Transcript of 10-28 Town Hall with Philip - Part 1

Philip Linden: Hi Everyone!!
Philip Linden: Nice to see you all
Philip Linden: OK!
Philip Linden: Thanks for coming.
Philip Linden: I suppose we've all heard the news by now, but let me summarize
Philip Linden: we've just closed a new round of financing for the company,
Philip Linden: for a total of $8M dollars.
Philip Linden: The investment is coming from both our existing investors and two really great new ones:
Philip Linden: the first is Benchmark Capital, which is an amazing VC firm that really gets what we are doing and is behind it.
Philip Linden: The second is an investment from Pierre Omidyar, through his foundation, the Omidyar Network
Philip Linden: Pierre is a guy trying to make investments that promote technology enabling people...
Philip Linden: if you take a look at their site you will see some of the other things they do... very impressive stuff.
Philip Linden: I first met Pierre through his having an account in SL! He is one of us.
Philip Linden: Also, Pierre is the founder of eBay, which was also a benchmark-backed company.
Philip Linden: The guy from Benchmark who will be joining our board is Bill Gurley
Philip Linden: Bill is an amazing smart guy - engineer by training - who has learned an amazing amount about this market and about SL
Philip Linden: He is going to come to an upcoming town hall and take questions.
Philip Linden: We took this investment because it seemed like a great fit.
Philip Linden: Bill and Benchmark came to us with a deep understanding of what we are doing...
Philip Linden: and interest in backing and creating this type of thing... where the actions of a large community are what really drives the business,
Philip Linden: and not the other way around.
Philip Linden: We hadn't been directly seeking investment at the time - SL has (as you all know) been growing really well
Philip Linden: but we were very very excited to have the chance to get these guys onboard.
Philip Linden: As for what we will do with the money...
Philip Linden: we will do what we are currently doing, exactly, only faster.
Philip Linden: this means we will hire more people, fix more bugs, build more tools.
Philip Linden: We will get SL stable and totally scalable,
Philip Linden: and keep building it in exactly the way we have been...
Philip Linden: by rapidly fixing and evolving it, and by listening carefully to what is being said by everyone and to what is happening in-world.
Philip Linden: So I'm out of breath...
Philip Linden: let's take some questions!\

You: Jarod Godel: Question: Will the fact that eBay is now a backer of SL encourage Linden Lab to embed Hyperlinks into SL?.
Philip Linden: So.... hyperlinks.
Philip Linden: We think that deeper connections to RL are important to SL, and we are working on them now.
Philip Linden: This means more than just hyperlinks...
Philip Linden: there is clearly a general need to do great 2D interfaces, for example.
Philip Linden: We are working on this, and will do it faster with more investment.
Philip Linden: Remember.... eBay is NOT a backer because of this investment,
Philip Linden: The investment is from Pierre, not eBay.
Philip Linden: We will be able to ask eBay lots of questions, though,
Philip Linden: because of the close connections they have to benchmark...!
Philip Linden: but this is informal... they are not an investor.

You: DoteDote Edison: what do the investors expect in return for their monies? since this is not a public company?
Philip Linden: The investors get a stake in the company... this means some of the stock.
Philip Linden: That is the way all private equity investments work.
Philip Linden: Pre-public companies still have stock, just like any other company.
Philip Linden: When you bring on an investor, you give some stock to the new investor,
Philip Linden: in the same way that you give stock to employees.
Philip Linden: By pre-public, I mean that Linden Lab is not a public company...
Philip Linden: you cannot buy our stock at an exchange.
Philip Linden: But investors and employees own stock.
Philip Linden: So what the investors 'want' for their money is simply for us to become successful.
Philip Linden: So that the % of the company they own goes up in value compared to what they paid.

