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Course: Entrepreneurship > Unit 1
Lesson 4: Philip Rosedale - Founder and Chairman of Second LifePhilip Rosedale - Founder and Chairman of Second Life
Philip Rosedale, Founder and Chairman of Second Life, talks about the origins of his groundbreaking virtual world, and how patience was the key to making the company profitable. Created by Kauffman Foundation.
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- At1:54how do you earn money using this type of business?(14 votes)
- By charging a monthly membership fee for premium membership. There are also ways to make money 'in game' by selling your creations (clothing, buildings, hair, shoes, jewelry, whatever - use your imagination). In the beginning it was fairly easy to make money in game, however now it is so big and popular there is massive competition and big players already with major market shares. There is also a market for 'lindens' (the in game currency) which can be bought and sold, one cool thing is that lindens can actually be converted into real currency. Back when I was playing approximately 260 lindens was worth $1 U.S. Dollar.(15 votes)
- So what is Second Life? What is its purpose? Strangely, over the length of this video I do not think Mr Rosedale explained what is Second Life, instead it felt like a vague commercial.(11 votes)
- Second Life is a free online 3D virtual world where users can socialize, connect and create using free voice and text chat.(10 votes)
- Sorry if I'm being silly or clueless here.
Who exactly is Philip Rosedale? It seems like he is the founder of a lot things here.
What is his first accomplishment that helped him establish Coffee and Power and Second Life?(6 votes) - How does an entrepreneur survive that waiting period, both mentally and financially?(4 votes)
- I realize that Second Life is still around, but is it still as widely used and popular today as it was when it started? (I tried it out and it ran far too slow on my ancient computer so I gave up...)(2 votes)
- the wikipeda article mentions about a million regular users(2 votes)
- How did u manage the challenges to your community?(2 votes)
- who is becoming a chairman why?(2 votes)
- How do you make Second Life profitable?(1 vote)
Video transcript
- I'm Philip Rosedale, I'm the Founder and now the Chairman of SecondLife. As a kid I was into tinkering and building things and electronics and as computers became widely available I became a programmer. I just couldn't get out of my head, the idea that the coolest thing you could possibly do with computers and then with the internet
was to create a virtual world. Well SecondLife is kinda like the world's biggest LEGO kit in a way. It's a virtual world, a
three-dimensional world in which everything is built
by the people who come there so it's a kind of a blank canvas in which you can build anything. The other thing that's fascinating about it as a virtual world is that we go there, that people are present there as avatars, these digital projections of
ourselves into that world. The beginning of it was my belief that it would be this amazing
kind of visual playground with all this architecture and all these things built by people. And that was true to an even greater extent than I had imagined, but the part that I really hadn't imagined was what it would be like
to have people in there, this idea of the avatar, this idea of going into that
world as a digital person was something that I
really didn't understand and I think that the ultimate
success of SecondLife and the tremendous impact
it had in the media and kinda in the minds of
everyone who even heard about it much less used it, was greater because of
that idea of the avatar. Well one of the obstacles we had to overcome with
SecondLife was simply waiting and not spending too much
money while we waited. I had been passionate about
building a virtual world like SecondLife literally
since the end of high school, but I didn't believe until 1999 that the technology was in
place to enable a business to be built around a virtual world. And so in that time in between I actually told all my
friends I gotta wait. I cannot do this yet. The technology is not here to make a real business
around a virtual world. You know every really futuristic idea goes through a pretty
predictable growth pattern of really pretty linear,
gradual growth at the beginning, followed by a sort of a gradual inflection where the product finally
becomes non-linear. Most technology projects, especially the really
great, futuristic ones, take several years to mature into a form where they can start to make money, and so as an entrepreneur you gotta be ready to wait several years and you've gotta have investors
that are willing to wait and for SecondLife that was very true.