Philip Rosedale: Getting Back to the Garage
It has only been a few months since Philip Rosedale passed the role of CEO of Linden Lab®on to Mark Kingdon, in turn taking the role of Chairman of the Board from Mitch Kapor. This transition was a natural place to start the interview.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: You talked today about handing the CEO position over to Mark. So I’m just wondering if you could talk a little more about what that has meant to your job and your position.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah. Well, I have always had a product background and a technology background so my contributions have been always sort of R&D and innovation around Second Life as a product, the core technology. In the very beginning, I worked on, designed and wrote some of the early code in Second Life®. And, as the company has grown, I think I’ve been able to contribute enormously around things like organizational process, but more at a design level. I am fundamentally a designer. I’m a builder of things. And so I think the good call that I made primarily, with the board’s support, was to hire a ‘new me’ last year because I just felt that I’d be of more use to the company if I had the majority of my time working on design, product, innovation, problem solving, at the edge of where we’ve got challenges like usability, interface, those things. I wasn’t getting any more time. I mean with the company being 300 people – if you look back six months ago at my calendar – I wasn’t able to spend any time on design. I was spending all my time on leadership management, growing the company, organizational process. And I think that, if you go back and interview people, I’ve been a pretty good CEO for an innovative technology founder.
For me, this story holds more than a hint of the “tech firm as garage band” meme. I am not the only one who has a vision of the startup tech firm squatting in a garage, surrounded by disemboweled computers, wire clippers and soldering irons. And Philip wanted to get back into the garage. Not too surprising, but he then goes a bit further to confess what many in the blogosphere have suggested: that Linden Lab has matured enough that it needs someone who is not just a good CEO, but a great one:
PHILIP ROSEDALE: You know, I think I’ve grown into a good CEO, and I said this at the time that we made this announcement in transition, if you put a group of people together and you said, “I want to have a little convention, and I want to have the hundred smartest people in the world that like design and innovation around technology, I think I might get invited.” If you had a conference to talk about the people that are the hundred greatest leaders of mid scale to large scale organizations, I wouldn’t be on the invite list. I’ve read those people’s books, but I wouldn’t be there.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: And Mark would.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: And I think Mark is a guy who’s on his way to being on that list. If you look at his background and his skills, he’s an extraordinary guy. Wonderfully, he’s kind of a quiet guy so you have to look through his background carefully, but he’s just revered by the people that he’s worked with, in his ability to lead, provide adequate but not excessive structure, to just figure things out. He has a tremendous grasp of the technology, the feature set. He’s in world mentoring and walking around and going through every piece of the process. Like he mentioned onstage, he’s intensely acclimated to and passionate about user centered design to a greater extent than me, frankly. And then most of the founding team around Second Life, he has this very practical, “Let’s get in there and talk to people. Figure out what the problems are. Iteratively solve those problems.” And I think he’s going to do that better than we’ve historically done. I think the company, really, with my leadership, has had a sort of a technology first approach, where we’re a little bit more focused on R&D than we are on user led iteration. And so I think Mark will take us a little bit more in that user led direction, while still having the brains and the firepower to understand the technology and the product.
So my job will hopefully change, and it is changing, and the last couple of months have been just a total delight for me. The first time in almost ten years I’ve been able to relax a little bit and watch somebody else do a fantastic job just leading the company. So I’ve been able to go back and say, “Well, what, from a design perspective, am I going to work on next?” And I mentioned a couple of those things today. I’m generally interested in this broad problem, not just like 3D interfaces, but I’m interested in the general problem of how to connect oneself to the virtual world.
What exactly calls to Philip from the garage? The user interface:
As Mark was saying, he made a good expression there; he said that “it’s too mechanical today.” How we reach into the virtual world through the keyboard and the mouse, it’s really mechanical. It feels really clumsy and sort of step wise and we need to have something that’s more fluid and natural in the way that we come to use two dimensional windows on computers in a fairly fluid way.
So I’m interested in those problems. I’m interested in working on the interface. I’m interested in somewhat more advanced, forward looking interface technologies. I’m still participating in lots of different design issues. And whenever we’re contemplating a big change in the product, I’m certainly in the loop. I’m certainly working on those things. But, yeah, I just hope I’ll have a lot more time for R&D, a lot more time for product innovation.
Now, one aspect of the garage story puzzles me. Philip didn’t take just any role, when he stepped down as CEO. He became Chairman of the Board. That role has its own requirements, which rarely involve coding or soldering.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So the other change that happened at that time is that you took over Mitch Kapor’s role as chairman of the board.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Mm mm.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: And so that means, I assume, standard corporate governance, and you’re setting the agenda for board meetings, you’re responsible for looking out for investors’ interests, overseeing the management.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Right. But I’ve been on the board, and, as is the case with many great startups, I’ve been on the board from the beginning. I’ve always been on the board of the company. Mitch is our, well; he’s so many things to the company. He’s our founding investor. I was thinking Mitch is kind of the grandfather of the company in so many ways. The distinction of chairman, I think, happily, doesn’t usually kind of come into practice. We’re a very good board in terms of how we all work together.
So a lot of things will change, but, yeah, I’ll spend a little bit more of my time in that leadership and guidance role there on the board.
My outsider’s take on all of this is that bringing in Mark Kingdon as CEO was a smart move, and a natural one for a company that is maturing. But moving Philip to Chairman of the Board is less a matter of giving him a role he actually wants, and more a matter of giving him a role that sounds good. After all, isn’t “Rosedale steps down as CEO, Becomes Chairman of Linden Board” a better headline than “Rosedale steps down as CEO, Moves into Mom’s Garage”?
But let’s get a reaction from someone who has a much better inside view: the man who quite literally wrote the book on Linden Lab, The Making of Second Life, Wagner James Au. His responses to Rosedale will appear on his blog at New World Notes.
A sample of what to expect from Mr. Au:
I'm looking forward to the innovations Philip will cook up from his
new role. I am a bit concerned he didn't mention anything about
exploring and participating in Second Life more, because I think
that's where he'd be most valuable, for the community and for the
company.
Roland Legrand of MixedRealities.com provides not only comment on this interview, but the results of his own lengthy interview of Rosedale at PICNIC 2008.
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