
such a pla orm, 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 frac on of that.

Think back to 1999, midnight on the 31st
of December to be precise. As the world
held its collec ve breath what were you
d o i n g ? We r e y o u s i n g t h e r e
wondering if the end of the technological
world as you knew it was about to
descend upon you? Had you stock piled
yo u r p a nt r y ? O r we re yo u j u st
celebra ng the end of one century and
the beginning of the next?

Only it didn't happen that way and it was
a long hard slog for Linden Lab to get
Second Life established. When they
couldn't grow it as quickly as it needed to,
they had a round of layoffs. There were
31 of them and 11 of them le . That was
in late 2003, at which me they thought
they were pre y much dead.

1999 was also the year Philip Rosedale
started Linden Lab with Andrew
Meadows.
As the clocks around the world moved
into the year 2000 nothing happened,
everything carried on as it had been
doing.
Philip and Andrew were steadfast in the
belief that what they were crea ng was a
complex emergent system driven by an
economy and the contribu ons of a lot of
people, just like the Internet but in 3-D
and live--you were really there. The other
thing was this idea that it ought to be a

And then LL did one discon nuous thing:
They recognized that there was a core of
people who were really star ng to want
to build the content and invest in it and
really value it. And they 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.”
LL said the same thing about land: “Land
is yours to own and resell.” They had
been reading Hernando De Soto's The
Mystery of Capital and Jane Jacobs and
all these books about innova on and
Nu Vibez Magazine - August, 2014 - 89