Interview: Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon

Last night, Linden Lab announced that it tapped Mark Kingdon, former CEO of digital media agency Organic, to replace founder Philip Rosedale as CEO. Rosedale had continually emphasized that management skills would trump software experience in the search, something that seems to have worked out the best it could for Kingdon.  "I can't imagine a more exciting job, really," he said. "It's the most amazing mash-up of my personal passions. I wouldn't have been able to design something more exciting myself. I feel incredibly honored and privileged."

Regardless, this is hardly Kingdon's first brush with Second Life.

"I've been very interested in social computing and social media for the last several years in my job at Organic," Kingdon told Virtual Worlds News this morning. "Organic worked with some really interesting companies to take them early into social media, and we had some terrific success. I learned a lot about Second Life and experienced it first-hand through that. I found that it was a really, really compelling experience."

In fact, that early experience is almost directly responsible for Kingdon's new role.

"I met Philip about a year ago and invited him to our management team meeting to talk about Second Life," he said. "He was one of the best speakers we've ever had. It was really interesting, and we stayed in touch. When I read that he was looking for a replacement, I sent him an email, asked what he was looking for, and the rest is history. "

Kingdon's Second Life

"What's so compelling to me is the breadth of the ambition," Kingdon said of Second Life. "It's very big. It's very open. All of the wonderful content that's created individually and collectively created makes it a very rich experience. That's one of the magical properties if you will of Second Life. There's so much creativity and collaboration and co-creation and sharing. That makes it an incredible experience for the residents. "

One thing Kingdon made clear is that he's not gearing up for any specific changes yet. He won't begin as a full-time CEO for Linden Lab until May, and he's still familiarizing himself with the company and platform. Rather than come in with a grand new vision for Second Life--at least one that he's sharing--Kingdon's plan is to listen and learn.

That said, there are still some basic plans.

One of the things that's a basic principle for me, particularity when thinking about user-centric design which is what Organic does, is that you start with the user," Kingdon explained. "In this case it's the resident. It's going to be really important for me to understand their needs and what they require. There's no question that grid stability is a really, really important part of that. That's something the company has been very focused on well before the CEO search."

That commitment is sure to be welcome news to the existing Second Life community, but the rest of the industry has more interest in what Linden Lab can do to bring in new users, from individuals to corporations. Kingdon's taking that into account as well.

"The other side of that is there is an opportunity to enhance the resident experience, particularly for new residents spending their first hour in world," said Kingdon. "It takes a significant time investment, but it's pretty clear that once someone has made that investment and crossed that divide, they stay and they stay engaged. All good things come when we make that easier and shorten that learning cycle. And it's very possible and doable. There are lots of complex technologies that people have added extremely simple interfaces to. For that reason, they're joyous."

Kingdon cites the Wii as an  example, though, before  anyone starts getting their Wiimotes set up for PC use, not necessarily as a specific direction for Second Life.

His point seems like a new spin on Linden's initial concept for Second Life: build a space, and the users will fill it. For Kingdon, it sounds more like, make the space easy to use, and then the users will  fill it.

"We need to generally make it easier for all types of residents to get comfortable quickly," said Kingdon. "As we're doing that, I think a lot of different resident groups will emerge with different needs for their Second Life experience. As those groups emerge, we'll be looking at the tools and experiences they need for a rich in-world experience and figuring out the things they'll build that we should help create by giving them tools.  I think all those things will become clear as the resident groups solidify."

Regardless, it's not something Kingdon wants to steer too directly.

"Second Life isn't one of those experiences you can deterministically direct by saying it will be this or that," he explained. "What makes it so rich is that it's defined by the residents and the direction they've taken it. One of the primary definitions of Second Life is that it's open and free."

Kingdon's Linden Lab

Of course, much of the direction for Second Life and the Second Life Grid will still be coming from Rosedale, who will assume a new role as Chairman of the Board. Part of the point of the transition itself, Rosedale explained to Virtual Worlds News, is to free him from management duties and let him focus more on innovation and strategy for the virtual world.  Kingdon, though, will be helming Linden Lab.

With a corporate culture--the Tao of Linden--that alternately earns praise for innovation or scorn for inefficiency already in place, what can we expect from Kingdon?

