too early in the game
Last month, I wrote about why Second Life failed so I didn’t have to write about why Second Life failed. I mean, that post wasn’t about reasons for failure, it was about the fact of failure. My thought was that there are many people who simply assume Second Life failed, and they’re wrong, and there are many who will passionately argue that Second Life has succeeded … and they’re wrong too. Failure can only be judged by the ones who were trying to succeed.
It would be safer for me to say that failure is a matter of perspective, for surely failure passes through the same lens as beauty in the eye of the beholder. I do understand that many SL Residents were on their own journeys, and so of course they are their own best judges of the success of those journeys. But it would be an artful evasion to claim that any of those journeys, or even all of them together, constitute the sum total equation for the success of Second Life. We were trying to do something more – or at least, something else – and we failed. (Of course, I’m talking about the team and the company that I knew, years ago. The team there today is on their own journey, which I know next to nothing about.)
So if I’m willing to be this myopic and insular about judging failure, you can bet I’d be just as parochial in reviewing the reasons. I’ve seen and heard a lot of speculation that I don’t agree with: poor strategy, worse execution; lack of focus, misplaced focus; poor technology, doomed architecture; dumb marketing, uncontrollable PR; niche market, bizarre customers; crazy culture, undisciplined development; bad hiring, bad management; feckless board, dominating board, ignorant board. I’ve heard it all, and while there may be a grain of something like truth here and there, none of these things holds real explanatory power as a reason for why Second Life failed.
We failed as people. We failed as a team. Our failure was intensely personal, particular to each person involved, and ruinous to the overall team.
I’m going to switch now from “we” to “I” but I want to be really clear about why. We Lindens were all in it together, and there is a broad sense in which all credit and blame goes to all of us … but not in this post. Here, I’m talking about maybe half a dozen people, and so it would be too much of a personal attack for me to try to describe the failures of anyone other than myself. I’m willing to attack myself in this forum, but not my former colleagues, all of whom I still respect and a few of whom I love like my own family. But I want you to remember the “we” because otherwise the rest of this post is going to seem incredibly egocentric: there’s a certain kind of self-blame that’s really self-aggrandizement, and though I regard my own failures as critical, even the most deluded version of the story couldn’t claim it was all about me.
So. I failed as a person. I failed the team. I was responsible for many elements of our strategy, execution, culture and management, and those decisions aren’t the ones I regret. What I regret, to the extent that I’m capable of regretting such a rich learning experience for me, is giving up. I don’t mean at the end, when I was tired and disillusioned and looking around at a company I didn’t recognize and a future I didn’t want to live. A lot earlier than that, I gave up on people that we needed, people who were flawed and fragile but necessary. I let people fail, I let people go, I let people hide in their illusions and fears, I let them give up because I’d already given up.
The irony was, when I joined the company, I was supposed to be an experienced hand that would bring some sanity to a crazy world. But I indulged my own worst instincts - throughout the craziest times, when I could’ve done the most good, I just brought more crazy. I was having fun, but I chose my own twisted growth over a higher goal, and at times I was just plain mean or selfish or drunk. I really wasn’t ready for the opportunity that Linden Lab presented to me. I really wasn’t the guy I should’ve been when I got there; I didn’t know what I needed to know until I left.
Too many of the key leaders at the Lab were working through similarly damaging personal limitations. You might ask whether this really points to a failure in culture or hiring or leadership, and that would be a fair question. It’s true that Linden had a way of hiring certain kinds of people and forcing them to confront their own deepest flaws – but I think that’s beautiful, a feature not a bug. What we needed was one or more or all of us to conquer our flaws, to enable the entire team to rise above the limitations of each of us. But none of us defeated our own demons, and so all of us perished.
I’ve been gone from Linden Lab for over two and a half years, and still my failure haunts me. The last day of the year is always a good moment to come to terms with the passage of time, and this New Year’s Eve I’ve decided I should finally accept the fact that I’m never going to let it go. I’ll try to reach peace through the zen realization that peace is unattainable.
anything can happen
p. 73:
‘Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,’ I thought; ‘anything at all ….’
Race plays no significant role in The Great Gatsby, unless you adopt the ludicrous assertion that Gatsby was black. Here is the only page with a meaningful composition involving black characters. Nick sees three black passengers in a limousine with a white chauffeur, and this observation is enough to inspire wonderment at the limitless possibilities beyond the border into New York City.
Fitzgerald was only three generations removed from the Civil War, so the upheaval in the social order that he saw in the roles of the limousine riders is understandable. But there’s something he considered more improbable than that: ‘Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.’ What was so fantastic about Gatsby that we should compare his existence to the reversal of centuries of slavery?