You: SuluMor Romulus: When will LL become public?
Philip Linden: We have no specific plans to go public... we are still very early in our growth,
Philip Linden: and I couldn't even hazard a guess as to where we will be some years from now.
Philip Linden: My main focus will be to raise money and grow LL in a way that gives us the right levels of freedom
Philip Linden: to adapt SL to what it needs to become.
Philip Linden: The investments we have taken so far are consistent with that...
Philip Linden: everyone is very excited to see us take risks, make big decisions, and challenge the status quo
Philip Linden: that's what we've done with SL, and we will keep it that way.
Philip Linden: This investment combined with our growth also means we won't have to raise money for a long time.
Philip Linden: So I'll be able to fix bugs, not give presentations.

You: Emmy Guillaume: Will the Benchmark/Ebay connection help iron out issues with SL Land Auctions? - ie, will that technology be available here, in SL
Philip Linden: Again... there is no specific connection to eBay. I think our land auctions work okay.
Philip Linden: maybe we should do them through ebay? I'm not sure... open for forum discussion.
Philip Linden: But right now no plans.

You: Jarod Godel: Question: Will SL be taking more Open Source direction, seeing that benchmark backs RedHat and MySQL?
Philip Linden: I think we are already very aligned to open source...
Philip Linden: most of the challenge with open source is getting our team big enough to handle it.
Jarod Godel: Will you be opening any of the LSL code?
Philip Linden: You need a lot of people to manage the process.
Philip Linden: But we see no reason why SL tech shouldn't be open...
Philip Linden: of course in some sense (in-world) all of SL is in a meta way open source.
Philip Linden: But we will do more specific open source stuff over time. Just a matter of resources.

You: Sulendro Street: Is this good news also good news for users of the Mac SL client?
Philip Linden: This is good news for everything having to do with tech or features of platforms...
Philip Linden: because we will be able to hire more and work faster.
Philip Linden: so yes.

You: Weedy Herbst: Q- Will GM be able to build car lots and sell real cars?
Philip Linden: Hah! No more so than they can today.
Philip Linden: I think that real world stuff like that won't work as well in SL as things built here,
Philip Linden: because the spirit of SL is in how much better stuff built/done here can be.
Philip Linden: We are fair and open about uses... we don't for the most part try to restrict what people do here.
Philip Linden: We do however; hold out the right in our terms,
Philip Linden: to not allow real-world advertising.
Philip Linden: Whether we would invoke that to limit GM if they sold cars here (without asking)
Philip Linden: would be a function of what happened... how we all responded.
Philip Linden: But it is incredibly important that we not act where we do no need to, I think.
Philip Linden: I don't think toyotas would sell as well as seburos in SL.

You: Higbee Protagonist: Q haney: Since you guys are putting all of these void sims up, how soon can we really expect an asset server upgrade?
Philip Linden: The asset server upgrade was done a couple weeks ago....
Philip Linden: we are running on much heavier hardware there.
Philip Linden: There are fixes in the 1.5.6 that will put less load on that server as well,
Philip Linden: so that will make things faster too.
Philip Linden: I think perhaps you are thinking about bugs other than the asset server.

You: Jarod Godel: Question: You say real world stuff doesn't work well here, and yet you say it needs to integrate with the world better. can you explain how those two aren't mutually exclusive statements?
Philip Linden: Sure I can.
Philip Linden: The coolest things in SL will have the majority of their intrinsic value on the SL side, I believe.
Philip Linden: So let's look at movies as an example.
Philip Linden: Let's say we add the ability to play back movies in SL.
Philip Linden: Like a texture or something.
Philip Linden: So if we add that capability, there are different ways you could use it.
Philip Linden: I think that a compelling example would be a sort of mystery science theater...
Philip Linden: where we all watch old movies in a group like this and comment on them.
Philip Linden: Good grief that would be hilarious, and so very very SL.
Philip Linden: But what if you use that feature to just advertise some dumb movie that is coming out...
Philip Linden: put up billboards all over the place with trailers.
Philip Linden: That is using the same feature in a way that doesn't leverage any of the uniqueness of SL.
Philip Linden: So I think tech connecting SL to RL is neutral...
Philip Linden: it is a question of how it is used.
Philip Linden: And I doubt that the totally non-SL uses like pure advertising will be very compelling.

