I can’t remember Sandy Linden, apparently Sandy was formerly VP of HR for Linden Lab. Now I’m not going to be familiar with, or even remember, every Linden, but this man seems to be extremely well regarded by people who do know him, exemplifying that Linden Lab have indeed hired some serious talent over the years. This struck me as I found a story that Sandy Gould, who has been working for Disney/ABC has been recruited as senior vice president of global talent acquisition and development for Yahoo! The story is on TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/08/yahoo-hires-former-disneyabc-televisions-sandy-gould-to-lead-talent-acquisition-and-development/
Rather interestingly the Facebook comments on the TechCrunch article are started by a former Linden whom I do remember, Ginsu, who has an old complaint about stories that mention Linden Lab:
Dammit it’s Lab not Labs! Linden Lab. <sigh> Congrats Sandy!
However it’s not TechCrunch’s fault … this time! They are quoting the Yahoo blog post about Sandy’s appointment: http://ycorpblog.com/2013/01/08/sandy-gould/ The interesting thing about this is the way they tie Linden Lab/Second Life together. This is something Rod Humble has been helping to fix by releasing new products, of which Versu goes quieter and quieter by the way, there’s less info on the homepage for Versu now than at any time since I’ve seen the page!
However back to Sandy Gould, there’s an interesting article from 2008 in The New York Times which mentions Sandy: The Job Interview, Starring Your Avatar. This features a description of Second Life being used for … umm… job interviews, as well as Sandy being in a Superman outfit to conduct said interview.
The article also calls Second Life a Multi-User Virtual Evironment, or MUVE, which isn’t exactly an acronym that has caught on but is a good retort to people who tell you Second Life is a game!
What articles like this bring to the table are examples of different use cases for Second Life, reminders of former staff, reminders that there are many folk beavering away in the background at Linden Lab whom we may not be familiar with or appreciate their efforts and that no matter how many times it’s pointed out, people simply can’t help adding the letter s to the end of Linden Lab, big article or small article, Linden Labs has, for some bizarre reason, stuck as the name of the company on an alarmingly widespread scale. This isn’t helped by Linden Lab’s Senior Director Of Product being Don Laabs, they could have at least made it Don Laab!
A VP Of global talent acquisition and development sounds like a rather funky title, but it’s not one Linden Lab are currently looking for. However there are a number of vacancies on their careers page: http://lindenlab.com/careers Now I’m always happy to see Linden Lab recruiting, I’ll worry when they’re not. However, some of the interesting positions I was looking at back in November, are no longer advertised, which may not be surprising but what has happened to the jobs? The Director of Customer support and virtual currency manager vacancies are two I’m particularly intrigued by. These positions aren’t listed on Linden Lab’s Senior Management page, presumably because they aren’t senior managers but it would be nice to know whose doing what!
The About Linden Lab page that does list the management, is quite amusing and interesting, you can read it here: http://lindenlab.com/about
They seem to be having a bit of fun with their biographies, which is nice to see, it would also be nice to hear from them now and again, the current lineup:
Management
- Rod Humble | CEO
- Malcolm Dunne | CFO
- Lisa Berry | General Counsel
- Don Laabs | Senior Director of Product
- John Laurence | Senior Director of Product
- Lori Medeiros | VP of Human Resources
- Jeff Peterson | VP of Engineering
- Lee Senderov | VP of Marketing
Board
- Philip Rosedale | Founder
- Mitch Kapor | Kapor Enterprises, Inc.
- Jed Smith | Managing Partner, Catamount Ventures
- Bill Gurley | Partner, Benchmark Capital
- Dana L. Evan | Strategic Finance and Operations Executive
- Will Wright | CEO, Stupid Fun Club
They have some interesting backgrounds and some seem to have arrived with Rod Humble as they have experience with Electronic Arts, this isn’t new, some people who arrived under Mark Kingdon had experience with his former companies and some people who were here in the early days had experience with Real Networks, as did Philip Rosedale of course, indeed Sandy Gould had experience with Real Networks.
The days of Linden Lab’s management being close to the inworld community are long gone, I’m not sure if this is good or bad to be honest, but as long as they do a good job, we can have little complaint ….