Management and Board

Management

Board of Directors

Management

Rod Humble | CEO

Rod Humble is Chief Executive Officer at Linden Lab, and he leads the company’s strategy and the development of Second Life. Humble’s 20-year career in the game development industry has included work on more than 200 games. He joined Linden Lab from Electronic Arts, where, in his role as Executive Vice President, he led the EA Play label, which includes the best-selling PC game franchise of all time, The Sims. In 2009, he was ranked #2 on the annual list of the Hot 100 Game Developers from gaming publication Edge. Prior to his work at Electronic Arts, Humble served as Vice President of Product Development at Sony Online Entertainment for the massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) EverQuest.

You can follow him on Twitter @rodvik.

Bob Komin | COO and CFO

Bob Komin is the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer at Linden Lab. In this role, Komin is responsible for all financial matters and controls, human resources, legal, and administrative functions globally. Komin also oversees the Second Life economy, the largest user-generated virtual goods economy in the world. Prior to joining Linden Lab, Komin was the CFO for early stage solar energy start-up firm Solexel for the past two years. Before that, he was the CFO for privately-held Tellme Networks, a voice technology that is used by more than 40 million people each month. In his seven years at Tellme, Komin helped to build the business from pre-revenue stage to over $100 million in revenue and grow its employees from 160 to 300. He was also a leader of the acquisition and integration of Tellme by Microsoft in a transaction valued at approximately $800 million. After 5 years in senior financial roles at Cincinnati Bell, Komin was the VP, Finance & Treasurer of the founding executive team of Convergys, a NYSE traded company that was formed by a spin-off and executed its $225 million IPO in 1998. Komin was responsible for raising over $2 billion in equity and debt offerings while VP, Finance & Treasurer at both of these public companies.

Komin received an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.S. in Accounting and General Science with a minor in Chemistry from the University of Oregon.

Jeff Petersen | VP of Engineering

Jeff Petersen is the VP of Engineering and comes to Linden Lab with over 20 years of experience as a game programmer and engineering lead with a passion for well-architected, highly optimized systems. Prior to joining Linden Lab, he spent 10 years working for Sony Online Entertainment, primarily doing MMO RPG development (with a focus on the networking, server side, and core technologies), along with PS3 and PSP development. Titles worked on include: Everquest, Everquest II, Star Wars Galaxies, Planetside, Untold Legends PS3, Field Commander PSP, FreeRealms, and CloneWars Adventures. While at Sony Online Entertainment, Jeff developed the core technology infrastructure that currently serves as the foundation for many development efforts at the company. He has also held leadership and engineering positions at Harmless Games, SilverPlatter, and Virgin Interactive Entertainment where he created an early entry into MMO gaming called Subspace.

Rhett Woods | VP of Product

As Vice President of Product, Rhett Woods is responsible for the product and user experience teams for Second Life and future Linden Lab products. He was previously at Adobe, where he led the creative strategy and execution of many product launches, including Creative Suite 3, the company's largest and most successful software launch at that time. Prior to Adobe, Woods served as VP of Creative Marketing at Macromedia, where he pioneered many of the interactive campaigns.

Lisa Berry | General Counsel

Lisa Berry joined Linden Lab as General Counsel in November 2010 with over 20 years of legal experience in Silicon Valley. As General Counsel, Lisa is responsible for managing the legal department and advising the company's board and management on legal issues and corporate governance matters. Prior to joining Linden Lab, Lisa was director of business development at an alternative fuels start up company. She also spent two years as general counsel of Tellme Networks and was part of the team responsible for the acquisition of Tellme Networks by Microsoft. Prior to Tellme Networks, she was general counsel of Juniper Networks beginning with its 1999 IPO and during its growth to a billion dollars in revenue. Prior to Juniper Networks, Lisa was general counsel of KLA-Tencor Corporation and associate general counsel of LSI Logic Corporation.

Lisa holds an LLM in Taxation from the University of Florida School of Law, a JD from the University of Miami School of Law and a BBA from the University of Miami.

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Board of Directors

Philip Rosedale | Founder

Philip Rosedale founded San Francisco-based Linden Lab in 1999, and has led the creation of the virtual world of Second Life from initial concept to a market-leading virtual world, with a robust economy and a global population. As a pioneer in the virtual world industry, Rosedale is actively involved in the strategy, development and design of Linden Lab’s products, including the world of Second Life and the Second Life Grid platform. Rosedale is known for his entrepreneurial approach to new technologies, starting a network software company when he was 17. In 1995 he created an innovative internet video conferencing product, which was later acquired by RealNetworks, where he went on to become Vice President and CTO. In 1999, the advent of consumer broadband and better PC 3D graphics inspired Rosedale to leave RealNetworks and found Linden Lab, pursuing his lifelong dream of creating an internet scale virtual world. Rosedale holds a BS degree in Physics from the University of California at San Diego.

Mitch Kapor

Mitch Kapor is the founder of Kapor Enterprises, Inc. He has been a leading figure in the computer industry for 20 years. He was the founder and CEO of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, which sparked the desktop revolution in business computing. Mitch has been at the forefront of the information technology revolution for a generation as an entrepreneur, investor, social activist, and philanthropist. For the past 15-plus years, Mitch has been an investor and advisor to high-technology start-up companies including founding investments in UUNET Technology and RealNetworks. He is currently a director of Linden Lab and Reactivity, Inc. From 1999 to 2001, Kapor served as a partner with Accel Partners, a leading venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California. He has an undergraduate degree from Yale in linguistics and psychology and is an alumnus (but not graduate) of MIT's Sloan School of Management. He held an Adjunct Professorship at MIT's Media Lab from 1994-1996. His writing has appeared in Scientific American, Wired, Forbes, the Harvard Business Review and the New York Times.