You: Hiro Pendragon: Q: Thoughts on full reverse compatibilty with WWW?
Philip Linden: ummm I suppose that is a big question... email me on that one or forums.
Philip Linden: I don't totally understand.

You: Maxx Monde: Last night you said markup from a small number of players buying most of the land in auctions wasn't a problem. If that is true, isn't the fact you have so few sellers versus the number of land buyers an inherent problem? Or an oligopoly *is* wanted?
Philip Linden: I don't think anyone understands the right direction for land...
Philip Linden: but it will emerge like everything else.
Philip Linden: Right now it seems there are a small number of people buying land at auctions,
Philip Linden: and selling it at virtually no profit to a larger set of people in smaller plots.
Philip Linden: At least that is what I see in the data.
Philip Linden: Once SL is really big, I don't think it is appropriate for us to design/parcel/plot all the land.
Philip Linden: It seems better to sell bigger pieces to folks who basically redevelop it in some way.
Philip Linden: right now we are doing a little of both.
Philip Linden: We sell some small plots and some big.
Philip Linden: But I think long term it should be the community that drives the expansion planning, terraforming, everything.
Philip Linden: So we need a plan to get there.
Philip Linden: Agree that right now things are doubtless not optimal. Eager for feedback.
Philip Linden: I don't think LL creating every tiny plot for every new user is the right design though.

You: You: Kathryn Jackson: will the amount of prims allowed on a peice of land ever increase?
Philip Linden: Yes, it will.
Philip Linden: As we speed up the code or get faster hardware we increase it.
Philip Linden: It used to be 10,000 now it is 15,000.
Philip Linden: I don't have a target date or anything.
Philip Linden: first priority is making the overall system faster with the prims we have.
Philip Linden: BTW we are doing some incredibly work in labs on that. Hang in there.

You: Chosen Few: With all this new investment, any ideas about upgrading the physics engine to something that can support more complexity?
Philip Linden: Yes we will upgrade to Havok2 and do other things to do that.
Philip Linden: No target date, but high priority.

You: Zapoteth Zaius: Question: How do you feel about all the malls cropping up in SL? (Not bashing them, I own one too )
Philip Linden: I think malls are great cause they are one of the first thing that has worked really well in SL
Philip Linden: so that is cool... emergence.
Philip Linden: Same thing with night clubs.
Philip Linden: they are a trip, right?
Philip Linden: But they aren't the only thing that will be great in SL
Cereal Milk: yes, there's also casinos!
Philip Linden: I am waiting for the next few big ideas.
Philip Linden: I don't think we will have long to wait. I suspect that malls are far from the top of SL's potential.

You: Driftwood Nomad: Will there be better rewards for non-developers, like scripting and textures?
Ice Brodie misses group project support.
Philip Linden: We are working on some plans for how to better incent non-dwell development, yes.
Philip Linden: Look for some announcements over next months.

You: DoteDote Edison: what about people who "game" the dwell system in their various ways
Philip Linden: No system used by humans to score things is perfect.
Philip Linden: We will keep making dwell and reputation and stuff like that better,
Philip Linden: but I suspect there will always be deviation from what we would like...
Philip Linden: for dwell or reputation, etc, to reward what we collectively want it to.
Philip Linden: I don't have easy answers to that. I don't think there are.

You: Donnie Donovan: I read the articles on professors conducting virtual classes in Second Life. Are there any plans/ideas to create features for teachers and/or public Universities in-world with class room tools?
Philip Linden: We have a big feature list and in general I'd say some help with education,
Philip Linden: but nothing specific. We don't have multiple teams... only one.
Philip Linden: I'd say gaming in general (making it better in SL) is biggest priority along those lines.

