Wagner James Au / New World Notes

In case you missed my extended interview with Linden Lab head Bradford Oberwager on my Patreon — read Part 1 here, Part 2 here — I've included key excerpts below. My top takeaways are these:

• An updated version of the Second Life mobile app will be free to download for everyone in "weeks".
• Second Life's monthly active user numbers have declined to around 500,000 MAU.
• The recent Linden staff cuts were about re-organizing the company around expanded trust and safety roles based in its Atlanta office, and putting more resources into the mobile app.
• The Linden Lab re-org has nothing to do with any potential acquisition of the company, which is not on the table — and also has nothing to do with the recent changes to gacha content. 
• "[It]s a moral imperative that Second Life continues on. It is good for the world, and I'm committed to that." 

Excerpts below — along with the story of his wolf avatar:

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When Bradford Oberwager first logged into Second Life, he went on a shopping spree, hellbent on customizing his avatar. His initial attempt was not quite successful.

"After about an hour," he tells me now, "someone walked up to me and suggested that I may not want to be wearing thirteen jackets." The random resident helpfully offered to show the future owner of Second Life some avatar dressing tricks.

That experience was key to Oberwager's initiation into Second Life, but his "aha" inflection point came a bit later, through a customization unique to him:

"It was when I finally figured out how to buy a wolf tattoo and get it on my chest (all by myself) that I realized how you could relate to your avatar in a way no one could have explained to me. My Linden name is Oberwolf, so this was a big moment. "

The latest crucial moment for Oberwager and Second Life is happening right now: Not just in the challenging re-org of Linden Lab, but leveraging those changes to sustain Second Life.

Wagner James Au: What's going on with these [staff] cuts? 

Brad Oberwager: So, you know, I own the company, Linden Lab, that really has one significant asset, of course, Second Life. And it's had other [assets] along the way, it had Tilia, it had Sansar — it doesn't have those entities anymore. 

So as my focus has been very much on Second Life's future success. I first thought, you know, what does that look like? What are we going to try to do that makes Second Life the most valuable for three groups: Current residents who are spending a lot of their time in Second Life, lapsed residents who used to spend a lot of time in Second Life and now don't spend as much time. And then new residents, folks that we can provide value to for our sustained future.

Our support for creators has been less than stellar, in some ways, over time..And our support for residents –the ones that are helping us build things and help us build community — It's gotten antiquated… 

And so what happened was, we made changes across the whole organization, and some people got promoted, some people got moved into different parts of the organization, and some people,  we had to say goodbye to some people. And that's always unfortunate, especially when it’s folks that have been around for a long time. That's really tough. 

But what we’re trying to affect is to rebuild the organization in line with what's best for the residents going forward, under two umbrellas:One is engineering, what are we going to be building, mobile app, things like that — engineering, technology we provide. And support, operations.

So let’s talk about support, what we did with support. We basically blew up all the formal titles and structure in how we provide support, and we formed two new teams…Resident success and Trust & Safety. And we're going to pour all of our energy into those two groups in terms of supporting [them]. So what's happened over time is Trust & Safety continues to become more important, not less… And so we’ve created this brand new Trust & Safety team that has tremendous autonomy and a very high bar of success. 

And then, instead of having this old way of looking at customer service… this concept of “resident success” is going to be very focused on the experience that residents have, and it's also going to use a lot of technology to help us. 

WJA: There is a narrative that could be true or not, that it's about requiring people to move near the Atlanta, Georgia location.

BO: So it used to be that many of the positions allowed for some flexibility, as it's not just I decided people have to go back to the office.The new positions require being in the office because of what they're getting done. So what we realized was to effectively manage trust and safety, you need to be a team that is talking to each other more, that there needs to be more interaction. 

And so the Atlanta office, every position that's been tossed around, new ones and old ones, every new position, requires you to be in the office. That wasn't just a, “Hey, I want people back in the office.” Every position has changed…We're doing things in a more team way. We're doing things where there's a lot more cross-functional training… 

Every one of those jobs — which is way more than was eliminated –we then created Customer Success, Trust & Safety [roles]. Most of the people that were in those previous jobs were moved into these groups. Most of them. Those new groups, they necessitated being in the Atlanta office…

WJA: It does bring up an irony, because, supposedly Second Life is the virtual world where you can form online communities, you can get anything done online, and it eliminates the need for proximity.