Jed Smith

Jed is the Managing Partner of Catamount Ventures. Catamount was founded to focus on the underserved seed/early stage venture investment market. Catamount is investing out of its second fund and has approximately $45M under management. Prior to Catamount, in 1997 Jed was the founder of drugstore.com (NASDAQ: DSCM), and served on its board of directors with John Doerr, Brook Byers, Peter Neupert, Howard Schultz and Jeff Bezos. Prior to drugstore.com, Jed co-founded and spent four years at Cybersmith, a retail store chain that showcased the latest advances in information technology and multimedia software. Before that, Jed was Vice President of Sales at Tribe Computer Works (a networking hardware and software company that was successfully sold). Jed began his career in technology working for Tom Siebel at Oracle Corporation, ultimately serving as District Manager for Eastern Region VARs. He is a recipient of the Albert Einstein High Technology Award. Jed holds a BA from Middlebury College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Bill Gurley

Bill Gurley joined Benchmark Capital in 1999 after spending two years as a partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Before entering the venture capital business, Bill spent four years on Wall Street as a top-ranked research analyst, including three years at CS First Boston focusing on the personal computer hardware and software business. His research coverage included such companies as Dell, Compaq, and Microsoft, and he was the lead analyst on the Amazon IPO. In both 1995 and 1996, Bill was a member of the Institutional Investor All-American Research Team. Prior to his investment career, Bill was a design engineer at Compaq Computer, where he worked on products such as the 486/50 and Compaq's initial multi-processor server. Before Compaq, he served in the technical marketing group of Advanced Micro Devices' embedded processor division. Bill is the author of the Above the Crowd newsletter which focuses on the evolution and economics of high technology businesses.

Dana L. Evan

Dana Evan brings a unique combination of strategic and executional strengths to more than 20 years of leadership experience in global finance and operations management. Most recently, Ms. Evan served for 12 years as CFO of VeriSign, Inc., where she was a founding executive and a significant contributor to the company's growth and profitability. She led VeriSign's worldwide operations related to finance and accounting, real estate and property management, legal matters and investor relations, as the company grew from a small venture-backed start-up in 1995 to a global corporation of nearly 5,000 employees. Ms. Evan was a key member of the executive management team, helping to set business strategy and manage company operations as revenue reached nearly $2 billion dollars, driving profitability and cash flow of nearly a half billion dollars per year. During her tenure, Ms Evan led the company's institutional financing rounds, including its successful IPO in 1998 and follow-on financing initiatives. She also was instrumental in driving, executing and integrating approximately 60 merger and acquisition transactions. As the company's chief financial spokesperson, she has been featured in numerous business and financial press, including the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Financial Times.

Before joining VeriSign, Ms. Evan provided consulting services in the capacity of CFO, vice president of finance, and other executive roles for both public and private companies. Prior to that, Ms. Evan spent six years in various positions at KPMG LLP. Ms. Evan is currently a director of Omniture, Inc. (OMTR) and Linden Lab/Second Life and an advisory board member of VinTrust. For the past two years she has served on the board of MySQL, a venture-backed startup which was recently acquired by Sun Microsystems for $1 billion dollars in February 2008. Ms. Evan has also recently undertaken angel venture investing activities and advisory services for companies and entities in the technology and media arenas.

Ms. Evan is a Certified Public Accountant and holds a B.S. in Commerce with a concentration in Accounting and Finance from Santa Clara University. She is actively involved with several charitable organizations, including the Boys and Girls Club of America, The Health Trust, and the University of Santa Clara Business School. She resides with her husband and two sons in Saratoga, California.

Will Wright

Will Wright, widely acknowledged for creating the simulation video game genre, unveiled the highly anticipated Spore^TM in September 2008. Spore is a "universe in a box" that allows players to create a species and guide it to sentience, help it build a society, develop its culture, and explore an infinite cosmos of worlds created by other players. Fans eagerly embraced the creation tools in Spore and have created over 100 million pieces of user-created content, as of Summer 2009.

Spore has been distinguished with such honors as Popular Science's "Best of What's New Award," Popular Mechanics's "Breakthrough Award," PC Magazine's "Technical Excellence Award," Time Magazine's "50 Best Inventions of 2008," and the Jim Henson Technology Honor.

A true gaming industry legend as a result of his pioneering contributions to video games, Wright has been the recipient of several prestigious awards and honors. Rolling Stone named Will Wright "One of the 100 People who are Changing America," in March 2009, placing him among artists, leaders, scientists, and policymakers who are "fighting every day to show us what is possible." In 2008, Will received the first-ever Gamer God Award at the Spike Video Game Awards as a testament to his revolutionary work. In 2007, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts recognized an individual in the Video Game Industry for the first time when it named Wright a fellow. He also received the Producers Guild of America Vanguard Award that same year.

Wright first rose to prominence when he developed SimCity^TM, the acclaimed, nonviolent, open-ended sim game. Wright then followed up the success of SimCity with a string of popular simulation games throughout the 1990s. Titles such as SimEarth: The Living Planet (1990), SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony (1991), SimCity 2000 (1993), SimCopter (1996), and SimCity 3000 (1999) introduced simulation games to hundreds of thousands of new fans, demonstrating the genre's true potential.

Wright's next groundbreaking game came in the form of The Sims (2000), which has gone on to become the best selling PC game franchise of all time, being available in 22 languages in 60 countries. Wright, who studied architecture in college, originally conceived of the game as an architectural design simulator. To "score" the quality of the design, he added tiny people who would inhabit the buildings. These simulated people quickly stole the spotlight, and Will realized that watching the lives of the Sims unfold was the real entertainment. The Sims franchise has now sold over 100 million units around the world.

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