Gatsby was a bootlegger, a scammer, a fixer, a criminal through and through. And yet he was a successful social climber, welcomed in high society and regarded as mysterious rather than despicable. But this deception isn’t enough to rate the idea of Gatsby as improbable.
What’s improbable is Gatsby’s desire, particularly his desire in juxtaposition to his contemptible reality. His dream of lost love is a desire for purity and innocence that he’ll never have – not because the time has passed, but because of the person he is. He is a criminal and no matter how wealthy or charming or famous he may become, in his actions and in his heart, he is an evildoer.
It may be that every bad man desires to have some part of his life that is unsullied by his participation – the robber who gives to the poor, the gangster that supports the neighborhood, the vigilante that protects the weak. But no action ever redeems the sinner who can’t reform his own twisted soul. Gatsby’s problem wasn’t that he couldn’t repeat the past, but that he wouldn’t have done anything differently even if he could. The idea that you can be bad and join your rotting heart to something good is the most improbable conceit of all.
why second life failed
This post is about why Second Life failed – but not in the sense of, “here are the reasons why Second Life failed,” but instead, “here is why it is true that Second Life failed.”
Slate published an article titled “Why Second Life Failed” that also, like this post, is not an elucidation of reasons why SL failed – but unlike this post, it is not an authentic attempt to support the proposition that SL indeed failed. It is simply an effort to market a new book by posting an article with a catchy headline. There is an unavoidable paradox in that any marketable headline with the structure “Why [X] Failed” must use for X something that has first achieved at least some significant success, otherwise the title would be too obscure to attract readers. I started a company called Bynamite that folded after less than two years – no one writes articles titled “Why Bynamite Failed” because no one’s ever heard of Bynamite.
This mild paradox isn’t sufficient defense for SL’s ardent users and thoughtful critics. As is often the case with posts about SL’s demise, the comments to the Slate article are full of well-informed, intelligent and passionate conversation that puts the original article to shame. At Terra Nova, Greg Lastowka suggests that SL remains fertile ground for study, with the pointed rejoinder that “Second Life never failed – the media reporting on Second Life failed.”
As a former Linden, I appreciate the desire to insist that Second Life hasn’t failed. I joined Linden Lab in 2005, at a time when we had a few dozen employees and registered users in the tens of thousands. By the time I left four years later, we had around 7 times the number of employees, several hundred times as many users, and almost a hundred times the revenue. It certainly felt like success to me. I left sated with a feeling of accomplishment, and great hope for the future of Second Life.
But I also left feeling depleted. We had stumbled our way from obscurity to something like prominence, but I didn’t know how to take it to the next level. We weren’t making progress despite having bountiful talent, desire and resources. We had a beautiful company, a real culture of beauty and love, genuine emotion for each other and for the world we were helping to build. And it wasn’t working, not well enough and not fast enough and not big enough.
Perhaps there never was a next level. Perhaps it was always the destiny of Second Life to be an innovative niche product for a select group of people, a worthy subject of serious study, a constantly evolving emporium of edge cases. Maybe we should have just hunkered down, and focused on maintaining an elaborate playground for only a select audience of passionate and creative people. We could eke out a fine living, and damn the rest of the world who just didn’t get it.
But I couldn’t damn the rest of the world, because dammit, I’m from that rest of the world. I was never a true Resident of Second Life; I was a visitor, an outsider with the good fortune to see the incredible things that people can do in a truly free environment. I was inspired, amazed and delighted by Second Life – as well as occasionally revolted, offended and demoralized – and the diversity and depth of this experience was a revelation to me, one that I believed that everyone can appreciate.
And I still believe that, which is why I have to accept that Second Life has failed (so far, we must always say so far). The reality is that Second Life is still a niche product, and to deny that I wanted it to be something more would dishonor the heartbreaking glory of our ambition. It’s fair to say that Facebook became our second life, but it’s also shortsighted. Not so long ago, people laughed at the proposition that anyone wanted to maintain a virtual presence online that could form the basis of social interaction. Facebook did put an end to the dismissive chuckles on that topic.
But it’s equally laughable to say that this is where we’ll stop, that the final destination of online interaction consists of wall posts and text messages in two dimensions. I still believe that there’s no sensible way to define an impassible boundary between where we are today and a time when people “live” in a three-dimensional virtual environment. I’m still a true believer, an old true Linden in that way. So I have to admit that Second Life has failed.
So far.
great jobs
The death of Steve Jobs raises and answers the question that haunts the psyches of ambitious entrepreneurs everywhere: “Was it worth it?”
