Rosedale: No plans to sell Linden Lab
By Adam Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Nov 27 (Reuters) - Linden Lab Chief Executive Philip Rosedale said on Monday that the company is not looking for a public share offering or a buy-out, but he admitted that the rapid growth of Second Life has at times stretched its resources to the breaking point.
“I’ve got no plans but to build a solid standalone company,” he said on the Yi-Tan Weekly Technology Call run by consultant Jerry Michalski and technology strategist Pip Coburn. “We’re at a place now, we’re very close to profitability, we have lots of money in the bank.”
Rosedale’s comments come on the heels of remarks earlier this month by Linden marketing vice president David Fleck, who told the Times of London that Linden Lab was open to an initial public offering (IPO) or a sale. Fleck has since left the company.
San Francisco-based Linden Lab is privately held and backed by venture capital funding from Globespan Capital Partners, Mitch Kapor, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos.
Second Life has seen explosive growth in the number of registered users, which total about 1.5 million from only 500,000 a few months ago. The number of regular users is much lower, with most estimates ranging from 100,000 to 600,000.
The number of peak concurrent users reached a new high of 16,000 over the weekend, a milestone which was marked by lag and system crashes within Second Life. Rosedale said that Linden had sufficient resources to deal with the increasing load on its servers, but he acknowledged that the company could not always bring enough resources to bear.
“We have a huge community of people who want to do things with Second Life that we as a company are stretched to the limits to try to accommodate, the question for me and us as a company will be how we can most rapidly grow to bring the things that people like” he said. “We have a problem meeting demand, people are buying more land than we are able to put online — that’s a high quality problem but it’s a problem nevertheless.”