You: Kurt Zidane: is there, or ever been, plans to out sources or hire some one with major experience in graphic engines. ie John Carmac, or some one at Idos systems.
Philip Linden: We have guys that good.
Philip Linden: We will hire more.
Philip Linden: This is a big challenge.... rendering a scene this complex.
Philip Linden: We have biased toward complexity, because we beleive that is what deeply matters.
Philip Linden: And now we race to bring up the frame rate.
Philip Linden: Just give us a bit of time... we are working on some graphics improvmenets that I think you will like.
Philip Linden: We are a hardcore 3D team... lots of experience.

You: Torley Torgeson: Dear Philip, will there be more privacy options in the future for those who, say, wish to be intimate and personal and find that IM alone is not expressive enough? Or a "hide from Map" mode so that one cannot be found temporarily?
Philip Linden: Better privacy is certainly on our lists, yes.


You: Oz Spade: Will there be any development in future versions of SL towards allowing us to make our own front-end GUI interfaces through LSL? Something more powerfull than llDialog.
Philip Linden: Yes there will. Big time.
Philip Linden: Working on some ideas now.

You: Krashen Byrne: Several sims have been hit by a dwell wipe bug in the last few weeks. Can you update us on what is being done?
Philip Linden: Honestly I've been so busy on the funding side I don't know status on that.
Philip Linden: If you send me an email to remind me (philip@lindenlab.com) I'll get some data.

You: Ice Brodie: Philip, did you bring us swag from the con, and what's the possibility of having persistant storage, if not in notecards, due to asset server concerns, maybe a textcard object without the inventory function?
Philip Linden: Well on the swag side...
Philip Linden: it's a legal conference... so not too much to grab.
Philip Linden: But we sponsored it and there are these nice leather binders catherine did...
Philip Linden: with the SL hand embossed into the leather.
Philip Linden: But I don't know how attendees would take to me lifting those from their bags.
Philip Linden: As to the notecard thing and storage... point noted. We definitely have that on our list. No schedule.

You: Yoshi Platini: Are you hitting bottlenecks on the Net itself, or are the lag issues at this point solely in LL's ability to generate the streams?
Philip Linden: There are no bottlenecks on the net.
Philip Linden: Most of the delays in things happening in SL are due to the servers struggling to get data ready to stream to clients,
Philip Linden: or due to low FPS on the viewer (which makes everything lag)
Philip Linden: Well yes I'm sure some parts of the world are slow, I agree.


Philip Linden: Hey can I ask a quick survey question, BTW.
Philip Linden: How many people here are not from the US? Just type 'me'
Oz Spade: You'll have to pass it through Haney.
Weedy Herbst: me
Zonax Delorean: me (EU/Hungary)
Moopf Murray: me
Caran Suavage: me (EU/Hungary too)
Torley Torgeson: me
Bernardo Rockwell: me
Bernardo Rockwell: brazil
Caran Suavage: me
You: Moopf Murray: me
Philip Linden: So maybe 25-30% of us.
Philip Linden: OK that is helpful.

You: Moopf Murray: Philip, you had said only a week or so ago that all near-term development is in fixing bugs, yet you have mentioned that you're working on a number of different things in the labs? So, you're not working exclusively on fixing bugs then?
Philip Linden: Well we are all working on stuff that in one way or another speeds up or smooths the system.
Philip Linden: So right now some folks are fixing specific bugs in code,
Moopf Murray: that's different from working on bugs though, surely
Philip Linden: others are adding systems or tools or other backend tech to better manage scale
Philip Linden: others are working on rendering and other enhancements to make the viewer faster, etc
Philip Linden: We mix near and mid term development, yes.

You: Yoshi Platini: Do you foresee rolling out more "alien" sims, or even another "planetary" Grid? I'd love to see more terrain like Mimas and Tethys.
Philip Linden: Good point... noted.

