As people await a blog post, some with baited breath, I can non-exclusively reveal that Ebbe Altberg has been named as the new CEO of Linden Lab. The news was brought to my attention by a post over at SLUniverse by Ashur Constantine, who joined SLUniverse in February 2014 ….. and was making his first ever post ….. hmmm.
The news is however confirmed by reading Linden Lab’s press release on the matter. Rumours that Ebbe has been appointed CEO purely because he has Alt in his surname have been strenuously denied by unnamed officials.
The press release informs us:
Most recently prior to joining Linden Lab, Altberg was COO of BranchOut. Prior to that, he was part of the executive team at Yahoo!, most recently as SVP of Media Products. His more than 25 years of experience managing teams that create world-class products and services also includes leadership roles at Ingenio (acquired by at&t Interactive) and Microsoft.
There are more details about Ebbe on his bio on the Linden Lab website:
Ebbe Altberg comes to Linden Lab with more than 25 years of experience leading teams and creating software used by hundreds of millions of users. After graduating from Middlebury College he went on to work at Microsoft, where he spent most of his 12 years leading teams that created the world’s most popular productivity products such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Office.
In 2000, Ebbe moved to Ingenio, Inc., where he headed up product and had a stint as interim CEO. As Chief Product Officer, he lead Ingenio to become an innovative telephony and marketplace company, which was ultimately acquired by at&t Interactive in 2007.
Ebbe then joined Yahoo! in Europe as VP Head of Audience, with responsibility for all consumer-facing products and affairs. After a couple of years he was promoted to SVP Media Products, a group of about 800 engineering and product people that created the Yahoo! homepage, news, sports, finance, and entertainment products and platforms.
Most recently, Ebbe went back to a small startup, BranchOut, where he was the COO and managed the teams building products for professionals such as BranchOut and Talk.co.
Alas Ebbe hasn’t yet made anything funky to put next to his name like the other senior executives have, but give it time.
Hopefully Ebbe will address the people shortly in the form of an official blog post, but Ebbe is the CEO of the new Linden Lab, where there are products other than Second Life, however as Second Life is still the star project, people will expect an address at some point in the near future.
Ebbe is not a household name, nor were Mark Kingdon or Rod Humble, although Rod was known in gaming circles. However Ebbe’s CV does demonstrate a quarter of a century of experience, which sounds much longer than twenty five years for some reason.
Ebbe has worked for Yahoo! Those who have experienced pain and suffering at the hands of Yahoo! over the likes of Flickr or Yahoo! Groups should not be panicked by this news.
What Ebbe can bring to Linden Lab and Second Life, only time will tell, but I would hope that everyone will give him a very warm welcome and a chance to implement his own ideas.
Just to clarify, I’m relaibly informed that Ashur Constantine is not a mole, which is a pity in many ways because it would have been exciting to have an undercover alt spreading the news at SLUniverse.
And he already has a parody account: @RebbeAltberg
That was fast out of the blocks!