"One of the things that intrigued me a year ago when Philip came to talk to my management team at organic was his leadership vision for Linden Lab and some of the innovative practices he used and still uses today," said Kingdon. "I think that every company goes through different stages of evolution. The culture that's created in formative years is what makes it strong and rich and vibrant. There's no question that's what Linden Lab has. My job is to find those parts that are core and central that we need to grow and then in a comfortable way decide where we need to change."

Just as Kingdon discusses the open-ended nature of his relationship with Second Life, he doesn't want to approach Linden Lab with set  ideas either.

"I think it's very important to listen and learn," he said. "And I'm not even on the Linden Lab payroll yet, so I'm listening and learning from an outsider's perspective. The first thing I want to do is spend time with everyone and listen and learn first-hand at the same time as getting to know residents and getting to know their needs and where they're going. From that, the priorities for the company and myself will emerge. I'm not going with some preconceived notion. I think it's important in a place like Linden Lab to listen and learn and engage all the smart people and move from there."

Kingdon says he had a similar experience when he took the same role at  Organic, itself a seven-year-old company when he joined. It had a similarly self-directed, low-hierarchy culture. Seven years later, Kingdon says, much of his inherited culture is still active and going strong.

"I think that that's so important as I join Linden Lab that we keep and nurture those things," he explained.

First 100 Days

While Kingdon's plans are open ended, one plan he will discuss is to stick with Rosedale at the beginning. Just as Rosedale was reluctant to speculate on what exactly his new role would be--"That should be a conversation," he said--Kingdon wants to work with his predecessor to plot the smoothest possible transition.

"Philip and I have talked a lot about our time together, and one of the things that I did at Organic is that the founder and I shared an office for my first year," said Kingdon. "It was absolutely fantastic, just one of the best things we did. Philip doesn't sit in an office, but if you extend the metaphor, I think it's really important, and Philip agrees, that we spend a lot of time together because this is a partnership. My first focus is on absolutely learning as much as I can on what the folks at Linden Lab are doing, what the strengths are and what the weakeness are  that they're working through. Then figuring out with them to focus energy on the things that are most important. I do think that's making the platform stable and successful for the existing residents and making the new resident experience better."

The biggest challenge Kingdon sees for Linden is maintaining its  early innovator status. With more and more competition coming from different directions, sustaining the speed of innovation is "one thing we'll be focused on," said Kingdon.

Mostly, though, Kingdon is optimistic.

"We are at a really fantastic place in the evolution of the digital experience," he said. "It was initially just a static page on the Web. Then we saw sound and video. I think the next stage of evolution is the 3D virtual world experience. I think that Second Life is in a really enviable position in this next "

Comments

[Simone Brunozzi]

I think that Mark Kingdon will be an excellent CEO; Philip is a great leader and technology professionist, but being CEO and some-kind-of CTO at the same time isn't easy.
I hope, however, that Mark will be able to bring Second Life to a broader audience.

[Prokofy Neva]

Fascinating interview, and hopeful sign of more attention to inworld content creation and businesses.

Here's where I see some friction coming sown the pike, however, if Kingdon really follows through on this: he still has Philip Rosedale in the company still in charge of "strategy", and its some aspects of this "strategy" that Philip is still in control of that likely need to change.

Philip's strategy has always emphatically been to privilege and celebrate early adapters and their rapidly-adapting new apprentices, and the technically-proficient in the understanding that 10 percent of the people in most virtual worlds create the content for the other 90 percent.

Philip has always tended to scorn land businesses and in fact emphatically speak out against arbitrage and constantly follow a policy of reducing value of land and glutting land (which serves LL's bottom line but constantly disrupts investment of inworld businesse -- not only land sale operations per se but any business that has need of land for a store or a venue).

Philip has also tended to be unaware of the value of land services and land value for the world's economy, and tends to privilege content, scripting, gadget-making etc., naturally following his inclinations and his belief (held by his peers) that only the programming and design of software and inventoriable content matter in virtual worlds.

On usability/newbie orientation, Philip also has profoundly ideological beliefs about how this should happen and has constantly intervened and shaped this, recently by creating a privileged list of corporations that were contracted to handle newbies with their own APIs and fed a percentage of the sign-up stream -- and failed at retention as much as the Lindens do.

