(2006-09-11) Kapor Second Life Talk

Mitch Kapor was an early investor in Second Life/Linden Lab, and gave a talk at their recent Community Convention.

• Nobody had done anything like this before in many respects, and we agreed that what we needed was a long Run Way. If a business like an airplane and you need to be able to be in the air at the end of the runway, and you don't know how long it's going to take to take off, you'd better have a long runway. What that meant, that had very strong implications, because we needed to be able to have enough money to last until the business looked real enough that it could attract more conventional investors, and we did not know how long that would take. There were other angel investors (Angel Capital), and we did several small rounds of investment, small relative to other things that were going on. And we formed the base philosophy, which fortunately was consistent with Philip's approach, which was to be quite frugal if not outright cheap, and to see how few people it would take. By contrast, at the same time we were raising and spending I think $7 million, which was how much was spent prior to first big capital investment, ThereCom was burning through $70 million..

• I had an unexpected spiritual experience two days ago about this very thing. I was watching on YouTube the Video of the Suzanne Vega performance (in Second Life) she was doing with John Hockenberry on Infinite Mind, the NPR show... The camera is panning around, looking at residents, so I'm watching a kind of television broadcast of an event that is simultaneously real and virtual. And all of a sudden my sense of what was real expanded a million-fold. A fundamental shift of my awareness happened. Where this is going is in the full interpenetration of the terrestrial reality made up out of atoms, and virtual realities made up out of bits. It's not a seperate thing, it's not a cartoon, it's not a game, it's a much, much, much, much unimaginably larger reality, and that is powerful.

• The American Cancer Society is setting up an office in SL. Why is there an office, because there are residents? Because there are people there who care about this. There was $40,000 raised for the American Cancer Society in Second Life. At first I thought, well, that was a one-time thing, but now I'm thinking, No, if you have a Real World organization then you want to have a presence there.