Mitch Wagner: Linden Lab needs professional help
By Adam Reuters
Fresh from a one-on-one interview with Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, Information Week’s Mitch Wagner has concluded that the company needs to bring in a new chief executive or chief operating officer if it wants Second Life — which he calls “buggier’n the mattress at a cheap Las Vegas motel” — to prosper:
Linden Lab is a wonderful company that’s working miracles every day. But they don’t have experience managing a booming business, and that shows. They need to bring in people who know how to take a company from emerging startup to billion-dollar giant.
Wagner, who gives a tip of the hat to Akela Talamasca of Second Life Insider for her comments on the issue, warns that such a transition is seldom easy.
For a lesson on what not to do, he points to Apple Computer in the early 1990s, when the company ousted founder Steve Jobs and brought in a series of seasoned managers who never meshed with Apple’s culture and strengths. On the other side of the coin, Wagner holds up Google and eBay, who needed a bit of grown-up supervision and brought in “outsiders who get the company vision.”
Second Life residents’ reaction to Wagner’s call to arms will probably range from “Amen, brother” to “good luck with that,” but the real audience for his column is Linden Lab’s venture capital investors, who have the biggest financial stake and influence in determining what happens next.
What do Mitch Kapor and Pierre Omidyar, who both have first-hand experience with the transition from start-up to professional managed technology firm, have to say about all of this?
