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Stuart Garfield
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Exit Interview
Former Linden Lab exec Lester looks to future in virtual world crossroads
By Rodney H. Brown
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John Lester | Former position: Evangelist, market development, Linden Lab Inc.
Five years ago, John Lester joined San Francisco-based Linden Lab Inc. and helped launch its Boston-area branch office, which has been located at the Cambridge Innovation Center ever since. Lester started at Linden Lab as a community manager and eventually became evangelist for market development. Rather than landing somewhere else in the company when it shifted departments, Lester decided it was time to move on. The former neurology research associate at Harvard Medical School and IT director for the neurology services department at Massachusetts General Hospital agreed to answer Mass High Tech’s own version of exit interview questions with News Editor Rodney Brown.
Why are you leaving?
Linden Lab has been undergoing a lot of growth and continues to undergo a lot of growth, and like any startup company, it is reorganizing and reprioritizing, I am leaving to look for broader opportunities in the intersection between virtual worlds and online communities.
What led you to accept your most recent position with the organization?
I believe that virtual worlds are a compelling platform for a wide range markets — for consumers, for entertainment, for business, for education — for pretty much as wide a range of markets as the web has. I joined Linden Lab because Second Life is a platform that focuses on harvesting the creative energies of the users, and it’s all built on user-generated content. I believed, and I continue to feel, that figuring out ways to create platforms that facilitate innovative user content and commerce between users is a huge opportunity for a wide range of markets. That’s why I joined.
What, if anything, do you wish you had known before you took the job?
How quickly things can grow. I expected a lot of growth rapidly and it was more than I could imagine. That’s a good thing — it’s definitely a challenging thing, too. You learn so much from being in an environment like that. That was one of the awesome things about being in a company like that, because I learned not just how quickly things can grow, but how to think and act strategically in ways that allowed things to thrive and grow even faster.
What were your greatest contributions to the organization?
Probably establishing our presence at the Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square — establishing an office presence on the East Coast, in Cambridge. Kendall Square is just such a great place for startup companies. You’ve got Google there, you’ve got Microsoft. In the Cambridge Innovation Center you’ve got all of these startups. There is so much opportunity for synergy. You are rubbing elbows with people with various different perspectives, and they are all innovators.
I am very proud of having led the foundation of that office, which has grown now to about 40 employees. Another thing I am proud of is the work that I did to help the growth of the educator community in Second Life. The pioneers of many platforms are the educators, and when I started I could count on two hands the number of educators using Second Life for innovative learning and immersive education. Now that I am leaving, it has grown into this force of its own — literally thousands of educators, hundreds of universities around the world have a presence in Second Life.
What do you consider to be the biggest challenge the organization now faces and needs to overcome?
I think the challenge Linden Lab faces is the challenge that any online platform faces at this point, which is how to integrate with the constellation of social networking environments that are out there — things like Facebook and Twitter. Linden Lab has been and is continuing to work on that right now. People use more than one platform. I think the path to success is figuring out how to get everything to work together — not be an island.
If you had your own island in Second Life, what would it be like?
I would create a space to bring together people from different disciplines to think about different ideas. I think that one of the biggest strengths of Second Life is that you can share ideas and concepts not just verbally and with the written word, but by creating a three-dimensional environment. I would want to create a space that fosters that.
What advice would you give your replacement?
Try to predict the future but remain nimble enough to take advantage of unexpected things that happen. The virtual world space is still very nascent, very new, and there is still so much more to learn and the trick is to be an agile learner on how people are using your platform. And then provide the right tools for them, based on how you are seeing them innovate. That is very hard to predict.
What will you do to fill in the hours recently occupied by your job?
I am enjoying the wonderful weather today, my goodness. But I am looking more broadly at virtual worlds, online communities and social networking and how they all connect to each other. What I am doing at this point is stepping back and looking at the whole constellation as broadly as possible. That’s really what I am fascinated by. I am doing a lot of thinking and looking and listening, too.
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