BO: It’s a huge irony, and the difference is, you can live a wonderful life in Second Life. [With trust and safety] it's really hard to strategize, build culture, cross-functional training. Someone gets up to lunch, the next person steps in. The things that people need in order to have a great experience virtually, you need physical. 

Wagner James Au: How will these [re-org] changes impact the Second Life community? 

Brad Oberwager: Our ability to respond faster, that's going to increase. 

As an example, what we started looking at how many open tickets were just getting left unopened effectively, and that that provided a poor experience for the residents. And what was happening is we were spending a lot of time on things that are very time intensive, that people really weren't getting value out of. 

People report bugs all the time [on our bug tracking] system, right? And so those bugs tickets pile up. You can imagine that a lot of people are complaining about the same thing, but they talk about it in different ways. That creates a disaster for something like Second Life, right? We have hundreds of thousands of people experiencing things in their own way, firing off tickets, and we're treading water. 

We can use technology to get things more organized, and by doing that, we realized that we can put more manpower on the important things, because now they're more organized, and so now we're actually able to take care of things faster. Whereas before, we just throw our hands up and we're like, “I don't know,” and we would have three people working on the same thing without knowing it. 

We figured out we can do this way better for everybody, better service to residents, I'm 100% sure of that… 

We also have to regain trust; the Trust & Safety department is as much focused on us. For some reason (that I keep trying to learn, and I can only learn what I can learn), there is a segment of the residents who don't trust us. Similar to the same irony, [that] we have to go back to the office [to support the] virtual world; we built this entire world for people. We spend ungodly amounts of money to support everyone, and yet there's this lack of trust. 

And so we're changing things to regain that trust. And so that's a lot of work and a lot of expense. So when I say trust and safety, I mean we've always cracked down on bad things, but it's very hard to do. We're putting more effort into that. It's going to be less effort in other places. 

What makes me sad is that even making the changes to increase trust has made people trust us less. Trust me, I get the unkind emails. So do the front line folks who are the most dedicated of all of us. We are humans and it is very hard for these Lindens to work that hard and get hate mail. No matter what, there is a segment of our residents who will believe what they want to believe and even me saying this will make them believe it more. 

So we have to make decisions. We're putting more effort into trust and safety in the world, and hopefully that will increase people’s trust of both the world and of us, and then that they will want to engage more. If it's a safer place, they'll engage more. 

Customer success, trust and safety, and then the underlying [goal] is trying to get the creators, who have also gotten frustrated with things –  that this is a very complicated organization — how to get them to trust us more. 

There's other things that are happening with those things in mind, because if we lose the creators, and if we lose too many residents, Second Life doesn't work. 

And it is a moral imperative that Second Life continues on. It is good for the world, and I'm committed to that. So I had to make changes.

WJA: Because of all these cuts or re-org, there were a lot of rumors that you were trying to set Linden Lab up for an acquisition. So is that true?

BO:  No.

WJA: Just plain “no”?

BO: Well, I could give you not a flip answer, but if someone came and offered me $4 billion, I can guarantee you I would take it. So when people say the company's not for sale and stuff like that, it's a stupid thing for people to say. They eventually look stupid at some point. 

So Linden is not going public, and I'm doing this for a lot of reasons. There's not one bit of this that was done to set us up for an acquisition. And the reason I can tell you that that is a surety is because a lot of these things we’re doing are extremely long term in terms of the benefit that we're going to get, and are more expensive than we were doing it before. 

So that is a fact. It never crossed my mind to do this, to set us up for an acquisition. This was set up for future growth, and that's not happening anytime soon. It's going to take a while to work its way out. We need to start growing again, and this was one of the reasons that we did it. But it's not like the growth engine starts tomorrow.

WJA: Well, speaking of which — so we're about 500,000 monthly actives, is that about right?

[Oberwager nods]

BO: The number of daily active users [DAU] is significantly less than that, as you can imagine. We’ve made some mistakes recently, you know, we've had some performance issues with the viewer and things like that, and we're scrambling to change it. It's not easy. And so our DAU has gone down, that's very concerning. Because it makes for a worse experience for everybody. It's not just the numbers to me, it’s the folks there [in SL] that you're friends with and stuff, it's a worse experience.