The Linden newbie experience has always emphasized building and scripting skills and filtering out newbies who are willing to go master these skills (or come already equipped) as part of the Linden philosophy of privileging content-making above all (in part, Kingdom himself leans towards making content king) rather than creating a balance among content creation, land, services, amateur user generated aggregation.

Philip and other Lindens prevailing at LL have also had an adamant view opposed to any form of advertising either on the log-in, the website, or the welcome and orientation areas. This more than any single factor hobbles the entree of big corporations into SL, but it also harms inworld businesses struggling for visibility in a field of vast atomization, lack of internal mass media, and fierce competition.

In his bid to keep out commercialization and overexposure of marketing, Philip has in fact merely enabled it to take much more ugly and massively crass forms (like the plethora of ad-farmers who extort land sales or control the view in many sims, something he is unwilling to do anything about due to -- again -- his belief in privileging creativity uber alles, rather than community and even the mildest forms of restraints on the few for the sake of the harmony of the many.

Ironically, the fiercely zero-advertising policy for the venues that really have the eyeballs (welcome areas, the splash screen) coupled with a fiercely laissez-faire approach to massive and unethical spam advertising on sims (where eyeballs are aggregated only by spam and repetition) has created a real wasteland for marketers. There are two easy ways to fix this:

o regulate advertising which means *allowing it* where there are the most eyeballs -- this can be on a rotating basis, on a sale basis, and can be tastefully done

o regulate advertising placement and form where it harms land values for those trying to offer venues, content, or maintain private lives, i.e. on residential sims -- restrict all ads to roadside or in commercially-designated sims.

If Kingdon worked on those two facets of the world, I'm confident he would see a DRAMATIC change in the valuation of Second Life for both corporations and inworld balances and an accompanying VAST improvement in the user experience especially on the mainland.

Instead, currently, as it is now, Lindens are still resistant to any form of orientation/welcome area advertising by inworld or outworld businesses, yet are contemplating letting some privileged resident organizations put their newbie-helping or non-profit content in welcome areas to steer the population to more Linden Mentor-like or NPR-like experiences, rather than allowing even the most service-based, newbie-oriented businesses to advertise -- let alone corporations like Coke or Nike that would be accepted by most people already used to them in the real world.

The fact is, most people coming into SL don't want to see NPR in the round, and don't want to learn to build or skill and live in a hippie commune. They want to find a range of things from dance clubs to role-play or geographical/culture themed sims to interesting lectures on books and ideas. So advertising should be allowed to help steer them to these venues, and the orientation experience should be simplified to concentrate on teaching people the skills to move, communicate, search, shop, manage inventory, and buy land or start businesses, rather than merely building, scripting, texturing, making particles and joining the FIC.

The current newbie experience forces those who land and manage to stay for the first hour to put a HUD on their head (something of eternal fascination to geeks and war-gamers but cumbersome for most people to find, understand, and manipulate), then forces them to learn to drive a vehicle (something they may never want or like to do in SL, given the terrible problems of sim crossings and poor physics), then, if they manage to overcome these and other obstacles, forcibly dumps them into an urban landscape with tall buildings they bang into while learning to fly, and canals that they keep falling into as they learn to walk.

I'm telling you, this situation is hurting desperately, and Kingdon really needs to hit the ground running on this, and make sure that ground is terraformed more flatly and freed of lag-inducing pitfalls, simplified, and appropriately open to outworld corporate and inworld service advertising as well as non-profits to help retention.

[Jon Himoff]

mark--

Success = new users.

Suggest you don't waste too much time on this. We wish you all the best in being successful. If you would like to work with us to promote our great areas and help show the positive side of the virtual world please let us know.

We are hosting a build festival which is another good of example of what is only possible in Second Life now http://garden.rezzable.com .

[Liberty Tesla]

I don't know what Prok is talking about with regard to orientation. I just took a new alt through Orientation Island, and it was exactly what he said it should be: moving, flying, chatting, changing appearance, buying, etc. Not a peep about building, scripting, texturing, or cliques.

Mind you, the orientation was still awful. It was dated (referring to user interface elements that no longer exist) and the HUD was buggy and not very useful even when it did work. I'm glad to hear M talking about improving the initial user experience, because SL's front door is badly in need of repair, and makes a terrible first impression.

And no, I don't think billboards would improve that first impression. If you have to have commercials, save them until *after* the audience is hooked.

