"Board of Directors" Added to Lindenlab.com's About Page

There's been a change at the bottom of the "About" page of Linden Lab's website. In addition to nine of Linden Lab's senior staff, at the bottom has been added "Board of Directors." There are three people listed there, Brad Overwager and Randall Waterfield, the two leaders of the investment group that acquired Linden Lab, and Raj Date.

Brad Oberwager

Brad Oberwager has spent his entire career in technology and consumer focused companies as an entrepreneur and board member.

Currently, he sits on the board of two public companies, Asure Software (NASDAQ: ASUR) and Better World (NASDAQ: BWACU). He is the chairman of two companies he founded, Jyve and Sundia and is also on the board of TEGSCO (aka AutoReturn). He owned Bare Snacks, acquired by PepsiCo in 2018.

Brad was Vice-chair of YPO International, a global organization of 25,000 CEOs.

Brad received his BS from Georgetown University, his MBA from the Wharton School and lives in San Francisco.

J. Randall (Randy) Waterfield

Mr. J. Randall (Randy) Waterfield, is the Chairman of Waterfield Holdings, which traces its origins to 1928. After selling the largest private mortgage company in the US and largest Indiana based bank in 2006 and 2007 respectively, he diversified into technology, manufacturing and other industries.

Randy holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation and is a graduate of Harvard University. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Red Oak Partners, Waterfield Technologies, Linden Research, Inc. and has previously served on the boards of YPO (and was the 2017-2018 Chairman of YPO), Asure Software ( NASDAQ: ASUR), SMTC Corporation (NASDAQ: SMTX), RF Industries (NASDAQ: RFIL), among others. He is also the Co-Chairman of Missouri Cobalt, LLC, the largest cobalt mine in North America.

Randy supports various education, environmental and community development charitable causes through the nonprofit Waterfield Foundation and J. Randall Waterfield Foundation.

Raj Date

Raj Date was the first-ever Deputy Director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). As the Bureau’s second-ranking official, he helped steward the CFPB’s strategy, its operations, and its policy agenda. He also served on the senior staff committee of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and as a statutory deputy to the FDIC Board.

Before being appointed Deputy Director, Raj acted as the interim leader of the new agency, serving as the Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury. He led the CFPB for most of the first six months after its launch.

Currently, Raj is the Managing Partner of Fenway Summer, an advisory and investment firm focused on financial services and financial technology. In that capacity, he chairs the investment committee of Fenway Summer Ventures, a fintech venture capital fund, and works with clients of FS Vector, the fintech advisory firm. He also serves as a Director for a number of innovative firms in financial services: Prosper, the marketplace lender; Green Dot, the bank holding company; Circle, the digital asset firm; Grasshopper, a de novo bank; and College Ave, a private student lender.

He is a graduate of the College of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley (highest honors) and the Harvard Law School (magna cum laude).

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau came about in 2011 as a response to the financial crisis of 2008. Before Fate joined it, he was a senior vice-president at Captal One and as a managing director at Deutsche Bank. He was also on the Board of Directors of Prosper Marketplace. He left banking work in 2009, and started the Cambridge Winter Center, which was "devoted to promoting the regulation of financial firms." His being apointed Deputy Director of the CFPB came with some controversy as it was reported that he was active in the discussions over the the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which led to the CFPB's creation. But he "was never found to be in violation of any laws and he had always recused himself from rule-making regarding peer-to-peer lending." It was after he left the Bureau he founded Fenway Summer. 

More on Oberwager and Waterfield can be read in our first article about the acquisition.

Sources: Linden Lab, Wikipedia

Hat Tip: Daniel Voyager

Linden Lab Announces Bing Gordon, Former Electronic Arts CCO, Joins Board of Directors

Last week, Linden Lab announced that Bing Gordon had joined their Board of Directors. Currently the Chief Product Officer of  Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers (KPCB), He is also known for "known for his gaming knowledge as former chief creative officer at Electronic Arts and as an investor and director at Zynga."

“We’re honored to have Bing join our board of directors and work with our team,” said Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab. “He’s helped to bring to life some of the most influential entertainment experiences in recent memory, and as we prepare to open Sansar for all creators, his insights, expertise, and counsel will prove invaluable.”

