It's easy to gripe about Second Life, what with its recent loss of luster and backlash in the media. A recent article in Inc. did a comprehensive interview with Linden Labs CEO Philip Rosedale, and a blogger at Found Read synthesized the interview into a clever top five that highlights what Rosedale did to get Second Life funded and off the ground (top five from Found Read, Rosedale quotes from Inc.)

1. Rosedale recognized his big idea for Second Life early, AND that it was too early for the market. So he waited, as Rosedale explains: "This is a nonstarter right now because for this to be interesting it has to be sexy, it has to be fun, it has to be fast, it has to be within human response times. It has to be like a video game. And in the mid-‘90s you couldn’t do 3-D on a PC."

2. Rosedale recognized that he needed more training if he was to be successful with his Big Idea later on. "I needed some experience working with other people and learning how you get people to work together and work on a really big system. I figured I would get to see all that at Real [Networks where he worked before founding Linden Labs]. And I did."

3. Even with big-name backers, Rosedale heard ‘No’ a lot because not everyone accepted his vision. But he understood that they accepted him. So he kept going. "Second Life was just unfundable. It was just the dumbest idea ever. Mitch Kapor [the founder of Lotus Development] was the only person who got it. Mitch invested in 2001 after I had invested about a million dollars of my own money. I think some of the early angel investors were largely investing in me."

4. When he saw that word-of-mouth marketing wasn’t working, Rosedale bit the bullet and made lay-offs. "When we couldn’t grow it as quickly as it needed to, we had one round of layoffs. There were 31 of us and 11 of us left. That was in late 2003, when we pretty well thought we were dead."

5. Finally, he recognized that getting customer buy-in meant “letting go” of the development, and placing it in the hands of his users. The rest is history. "We recognized that there was a core of people who were really starting to want to build the content and invest in it and really value it. And we said, What you have in Second Life is real and it is yours. It doesn’t belong to us. We have no claim to it. Whatever you do with Second Life is your own intellectual property."

The entire Inc. piece is worth a read, and credit to Found Read for so aptly summarizing the salient bits!

[Via Metaversed]