I saw a post over at SLUniverse from Cristiano (SLU head honcho) linking to an article by Peter Diamandis on The Huffington Post – Second Life: How a Virtual World Became a Reality. The article is based on an interview with Philip Rosedale, AKA Philip Linden, once Second Life’s head honcho. The post makes for an interesting read, although it should be pointed out that Peter Diamandis is a friend of Philip Rosedale, which he states in the article.
This means the article is positive, hurrah! What I like about the article is that you get a glimpse of how excited Philip was about creating a virtual world, Second Life may or may not have turned out how Philip expected, I’m pretty sure he once said he expected it might look like New York. However he envisaged a virtual world and he got one and it will go down in history as being revolutionary.
The key to a virtual world going from being a dream to reality was, it seems, tied to broadband over DSL. This breakthrough left Philip realising that a virtual world was indeed a possibility. However just how expensive these dreams can be is also explained in the article, Philip had USD$1million to invest , largely due to making money when Real Networks, where he worked, went public. However this was not enough to get started, Phlip is quoted as saying: “Unfortunately, even with my $1 million it wasn’t fundable.”
However some people such as Mitch Kapor of Lotus 1-2-3 fame were on hand to provide help and Second Life was born.
The article also gives a brief overview into the world of venture capitalists, more to the point, how risk averse they can be. The article also provides some nice commentary as to where Second Life is today, with more quotes from Philip: “The company’s about 175 employees in size today, and it’s very profitable because those users on Second Life are able to do really cool things with it and they’re able to get value out of it. In turn, Second Life as a company is able to share in some of that as revenue. The GDP of Second Life today is somewhere between $600 million and $700 million a year in transactions between people. Most of those transactions are things like users building and selling clothing, furniture design, to other users — essentially people building a virtual world and then selling that virtual world to themselves.”
It’s nice to read an interview like this, it’s definitely worth a read but it’s also a shame that we don’t get information like this from the Second Life blog. I’m not exactly sure what Philip’s role is these days, but he has always been a good speaker and it’s definitely good to see him talking about Second Life.