You: Jarod Godel: Question: Is Second Life immersive to you, Philip, or is it an extension of real life?
Philip Linden: it is immersive to me. Less an extension of RL.

You: Jeri Zuma: Q. for Phil: Lag.... that is the biggest single frustration... what will be done to attack it and to open up the possibility of large groups functioning well in a single sim?
Philip Linden: Well there are a lot of things we are doing...
Philip Linden: faster rendering of large groups.
Philip Linden: faster server performance.
Philip Linden: faster physics.
Philip Linden: That problem is central... affects everything.

You: Salazar Jack: The idea of providing an inworld interface for exchanging Lindens and US dollars, or buying Lindens directly with our credit card has surfaced recently, any comments on that?
Philip Linden: That change is lower priority... clearly people have ways to do that now. Bug fixing most important.
Philip Linden: But long term, we figure there needs to be some ways to exchange currency better than creasting a new account at a website...
Philip Linden: but not feeling like we need to have that tommorow.
Philip Linden: folks in that thread get confused...
Philip Linden: we aren't talking about LL selling currency,
Philip Linden: but about whether we should figure some way to do what is done today straight from the UI
Philip Linden: and in a way that works for a newer user with less time and interest.
Oz Spade: Not like There? But more like GOM through the interface?
Philip Linden: Right, like GOM in the interface.

You: Driftwood Nomad: Do Lindens also have alt avs?
Philip Linden: Some of them do, yes. But we've got not too much time for them in general, I think.

You: billy Madison: Question for philip: will there ever be more telehubs added to the snow sims at the bottom of the grid
Philip Linden: Adding telehubs is always hard cause its a debate and a big change for folks that already own land.
Philip Linden: But desire noted...
Philip Linden: will pass on.

You: Kathryn Jackson: I just wish the game did not crash so much do you actually do anything with the crash reports that are generated?
Philip Linden: We look at every single crash report.
Philip Linden: There are still a large number of reasons why crashes occur.
Cereal Milk: three of them being A, T, and I
Philip Linden: Some we will fix... we are getting the numbers down.
Philip Linden: Some are due to the graphics cards and drivers needing to mature.
Philip Linden: We try and do a broader set of things with the graphics card,
Philip Linden: and some cards crash when we do.
Philip Linden: We have a pretty good channel to nvidia, ATI, apple, etc. Hope to make it better.
Philip Linden: I think we will have another generation of cards until thing are really really stable.

You: Moopf Murray: What are your thoughts on player's private investment sponsoring larger projects in SL?
Philip Linden: Um if by that you mean people buying big plots of land like the aerodrome or sometihng....
Philip Linden: I am totally delighted.
Philip Linden: It is so great that we are growing and creating the room for such larger things.

You: Catherine Cotton: Philip what do you think SL will be like a year from now?
Philip Linden: What a great question, Catherine.
Philip Linden: Well here is what I hope:
Philip Linden: That there will increasingly be big projects... like the aerodrome or darklife...
Philip Linden: that will compete and diversify the couple of BIG things that go on today.
Philip Linden: I'd like to see a wider variety of experiences, and an increasingly tight and complex community of support
Philip Linden: around building and sustaining those activities.
Philip Linden: We need to add some features to make some of those work,
Jade Lily: Philip talks about what he would like to see *us* do with Second Life. Pay attention.
Philip Linden: but I think there is also a process underway that is working and is emergent and comes from all of you.
Philip Linden: Look at big projects like skydiving...
Philip Linden: a year ago we would never have seen that.
Philip Linden: Can you imagine if in a year there are just 10 more things of that scale?
Philip Linden: 10 things that are pure SL - things we've never seen before.
Philip Linden: That would be great... and I think it can happen.
Philip Linden: OK everyone...
Philip Linden: I've gotta get on a press call.
Philip Linden: So fun to be able to tell everyone here first about this all.
Philip Linden: And thanks for the support.
Philip Linden: Feel free to email me with other Q's or thoughts, as always.