“Doing less, better,” Rosedale said at SLCC this year. Well, one thing the Lab has a lot less of is its executives.
With the departure of the Vice President of core development, there are now just four company executives left on the books at Linden Lab.
Whether they are or aren’t being pushed out of the door, it makes me wonder what the Lab knows that I don’t.
What we have left at the moment is:
- Bob Komin, CFO, CEO and probably acting interim CEO to replace the Rosedale as the previous interim CEO – but who is not listed as such.
- Frank Ambrose, Senior Vice President of global technology.
- Joe Miller, Vice President of platform and technology.
- Kim Salzer, Vice President of marketing.
So, that’s one company officer, and three vice presidents.
As for the vice president of marketing – Linden Lab hasn’t been doing any marketing lately, so I’m guessing the workload might be a little light there, unless there’s a huge campaign in the works.
Grace McDunnough has graciously allowed me to deface this chart she made as a handy visual aid, comparing the present to January last year.
It’s not too hard to see why I’m concerned. Of the executives present in January last year, only two of those remain. The other two are more recent.
I’m presently lining up an interview with one of the remaining four, and I honestly don’t feel a lot of certainty that they’ll still be at the Lab by the time it is published. Over the years, I’ve scrapped four Linden Lab interviews for just that reason. One other interview went ahead, but the interviewee had actually already withdrawn from the Lab and kept it a secret.
Bob Komin confirmed for me – just a couple days ago – that Linden Lab has 240 full-time employees, plus any outsourced staff, contractors and so forth.
Four key executives is quite a lean line-up to manage an organisation of that size, but it makes me wonder if they’re wearing too many hats.
The family tree is great… really demonstrates the downsizing. Do you think the goal is to continue downsizing so that Second Life operates with minimal staff to keep the grid operating as a cash cow (albeit at a trickle of income).
Few senior officers feels like … few major improvements or plans or perhaps even EFFORT. A skeleton crew to keep the thing afloat while he (Philip) goes off and tries to strike gold a second time for his investors with “Love Machine”.
I think all MMORPG’s and Virtual Worlds inevitably face this moment in the product life cycle. How it’s managed (i.e. World of Warcraft manages just fine and profitably outside of the ‘novelty product phase’) will determine if it trickles off into some obscure and underpopulated platform or whether they can jolt some life back into the thing.
I’m trying to think positive in light of the acquisition of Kim Salzer, which had me thinking “yeah… they are working on it”. But her lack of communication is far from encouraging…
Skylar
Concur. When Ambrose leaves we will know it is time to yank any remaining investments. Ambrose is one that actually produced positive results.
A VP of Marketing’s core task is to “paint the pretty picture”. Kim’s part in Linden Land is to make Linden philosophy palatable and to move Linden product–it’s the most thankless of the vp jobs–an average marketing director in an average company can expect a tour of duty of, maybe, six months–if results are not positive or are flat lined then don’t look to see that VP hanging around for the next quarter. It is intensely performance dependent. If you haven’t heard from her, she is probably working very hard to do her job.
Her job is to bring in the money above and beyond the company’s current assets and to perform that task on a continual basis.
Having a familiarity with this type of process, I do NOT envy being her at this point in Linden time.
[...] past several months have seen more frequent and more dire signs suggesting its demise. With recent news of staff cutbacks, declines in user hours, logins, and even world size and steep increases in tier for nonprofit and [...]
Skylar, what Philip is up to at the moment really has *nothing* to do with Linden Labs. It’s not like he’s ever coming back. It’s not even like he was ever really back before.
Yes they’re down to four, and I for one am happy to see that Frank and Joe at least are still on board. Both really committed and solid execs, and right now that’s what SL sorely needs. I don’t know Bob or Kim, but I wish them the best.
One correction — Ginsu, John Z and I all left in early 2009. So by January 2010 it was largely Mark Kingdom’s team. By my recollection that would be, in addition to Mark:
Judy Wade
Brian Michon
Howard Look
Frank Ambrose
Joe Miller
Cyn Skyberg
Tom Hale
Marty Roberts
Oops – forgot Sandy Gould, VP HR. He left last month.
nicely posted Tateru =)
sobering image for sure!
Well, down to four, atm.
So whats this all about?
Is LL flatting the hierarchy down to make the company more efficient, give the employes more responsibility in their sections and establish a good teamwork on the base of flat hierarchy and well connected teams.
Ups, i must have dreamed …
Oh wait, whats this?
Will Frank get a new assistant ( http://lindenlab.hrmdirect.com/employment/view.php?req=57426& )?