Praise follows death like the glowing debris that trails a comet, and the writing in the sky says that Jobs was the greatest CEO ever. A few muted voices remember that he was famously harsh to work with, but this is universally regarded as an entirely justified mania for perfection. Considering his accomplishments, it seems almost irrelevant that he denied the obligations of paternity for one child, and consciously decided that his children should know him through biography rather than time spent with him, even – or especially – in the final stretch towards death, when the remaining time must be remorselessly allotted like oxygen in a sealed room.
This isn’t criticism of a great man. It’s a reminder that many of us would willingly make the same choices, were such greatness within our reach.
We say it’s not so, and try to believe it. We encourage each other to remember family, remember health, remember that a life of striving includes the quest to achieve a full and humane life through our work. But the life of Jobs is the story of his jobs, of his one true job: making a dent in the universe through the creation of products that become a part of our lives. For his success in that, we forgive and excuse his personality defects. We cannot blame a man for failing to uphold principles that we would throw aside ourselves if only we could be assured that the universe was malleable to our touch.
Saying that “you are not your job“ is a comfort; it alleviates the cognitive dissonance between your self-image and the productive economic output you contribute to the world. The lessons of Steve Jobs deny that comfort; his strongest exhortations insist that you are all about the things you make for the world – not for yourself, not for your hobbies or leisure, not even for your family and certainly not your friends if you have any. You have to do great work, never settle, remember that each day could be your last, don’t waste time living someone else’s life.
There is no obligation to community, family or friendship in these words – though strangely, there is an overwhelming commitment to society in the desire to dent the universe, for this is not a universe of cold cosmological phenomena, it’s a universe of people, and his ambition is all about changing how people live. For Jobs, if this ambition involved sacrifices of a more universal personal nature, there is no question that it was worth it. It was worth it for him, and his efforts were certainly worth it for us.
It’s touching to see the determination with which Jobs’ sayings are repeated in the wake of his death. But the message of his most appealing words isn’t quite the message of his life. He told us to follow our hearts, to trust our intuitions, to ask ourselves if our plan for this day is how we’d want to spend our last. But those are not goals, they are only beautiful means to an uncompromising end. The goal of Jobs was to be insanely great in a world-changing way. That’s the hard part of the message to understand. All of us can hope to understand what is in our own hearts, and can hope to have the courage to follow it. Almost no one alive has a realistic ambition to change the world – what many of us think of as world changing is merely interesting, hopefully entertaining, and possibly enriching.
worlds collide
You’re not a writer if you’re not writing something today about that day 10 years ago …
My wife was screaming about something on TV, but I couldn’t get out of bed. My head was heavy with flu, the sounds couldn’t penetrate the haze of mucus and sick. We had moved to San Francisco from New York two and a half years ago. I still missed The City, still missed the feeling of living in the giant beating heart of the world, a heart that pounded with the rhythm of my own. I grew up in a Jersey suburb 45 minutes from the Holland Tunnel. One of the few reliable moments of magic in my youth was the anticipation of a trip to NYC, which peaked the moment the towers came into view around a bend in the turnpike. The towers were monumental, elemental, permanent – I could no more imagine the city without them than the sky without the sun.
But a plane had just crashed into one of them. Surely an accident, I’ll read about it tomorrow when I’m over this flu. My wife is still yelling, and I bury my head deeper into the pillow and ignore the looming reality. And then the second plane into the second tower. Now even my virus-addled mind has enough strength to put together the picture, or maybe, isn’t strong enough to construct an alternate interpretation. It’s not an accident. The towers are coming down, the world is ending. I finally roll out of bed with just enough momentum to come to rest in front of the TV, where I sit slackjawed for the next two days, watching the grim images pile up, the towers falling, bodies falling, people running, debris and dust and ineffable dismay, the pictures and posters of the lost.
A call from the office asks when I’m coming in, gentle but insistent. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, I’d already decided I couldn’t do this work anymore, before that day. And now, these people, they couldn’t understand, with their happy California sunshine and bleeding optimism. They couldn’t understand what it meant to turn a corner of anticipation and be greeted only by empty sky. I wanted nothing of them. I wanted to go back, back home, back East. Now that trip could seem like a run to a ravaged home rather than a run from a broken promise.
But that was a problem; the excuse was too easy and at the same time, insurmountable. I could tell myself that I was going home to help, but no one could look at that smouldering hole in the earth and believe in selfish lies. I wasn’t running to help, I was running away, away from expectations, dissatisfactions, disappointments. The loss of September 11 deserved better than to serve as easy explanation.
