Why You Should Have Your Next Business Meeting in Second Life

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Second Life

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Philip Rosedale

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Getting A (Second) Life

We could have had three or four people on the call without having to use a 1-800 number. We'd just show up at a park somewhere in Second Life. Audio quality would be better than the telephone and you would hear the nuances of the voice better. If I wanted to show you a prototype of a new product, I'd just pull it out of my pocket and rez it -- meaning it would just show up and float in front of you. If we were working on cellphones, I could show you a big 3D model of our newest cellphone and we could play with it. If you put people in an immersive space that's also somewhat novel -- in Second Life you can actually rent tiki huts on a beach -- I guarantee you that you would remember the content of this conversation better than you would driving in your car and talking on the phone. I guarantee you would have laughed once or twice when I put on a funny hat or changed clothes with my avatar.

The applications just make it more fun to do business. We're in a creative economy now and people have choices about where they work and how they work. Being able to do your work in a virtual workspace that makes it fun and reduces your travel time is a tremendous benefit to a company.

Here at Linden lab, obviously we're eaters of our own dog food, I'm literally looking around my office right now and I can see several people who are in meetings with other Linden team members in world. We do virtually all our meetings in world -- in many cases we do an in world meeting even when we all are located in the same building.

How does the relationship change?

Anecdotally, the virtual meeting space allows people to establish friendships in business context and get closer to one another. You don't have real eye contact. And meetings are significantly less threatening. The sense of threat we have in real world meetings just isn't there in the virtual environment.

Earlier this year, you stepped down as CEO. Why?

I am fundamentally a product and design guy and technology is my background. We're a profitable company, growing quickly and closing in on 300 people. That's a big business and I didn't feel I could do it better than anyone in the world. If you looked at my contributions to designing virtual worlds, I think they're second to none. I'm one of the best guys on the planet to help a company do that. But if you look at the kind of organizational leadership you need going from 300 to 3,000 people, I don't think I'd be in the top 100. We're a very unique, well- positioned, interesting and compelling company that deserves to have the best people in the world in every role.

I've been leading this company as CEO since it began in 1999. I think I've done a good job but I'm ready to change and get myself more focused on product design technology. We have to do a tremendous amount of innovation and product work and technology work to grow beyond where we are now. I think it's best for the company if I reserve a large amount of my time to contribute there.

What's your next big idea?

There are a couple of things that need to become radically different about virtual worlds and specifically Second Life. One is usability. No one has figured out an easy way to use a virtual world, to make the software intuitive, and make the experience fast and fun and appealing to everyone. I think it's doable. There are incremental changes that we can make to the technology to make it as palatable as a Web browser -- perhaps even more so.

We've got issues around scalability. I think this whole thing is going to grow by about two orders of magnitude, a factor of 100, in the next 10 years. A lot of architecture is going to have to work right to make that happen. Second Life needs an intuitive interface and good search and discovery. When you try to browse the virtual world today, it still takes a bunch of time to find live music, a classroom or a teacher. Google figured out how to organize information on the Web and we need to figure out how to do the same thing in the virtual world. I think that's a worthy challenge to take on as a technologist. I love it.