Philip Rosedale is an American 🏷️#entrepreneur and technologist who founded 📝Linden Lab in 1999 and created 📝Second Life, the user-built virtual world it launched in 2003. Since October 2024 he has served as Second Life's full-time chief technology officer. Rosedale earned a B.S. in physics from the University of California, San Diego, and was named to Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in 2007.
Before Linden Lab, Rosedale created FreeVue, an internet video conferencing product that RealNetworks acquired, and served as RealNetworks' vice president and CTO from 1996. He led Linden Lab as CEO until March 2008, then became chairman, and returned briefly as interim CEO in 2010. He went on to co-found LoveMachine and then Coffee & Power, a marketplace for small jobs, which became High Fidelity in 2013; that company built a social virtual reality platform before refocusing on spatial audio. After High Fidelity took a stake in Linden Lab in 2022, Rosedale rejoined Second Life as a strategic advisor.
I was the CFO of Linden Lab from 2006 to 2009. When Philip and I first met, we compared the programs we had written on computers in 8th grade. When Linden Lab was acquired in 2020, we were invited back to Philip's backyard in High Fidelity for the closing party.