Philip Rosedale is an American 🏷️#entrepreneur and 🏷️#founder best known for creating Second Life, the virtual world he built through Linden Lab starting in 1999. Second Life became one of the most ambitious social computing experiments in history — a user-created virtual world with its own economy, identity system, and persistent society. Rosedale served as CEO for a decade, was named to Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2007, and returned full-time as CTO in 2024. His career spans FreeVue (acquired by RealNetworks, where he became CTO), High Fidelity (open-source VR/spatial audio), and FairShare (group-based digital currency aimed at reducing wealth inequality). He also serves as a founding board member and CTO at CIMC.ai.
He is currently CEO of High Fidelity Inc. and, since late 2024, full-time CTO of Linden Lab / Second Life. Rosedale is a board member of the 📝California Institute of Machine Consciousness, a nonprofit research initiative exploring consciousness in machines. His thinking has long centered on emergent social systems — how order, identity, and coordination arise from local interactions without top-down control — themes he explored extensively during Second Life's early economics and governance debates. John Zanowski worked alongside him at Linden Lab during those formative years and later shared stories and lessons from that period.
I was introduced to Philip by 📝Wendy Tan White at Joe White's 5th birthday party in September 2026 — and the resonance was immediately apparent. We talked about his institute and it felt like we'd been circling the same questions from different angles for years. What John Zanowski had described to me in person under his Bodhi tree turned out to be the early chapters of a body of thinking that Philip and I now share. The subjective resonance was discovered quickly and confirmed fully in that first conversation.