Four months later, I had quit the firm but hadn’t left the Bay Area. My life had become unmoored from a certain stable career path, into a meandering decade of exploration and discovery, of triumph and loss and the subtle closeness of the two, of searching for monuments to fill the hole in the sky.
something utterly fantastic
p. 72:
I was sure the request would be something utterly fantastic and for a moment I was sorry I’d ever set foot on his overpopulated lawn.
Gatsby warns Nick he’s “going to make a big request of you today,” but he won’t ask him directly, leaving it up to Jordan Baker to ask Nick at lunch later in the day. Nick claims to be more annoyed than interested, but this can’t possibly be true. It’s another example of Nick lying to himself and lying to us as readers.
Nick already knows Gatsby as the most mysterious figure he’s ever met, and surely the elaborate setup for the request must pique his curiosity. From a certain point of view, Nick’s right to treat the request as unworthy of the anticipation, and wrong to think it would be utterly fantastic. Instead, it’s a modest demand of impossible proportions – Gatsby only wants Nick to invite his cousin Daisy to tea, and have Gatsby drop by for a casually non-coincidental reunion. Gatsby only wants to recreate the past, to renew the idealized romance of his youth.
Fitzgerald believed that the great and small can share the same prosaic longings. He would have approved of the notion that somebody like Citizen Kane would spend his last breath on the name of a sled. In his day, some critics felt that Fitzgerald should be slightly regarded because his concerns weren’t sufficiently serious – he didn’t write about racism or poverty or bullfighting or war or incest. Almost a decade after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald complained, “I had recently been kidded half hay-wire by critics who felt that my material was such as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.”
All he had to deal with was the problem of the past as both anchor and engine for an unattainable future. Orchestrating a chance meeting is a small request, but reviving lost love would really be something utterly fantastic.
drive me crazy
Bob Lutz was a product development executive at BMW, Ford, Chrysler and GM over a 47-year career in the auto industry. His book Car Guys vs Bean Counters focuses on his second stint at GM, from 2001-2010.
In an excerpt in the WSJ, Lutz phrases a classic question of executive management, about the tension between leading by example or by autocratic demand:
I had to ask myself, and still do today, if it is the proper role … to get down in the trenches for hours on end, teaching the love of perfection in the smallest details when perhaps a more impatient autocrat would simply have ordered—nay, demanded—that it happen ….
This question has been asked and debated across many industries over many years. In information technology, we’ve seen different answers at HP, Intel, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Facebook. Often within the same company, the story swings between democratic (“emergent” is the trendier term) and autocratic over time, but you could roughly say that HP and Google have been known for emergent corporate cultures, and Intel, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook have been thought of as more autocratic. The public imagination tends to favor stories based on a single personality as leader, so it is likely that every tale of an “autocratic” workplace radically overstates the effect that any one person can have on a large organization.
But still, leaders matter even in the most emergent management styles, and Lutz’s question is a deep one. The tension exists because when a leader is right, autocratic demand will always lead to the best outcome in the shortest possible time – but no one is always right, and the flip side is that autocratic demand leads to the most disastrous failures very quickly when the leader is wrong. Emergent management is an attempt to institutionalize greatness over a long period of time, a period exceeding the career length of any single leader. Lutz asks the right questions again:
But does the autocrat, no matter how gifted, create sustainable success? Or does his style drive away other capable leaders who would form a leadership team after the great man’s departure? . . .
The fact is, though, that my effort to instill into the organization a drive for perfection and customer delight in all things was successful. And still I wonder—was I right? Did I change the core of the product development culture by teaching, or did I rely too much on my own will and my considerable influence to get what I wanted?
Strikingly, Lutz is haunted by the failure of his lessons to stick at Chrysler. He had left that company secure in the knowledge that his standards and principles were permanently embedded in the corporate culture. But it didn’t work – new leadership quickly shifted the company into a bean-counting mentality, and the passion he’d invested there evaporated as easily as spilled alcohol. He thinks there will be a different outcome at GM, but it’s not clear why there’s any reason to believe this.
I find some divisions in Lutz’s dichotomy questionable: an autocratic leader can certainly get down in the trenches, and an emergent leader can certainly demand great results. I agree that sustainable success is the ultimate arbiter of greatness – but if the company doesn’t succeed through crisis points, which sometimes require an autocratic hand, then it will not have the chance to measure a track record over generations of leadership. So I would say that a company – and its leaders – have to be able to master both styles, and most crucially, know when and how to switch from one to the other.
the gnawings of his broken heart
p. 71:
I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.
