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Industry Moves: Second Life CEO Philip Rosedale Stepping Down

By Rafat Ali - Fri 14 Mar 2008 02:10 PM PST

So the other shoe has dropped on Second Life: the once-hyped and then much-maligned virtual world company is losing its creator, founder and CEO Philip Rosedale. He will remain involved with the company full time as chairman of the board, he said in a blog posting.

The company is looking for a new CEO, and Rosedale makes the pitch for a more seasoned business professional: “As we grow, the role of our CEO will increasingly be to hire and grow the right team - to lead and help the company scale - to thousands of people and tens of millions of users of Second Life...I bet this will be the most interesting job opening in the technology world.”

Reuters: Mitch Kapor, investors and board member said that the management change is not a prelude to a sale of the company or an IPO, though he acknowledged that an IPO was an option under consideration.

Posted in: Entertainment, Gaming, Virtual worlds, Industry Moves

Tags: philip rosedale, second life

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From David Evans Mon 17 Mar 2008 06:32 AM

As someone who has built and inhabited virtual worlds for 15 years, I find the story of SL fascinating. Pretty good technology, passable worldbuilding tools, an ecosystem of companies building islands for major brands and the media certainly did their job over the last two years.

So why is SL stuck in a rut? Simple. SL is impossible to understand for newbies and there is nothing to do. People need some sort of direction when entering, some gameplay, anything to get them engaged. This has been rehashed a dozen times over.

I went to the SL recruiting party last summer in Boston. Interesting group of people, but nobody was into the business side of things, it was real estate dealers, sword sellers and other fringe folks.

Linden and they told me to go work for Rivers Run Red or Electric Sheep!

Maybe some Apple designers need to go into SL and work their magic.

An IPO at this time would be a debacle.