Linden Lab Expands Leadership Team, Adding Executives from Intuit and McKinsey

Brian Michon Named Vice President of Core Development; Judy Wade, Appointed Vice President of Strategy and Emerging Business

Linden Lab®, creator of the virtual world Second Life®, today announced the appointments of Brian Michon as Vice President of Core Development and Judy Wade as Vice President of Strategy and Emerging Business. Reporting directly to CEO Mark Kingdon, Michon and Wade join a recently expanded executive team that will help drive Linden Lab to the next level in 2009.

Michon will lead Linden Lab’s core engineering team responsible for the hosted services and virtual world platform that power Second Life. Michon is tasked with scaling Second Life to provide a high-quality user experience, supporting the growth in virtual worlds and evolving the platform to ignite a new wave of product innovation. Wade will advise on Linden Lab’s overall business strategy, including acquisitions and partnerships, and will identify new opportunities to grow the business in key vertical and geographic markets.

Under Kingdon’s leadership, Linden Lab has been focused on further expanding its footprint in the virtual world industry through several strategic initiatives. These include: localizing the Second Life experience in key international markets, simplifying the ‘first hour’ experience to broaden consumer adoption, enhancing the platform for enterprise users and building a marketplace for virtual goods. In 2008, Linden Lab continued to lead the virtual world market it created with the launch of Second Life in 2003. It continues to see significant usage growth, with Residents spending more than 400 million hours in Second Life in 2008, up from 246 million in 2007, an increase of more than 60%.

Linden Lab has added more than 100 new employees in the past year, including several additions to the executive team to help drive these strategic initiatives. These hires include Senior Vice President of Customer Applications Howard Look (formerly of Pixar), Chief Product Officer Tom Hale (formerly of Adobe) and Senior Vice President of Global Technology Frank Ambrose (formerly of AOL). This group, joined by Michon and Wade, bring a wealth of relevant management experience and skills honed at world-leading companies to bear on Linden Lab’s strategic goals for expanding Second Life.

“Brian and Judy share a remarkable talent for managing large projects in rapidly evolving business environments,” said Mark Kingdon, CEO of Linden Lab. “Brian has decades of experience in designing highly available, mission-critical software services for some of the largest corporations in the world, and Judy has charted strategy for a range of companies from semiconductor giants to software startups. Both of them understand how to manage change, which is essential for Linden Lab, as we are constantly setting out to do things no one has ever done before. This is a transformative time for us, as we prepare for rapid growth by investing in infrastructure, forging new partnerships, developing additional capabilities for Second Life and revolutionizing the user experience. We’ve assembled a tremendous executive team to make it all happen, and the skills and experience that Brian and Judy bring with them will play indispensable roles in the next chapter of Linden Lab’s development.”

“Second Life continues to see strong growth, and ensuring the stability of the platform as it scales is an important initiative for us as we accelerate the expansion of the virtual world,” said Brian Michon, Vice President of Core Development, Linden Lab. “I’m looking forward to leading the core engineering team to ensure that our virtual world platform and services allow Second Life to reach new levels of reliability, while continuing Linden Lab’s mission to be a pioneer for virtual world innovation and user contributed creativity worldwide.”

“As the leader in the virtual worlds space, Linden Lab is in a position of great opportunity,” said Judy Wade, Vice President, Strategy and Emerging Business, Linden Lab. “We are consistently forging new ground, and I look forward to working closely with Mark on corporate strategy that will support the continuing growth and enhancement of Second Life and help Linden Lab further expand the reach of Second Life with new products and markets.”

Michon brings over twenty years of experience in technical engineering and leadership to head up the core engineering team at Linden Lab. Before joining the team, Michon was VP of Engineering at Intuit leading software development of web service and platforms powering both hosted and desktop software including Quickbooks™, TurboTax™ and Quicken™. Prior to Intuit, he was co-founder and VP of Apps.com – which was acquired by Intuit in 2000 – where he led the design and development of an online directory of business applications. Previously, he was Director of Engineering at the web marketing system integrator Think New Ideas and an engineering leader in Oracle’s Server Technologies group. He received his MS in Computer Science from Stanford and his BSCS from MIT.

Wade has over sixteen years of experience in helping companies address challenges and opportunities, providing her expertise in managing her clients’ strategic initiatives. She was previously an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Kapor Enterprises, where her role included evaluating opportunities for using Second Life to deliver enterprise training. Prior to that, she was a partner of McKinsey & Company, where as a member of the company’s Organization and Strategy Practices, she helped Fortune 500 clients and growth companies with significant strategic and organizational transformations across multiple sectors. Before joining McKinsey, Wade was a semiconductor analyst at Hambrecht & Quist. She also takes an active role in her community, serving as a Trustee of UC Berkeley and on the Dean’s Alumni Leadership Council at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Additionally, she also contributed her time and expertise to improving education and business development in Africa. Wade earned her Masters in Public Policy from Harvard and her BA from UC Berkeley.

About The Second Life Grid and Linden Lab

The Second Life Grid is a technology platform that enables organizations to build custom virtual world environments and applications. Offering the industry’s most advanced content creation, land management and transaction tools, the Second Life Grid enables individuals, educators, researchers and organizations to increase productivity and cut travel costs by moving meetings, prototyping, training and other efforts to a virtual environment. In 2003, Linden Lab launched Second Life, an acclaimed 3D online world built on the Second Life Grid. Inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people from across the globe, the Second Life virtual world has a fully functioning economy and empowers its users to create content, interact with others, launch businesses, collaborate and educate.

Linden Lab was founded in 1999 by Chairman of the Board Philip Rosedale and is headquartered in San Francisco. The company is led by CEO Mark Kingdon, the former CEO of Organic, Inc.

Contacts

LEWIS PR for Linden Lab
Kristin Mitchell, 415-992-4434
secondlifeus {at} lewispr(.)com