Linden Lab is a technology company best known as the creator of 📝Second Life, the largest-ever 3D virtual world built entirely from the creations of its users. Founded in 1999 by 📝Philip Rosedale and headquartered in San Francisco, the company launched Second Life in 2003 and operates the platforms, currency, and payment rails that let residents create, own, and trade virtual goods. Linden Lab employs a deep bench of technology veterans, including former executives from Electronic Arts, eBay, Disney, Adobe, and Apple.
A defining feature of the company's model is its policy granting participants intellectual property rights to the in-world content they create, which seeded a user-generated economy that today supports roughly two billion creations and a virtual economy of about $500 million. Linden Lab operates the LindeX, the exchange for its in-world currency, the Linden Dollar, and in 2019 spun out Tilia, a registered money services business and licensed money transmitter that powers virtual economies beyond Second Life. In 2008, the company received a Technology & Engineering Emmy for Second Life in the user-generated content and game modification category. Acquired in 2020 by an investment group led by Randy Waterfield and Brad Oberwager, the company saw its founder return as Chief Technology Officer in 2022.
I was the CFO of Linden Lab from 2006 to 2009, the press's "virtual fed chair," as it grew from $10m to $80m in revenue. I managed the world's largest virtual economy and stabilized the LindeX while shutting down in-world gambling and battling credit card fraud, and I developed an SEC-approved revenue recognition methodology for the sale of an infinitely transferable digital good — generating $30m in cash flow from selling virtual land.