“Linden Lab has a wonderful legacy and future, based on its technical excellence and forward vision,” said Gordon. “Over the past 14 years, Second Life has proven the value of user-created virtual experiences, and enabling people to create their own social VR experiences is a massive opportunity for which no company is better positioned than Linden Lab is with Sansar. I’ve been spending a lot of time working with Ebbe and the team over the past six months, and it’s an exciting time to officially join Linden’s board.”

Hamlet Au of New World Notes called Bing Gordon's addition potentially good news for Second Life and eventually Sansar to retain new users, "Bing is a passionate advocate of gaming systems to drive engagement. So hopefully this means he's going to advocate for adding game systems to both Second Life and now Sansar, something many Linden Lab staff want, but are unable to push forward without more support from management."

In an article in Polygon, Gordon compared running a business to a "World of Warcraft" guild.

"If you're going to build a company, you have to do it like a World of Warcraft guild leader builds guilds," Gordon explained. "You build a weekly calendar, with check-ins, you come up with a system and process to split up the loot, and hope that they don't try to kill the boss," he joked."... the most powerful part of gaming isn't the competition, it's cooperation. So you develop a structure where cooperation is rewarding. In MMO parties, it turns out with a party of five, even if it's strangers in what's called a 'pick-up group,' what you come to expect is that each individual is around 20 percent more productive, using overlapping skills."

Second Life isn't a game, though almost from the beginning users have been making and playing games inworld. Trouble was, newcomers whom were used to MMOs which provided some sense of direction on where to go, have often felt aimless and confused by the lack of it following the short introduction at Learning Island. This has been cited as one of the big reasons Second Life first time users have a low retention rate, estimated by some to be as low as ten percent. If Gordon can cut the number of new users dropping out by half, that would halt and probably reverse Second Life's long slow decline in usership.

Sources: Linden Lab, Forbes, New World Notes, Polygon

Bixyl Shuftan

Philip Rosedale (Philip Linden) No Longer on Linden Lab's Board

Hamlet Au of New World Notes reported yesterday that Philip Rosedale, Second Life's founder and also known here as Philip Linden, confirmed that he was no longer on Linden Lab's board of directors.


"I left the board around the start of the year [as] I was starting High Fidelity, but on great terms -- both Mitch [Kapor] and Linden are both investors in High Fidelity, and I'm still a big shareholder in Linden."

No longer on the board, Rosedale "no longer has any more input on company management decisions, overall direction, or policy formation." Hamlet saw this as a milestone in the history of Second Life as it means for the first time, "no Linden board member has direct day to day experience with Second Life as a product or personal memory of it's development of its hardcore user base." Most of it's current board comes from the gaming industry, which "suggests a very different direction for the company" than it's founder. "Veterans of the traditional game industry tend to take a very aggressive view on intellectual property," Hamlet noted, suggesting that might in part explain the recent Terms of Service controversy.

While he still has shares in Linden Lab, this news means the last "old hand" has truly left. How this affects the residents remains to be seen.

Source: New World Notes

Breaking News: Will Wright, Creator of “the Simulation Game Genere,” Joins Linden Lab’s Board of Directors

If you’re a fan of simulation gaming, you have recall the name Will Wright. Starting with the groundbreaking “Sim City” in 1989, Wright created a number of successful simulation games, such as the “Sims” series and “Spore.” He now has a new addition to his impressive resume: a member of Linden Labs’ Board of Directors.

A look at the Linden Lab site revealed his name and a biography. He was listed as “CEO of the Stupid Fun Club,” which suggests a tone of levity on his joining in. Taking a look at the Stupid Fun Club’s website was a manifesto stating a goal of helping human beings better unify with their technology, sometimes using tounge-in-cheek phrases.

Second Life Newser was contacted by Fuzzball Ortega of Steelhead, whom found the information on New World Notes, Hamlet rightly calling it a major coup, the creator of “the Simulation Game Genere” now joining Second Life. The lycan sherrif lightheartedly chided us, joking about the Newser not being the first this time to report breaking news.

The addition of Wright to Linden Labs shouldn’t be too big a surprise, considering Linden Lab’s CEO Rod Humble’s own background in gaming. Still, bringing in such a prestigious figure to Second Life, it can only be considered very good news for the future for the Grid.

Image from Stupid Fun Club.

Bixyl Shuftan