What we're gonna focus on, I don't know if it's coming through [in this chat].is we're gonna do fewer things, but better. 

We have built a great world by doing a ton of things, some of them great, some of them okay. Because that's the way the world works. 

We're going to embark for a couple years on doing fewer things better, to really hit. And so one of those things is mobile. That is a very expensive, very complicated undertaking. We don’t want to do it halfway. Right now it’s paywalled because it would have broken for everybody. This thing's getting open real soon. You know how much it costs to build something like that? You don't do that if you're trying to sell the company. 

WJA: Yeah. Well, so how soon’s that? Is it the next quarter? Next two quarters?

BO: That it’s going to be opened up to everybody? Weeks.

WJA: Oh, OK. Before the holidays launch. Well, that leads to my last and final question for concerned creators — what happens when they have to contend with IAP, 30% revenue, Apple and Google's cut?

BO: They're not going to get hit with that. The app is getting opened up. If there was a 30% [cut] it would be from buying the Linden Dollar. Apple doesn't care what happens in the world. Apple cares about what someone buys with USD. 

So if I buy Linden Dollars, it's not a currency — I'll buy tokens, and I give you the Linden Dollars in return for a service, that's not what Apple makes money on. That's not their gig. And Linden Dollars aren't going to be for sale through the app right away. 

When they are, we gotta negotiate with Apple, because that creates a big problem, because I don't get the money when you buy a Linden Dollar. So if I have to pay the 30% but I don't get that 30%, that creates a problem. So we're trying to figure that out. 

WJA: And so when you say [mobile is] open in a few weeks, it'll just be the basic client we have now, are we talking about also, you're able to buy items and that kind of stuff — the full economic integration in other words? 

BO: The full economic integration, to fully make it happen, is going to take years. This is a complicated thing, and we don't know what it's gonna look like.

What you're gonna be able to do [now]  is, if you have a Second Life account, you have not been able to log in, unless you're a Premium Plus or Premium subscriber. That paywall is getting removed. We were gonna move it to Plus because we thought, for $5/month it's worth it to people. We decided to remove the paywall. So that's what I mean by opening up. 

The updated app will have better functionality than anybody has seen. Right now what we're focused on making great is interaction, messaging, how you interact with your friends, getting dressed, getting undressed, how you look. 

We're not focused on making money in the app right now. The buying and the selling of things for the near term is going to be done through the traditional way through, through the desktop. 

It's going to change [eventually], of course. 

The other thing that we're going to be doin I can tease out — because it's not complete, or else I’d tell you — but we’re going to be creating a system of rewards for what we need to start seeing, which is more interactions. However, in awesome Linden fashion, you can turn them off if you don't like them!

So we are coming up with a way where, if you're interacting on the mobile app, if you're coming three days in a row, things like that, you're gonna be able to get stuff. We could not do that in the past, we didn't have the technology. 

And this, again, as you can imagine, the person who could do that on mobile is not the person that could build amazing things on a desktop. That's what a reorg is. I need more people who can do commerce on mobile than I need people that can do work on the old system. I think people are gonna love the mobile app. I'm putting a lot of money behind that hope. 

WJA: So how is this [re-org] related to the gacha, the change in the gacha policies, if at all?

BO: Absolutely zero. And I would have known. But then, because I saw [community rumors that the re-org was related], I went and asked every exec, and I asked my legal team. Not one person could even figure out how this was attached to it. And there's parts of gacha that we're not allowed to do. We brought back gacha mostly, but you can't have gambling without a license. But somehow, it’s Second Life, and you can find any sort of conspiracy theory. But I couldn't even find someone who could figure out how to connect the dots.

There's no plan that I'm aware of to allow gambling in any way, shape or form, until we have a license, which we do not have, and we are not looking into it. I do know that there are some places where you can put servers that make it legal to gamble, But I don’t want that scrutiny. We have a social casino so people can enjoy [non-cash gambling]. 

There's a million reasons why I don't want to do real gambling, and a lot of them are because I believe our world is good. And I'm not sure gambling is good. 

At right: Details of Oberwolf's wolf tattoo

For the full conversation, read Part 1 on my Patreon here and, Part 2 on my Patreon here.

Speaking of which, quick request: If you value in-depth articles like these, please consider subscribing to my Patreon here to keep them coming — plus exclusive content and other benefits!