[Prokofy Neva]

Liberty, as someone as a beta-era oldbie with a birthdate of 2003, you are picking out of this what you want to see, and trying to defend the status quo, understandable. I've gone through it, too, recently.

Sure, there are tutorials for moving or communicating. But they are cumbersome to move through, require forcing newbies to answer questions and go on mini-quests and take quizzes and earn money as if they were in a game (!), and various other silly things.

You are *forced* to go into this vehicle mode, *forced* to use a HUD that is indeed buggy and out of date, too, etc. -- I'm glad you conceed that.

I'm talking not only about that initial orientation island you land on, but every single other help/welcome/orientation type of area that the Lindens host in order to guide newbies. Every single one of them pushes building/scripting classes and NPR type stuff.

Billboards are for making it possible to have portals out of that hell of orientation. People WANT to be educated and informed about WHERE TO GO and WHAT TO DO. There is nothing wrong with having among those things sponsored ads that lead to clubs or venues of various types. Any normal real-life city would have the same thing, i.e. Grand Central Station in New York.

Just look at what the Lindens unveiled today, it's just awful:

http://secondlife.com/showcase/sub_page.php?showcase_category=4&blog_category=3

They can't seem to let go of the world, let go of the FIC, and now even institutionalize it. I really can rest my case very heavily for all the FIC skeptics out there by showing what they've done today!

They will now have a subjective, edited list steering newbies to venues *they pick*. These are already demonstrably their little friends, and their favourite corporations.

Instead of having a normal, transparent, democratic, automatic, and fair system called "paid ads" that would be accessible to any member of the general public willing to pay and follow some simple list of criteria (PG content, say), they have this ridiculous, twisted cabalistic "showcase".

It's just insane. Such a closed, secretive, biased system only leads to cries of injustice and is far more insidious than the common "camping" of sites, which is the poor man's classified.

When you look at this Showcase hand-picked by the Lindens to force newbies to visit (they will never see or hear of anything else), you have to marvel. Why is CSI:NY, which only has a dwindling number of visitors now since it flopped, featured there to artificially pump into it new life? Could this be due to the Lindens having accepted payment for a license to have a customized viewer by the Sheep, and a desire to keep them in their ambit? Or was it any part of an unwritten or unpublicized deal?

What is Capitol Hill, with its grand total of traffic of 113 and 71 even being featured on the website (!) all about? Does this have anything to do with the congressman in California who was involved in the opening of the sim? (I've asked questions about this relationship in great depth on my blog, and heavily debated the developers of it as well).

Sure, Virtual Estonia and Straylight are architectural or creative treasures but should we be flogging sites like these and dosing the newbie stream to them? What about every other business in SL?

Can you imagine if real life ran this way, where only the mayor's friends and a handful of NPR-approved venues got to advertise at JFK or Grand Central or anywhere on 42nd Street?!

One can only hope that the self-evident absurdity and socialism and injustice inherent in all these Linden schemes will be part of what brings them down.

The Lindens already have billboards in their welcome areas. They advertise their own content. Well, it's their game.

[Gordon Graham]

I agree the orientation process for SL is really abysmal.

It's too bad, when there are decades of best practices well-known to writers, instructional designers, and usability testers on how to introduce new material to new users.

Hint: start with an objective audience analysis and task analysis. Those might take 2 days.

There are associations, books, checklists, and no doubt dozens of experienced people willing to help with this on either a volunteer or paid basis.

But clearly LL has not availed itself of any of these resources.

The orientation looks like an amateur production by a handful of developers with next-to-no testing. The type of thing you often see in software startups.

Man, I would love to get my hands on this project... give me two weeks, and I could whip that process into shape like you just wouldn't believe.

[Gordon Graham]

I agree the orientation process for SL is really abysmal.

It's too bad, when there are decades of best practices well-known to writers, instructional designers, and usability testers on how to introduce new material to new users.

Hint: start with an objective audience analysis and task analysis. Those might take 2 days.

There are associations, books, checklists, and no doubt dozens of experienced people willing to help with this on either a volunteer or paid basis.

But clearly LL has not availed itself of any of these resources.

The orientation looks like an amateur production by a handful of developers with next-to-no testing. The type of thing you often see in software startups.

Man, I would love to get my hands on this project... give me two weeks, and I could whip that process into shape like you just wouldn't believe.