Gatsby carries around a couple of souvenirs to support the stories of his fantastic past: a war medal from Montenegro, a picture in an Oxford quad. These trinkets provide a tangible base to solidify his gauzy stories in the listener’s imagination; their production in conversation acts as a talisman that makes the stories real. But in the end these physical objects are signifiers for false tales – like building a castle in the air on a base of lily pads.
Gatsby’s use of his souvenirs seems childish and manipulative, but they’re only a more unique and imaginative application of a universal technique. In anyone’s life, what are the stories supported by driving a certain kind of car, or wearing a particular watch, or a wedding ring? These things are not manifestations of the truth; they are symbols of a story, objects we use to paint the brushstrokes of the picture we present to the world.
There’s truth only in action and emotion, not objects, and at the end Gatsby sums up, ‘You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me.‘ The truth is, he is alone in the world, without friends and without a home, unable to escape from the traveling prison of his own regrets.
with his smile
p. 70:
He lifted the words up and nodded at them – with his smile.
The Great Gatsby contains very little physical description of the man named Gatsby. Instead there is a careful magic enchanting the narrative, where Gatsby’s effect on others is described through the dark whispers of his reputation. Even when we do get a treatment of a physical feature – in this case, Gatsby’s smile – we do not see the whiteness of his teeth, whether his lips are thin or full, where the creases of past humor line his face. There’s no imagery here, only effect. We see the effect of his smile on the words that pass through his mouth, and we understand the effect of his personality on the listener. We get a sense of his controlling charisma, his ability to invest the most outlandish story with something pure from his heart.
He’s describing a romantic fantasy in which he travels the earth in riches, ‘trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.‘ The story is ludicrous. Nick says, ‘The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned “character” leaking sawdust at every pore …‘ But by the end, with his smile, Gatsby makes it all true.
start me up
A couple of months ago, a good friend was talking to me about the differences between most people and “entrepreneurs like us.” I had to recoil at the phrase. He’s a real entrepreneur – founded a couple of successful companies, working on a third, constantly driving and innovating and dreaming and creating. At my best I never reached his heights. I’d been a “startup guy” for a dozen years, and proudly wore that badge – as a startup lawyer learning business basics, boardroom battles, and founder secrets; as a venture capitalist investing across sectors and geographies; as a startup manager in multiple different roles and companies. When I finally founded my own company, I felt I could finally accept the label entrepreneur, and it felt great. But it didn’t last very long. I’d accepted a job at a large company not too long before that conversation, so “entrepreneurs like us” couldn’t include me anymore.
I’m not too flexible about the term, unlike those who believe in four types of entrepreneurs. I think an entrepreneur makes a for-profit business that didn’t exist before, without the benefit of existing infrastructure. That rules out what some call social entrepreneurship, because working for nonprofit good is too different than pursuit of viable commercial enterprise. And it rules out corporate entrepreneurship, because starting a new division or business line for an existing company is very different from starting a company from a cocktail napkin.
I said different – I didn’t say harder or more admirable. The numbers probably say that social and corporate efforts are harder, as there seem to be more new companies than there are new social efforts or successful businesses started within large companies.
I’ll differentiate some more: Although I’d include both the fruit stand owner and the tech company titan within my view of entrepreneurs, I don’t think they’re the same in most ways, even at their respective starts. Fruit stands aim for some daily living, selling a well-understood product, within a social infrastructure that understands and supports the concept of buying and eating fruit. The most extreme tech founder dreams of all the money imaginable, with a product that initially seems bizarre, with no apparent revenue model, distribution channel, or plausible customer interest. Although these two kinds of people have something in common, they have a lot more differences. So “entrepreneur” isn’t a binary label – it’s possible for one entrepreneur to be more entrepreneurial than another. Labels are most useful when we use them to distinguish and measure concepts. I don’t like seeing a meaningful word diluted to appease egos or ease conversation.
Because the company I work for now is fairly well known, I should doubly-triply-quadruply emphasize that this is all my opinion, and moreover it’s my opinion about me. I can believe that for many entrepreneurs, coming to Google doesn’t mean that your days as an entrepreneur are over – those entrepreneurs are more entrepreneurial than I ever was, which I’ve admitted isn’t a high bar.
And although I’m still a startup guy at heart, I can believe that Google can in important ways return to its startup roots, even though I’m naturally inclined to disbelieve that a large company can have the “energy, pace and soul of a startup.” But I’d say that you have to measure the energy and pace in the context of the scale of the ambition. People who think that Google is slow or that the competition is anything other than the unknown future are probably underestimating the enormous opportunity remaining in the information economy.
Ah, but that last bit, the “soul” of a startup … what does that even mean? That’s tricky, and probably the topic of another post.
