Interview with Linden Lab chairman Mitch Kapor in Davos
By Adam Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Jan 26 (Reuters) - Bureau chief Adam Reuters interviewed Linden Lab chairman Mitch Kapor on Friday from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he talked about why we shouldn’t care about the coming Second Life backlash, whether residents should have a seat on the board, and his in-world mind altering experience.
Kapor on:
The $100 billion opportunity
If you look at the history of disruptive technology platforms, like the PC, like the Internet itself, it appears that Second Life, or more properly virtual worlds, are going through that same type of explosive growth that happens when you have a very open platform, in which the barriers to entry and participation are low, in which there’s a lot of entrepreneurial incentive, and also a lot of idealism. And when you make the system open the way it is, with the open source client and more opening to come, people will invent fabulous applications of things to do.
When the PC was invented, nobody anticipated the spreadsheet, which I was very involved with, when the Internet became commercial nobody anticipated Amazon.com or eBay, and I have the same conviction that these virtual worlds are going to have killer applications that will just make it a huge industry. If we run the business well at Linden, Second Life can become a very large undertaking. If we don’t, then it will be somebody else’s.
The Second Life roadmap
Work on sound is very present tense, not some unstarted fantasy.I don’t know what the schedule is on sim limits, but I know that architecturally the feeling is it’s well understood what needs to be done. It’s do-able and it will be done, but I don’t want to make promises that have a low probability of working out. Software is hard and SL is still early on. It is wonderful but it is immature, everyone who uses it regularly understands that, there’s a kind of love/hate thing, and it is going to move rapidly.
Linden Lab’s “liquidity event”
The founding philosophy of the company was, we want to be in this for the long term. We want to make this sustainable. When we brought in venture capital money from Benchmark, there was a long soul searching discussion because we needed to feel confident we wouldn’t feel pressure for a premature public offering or a premature anything. This is a long term company.
When will there be a liquidity event? When do the investors and employees who are shareholders get some money back? There’s no timetable on that. Not this year. We’ll look at it again.
We’re focused on building out the company. The grid has to stay up 24-7, the frame rates have to go up, we have to make it easier to use, it has to become more civilized, there are all sorts of governance issues. All that is a hundred times more important right now than worrying about cashing out. I am not thinking about a liquidity event.
Second Life Hype
There are two things going on simultaneously: huge amounts of attention, the company isn’t hyping itself but there’s a bubble; and huge amounts of substance. You don’t have a million dollars U.S. changing hands every day and this huge explosion of creativity and economic growth without there being substance. So there’s going to be a retrenchment, the bubble will burst, but we’ll all try not to get too upset about it … we would all do well not to pay too much attention to the bubble aspects.
Avatar rights and Linden Lab board representation
I think there’s an argument to be made for democratic self-governance in Second Life. We’re a bit like China. The Communist Party talks about democracy step by step. The company has absolutely no interest in being the government of Second Life. Today it’s extremely crude — the landowners can set the rules and in an autocratic way enforce them. That’s not democracy.
It’s not about putting a member of the community on the board. The issue is it’s a for-profit business, there are fiduciary responsibilities to the shareholders. It’s not that I’m opposed to it — it’s that it doesn’t make sense in the current structure. So I’m taking kind of a Chinese position on this. I have to think after we finish this (interview) about whether it could be more accelerated or not, but right now, no.
The company is quite responsive to the residents as a pragmatic matter. That’s what’s in everybody’s interest. But there are five percent of people who are never happy, and the company isn’t going to make them happy. It’s about the greatest good for the greatest number. I’m interested in understanding whether there are ways of having resident-based organizations having a more formal consultative or advisory role. That’s one I think we ought to be doing something, and I think some of that is on the roadmap.
Second LIfe as a mind-altering experience
I do think Second Life can be a mind altering experience — Second Life, SL, LSD…maybe not an accident! When you’re in Second Life and you’re having a mixed reality event — the first one that did it for me was the Susanne Vega concert, and I saw the movie that was made. I’m watching a movie that was shot on a computer of a concert with a virtual avatars, but the real music, with other people in and around and watching it. I’m going, what’s real, what’s virtual, and I realized those distinctions were artificial. It’s all just as real, it’s all just as virtual. And I felt like the walls dropped away, and the universe which has been a small room got a million times larger.
