Linden Cuts Four, Possibly in Business Development

Yesterday Valleywag reported a tipster's rumor that Linden Lab was "laying off its business-development department, which had cultivated ties with software makers" in a move that would affect "9 or 10" employees.  With Linden's recently increasing focus on product development, reaching out to organization users, and even a hire aimed at liaising with the government, cutting biz dev seems like an odd move. Unfortunately, while Linden's PR was able to provide a statement, they couldn't clarify which department or what offices the cuts were in. The numbers do seem potentially lower than those quoted by Valleywag, though, which, incidentally, loves to mock virtual worlds and had a much larger round of layoffs earlier this month.

"Linden Lab is profitable, healthy and growing.  We've hired 100 people  this year and have open positions we are working to fill," Linden CEO Mark Kingdon said in a statement. "We are also increasing our  investment in core strategic initiatives related to platform stability, usability and several new product areas.  As we've refocused on these core initiatives, we've had to make some hard decisions about resources and as a result we eliminated four positions out of our headcount of nearly 300.  We do eliminate positions from time to time, and of course we have some attrition (in the single digits), though historically less than half the industry average."