Linden Lab JUST released this press release;

2014-02-05

SAN FRANCISCO — February 5, 2014 — Linden Lab®, the makers of Second Life®, BlocksworldTM, DesuraTM, and more, today announced that Ebbe Altberg will lead the company as its new Chief Executive Officer.

Most recently prior to joining Linden Lab, Altberg was COO of BranchOut. Prior to that, he was part of the executive team at Yahoo!, most recently as SVP of Media Products. His more than 25 years of experience managing teams that create world-class products and services also includes leadership roles at Ingenio (acquired by at&t Interactive) and Microsoft.

“We remain committed to world-changing innovation from Linden Lab,” said Jed Smith of the company’s Board of Directors. “We’re keenly focused on providing incredible experiences for all of our customers, and Ebbe is the perfect person to help lead our team as we continue to serve and grow our global audience of active users.”

“Linden Lab has long been at the forefront of building experiences that entertain people while empowering them to express themselves and profit from their creations,” said Altberg. “Our customers’ creativity is unparalleled, and I’m proud to join the talented team that serves them. Second Life is now in its eleventh year, and every day, users continue to create more and more amazing experiences to enjoy. Though much younger, Blocksworld has already seen hundreds of thousands of unique user-created worlds shared for everyone to play with. I’m absolutely committed to supporting our customers and helping them become even more successful. There are significant opportunities ahead, and I look forward to leading us into the next phase of growth.”

I can’t say I’ve heard of mr Altberg or the projects he’s worked on in his previous career.

I do of course know about Yahoo and am afraid that I can’t say many positive things about that company.

I will do some more research but so far I’ve not found much evidence that suggests Mr Altberg has any experience with Virtual Worlds, as a user or otherwise.

But I guess we’ll have to give him a chance and find out a bit more about him first.

I hope he will be willing to throw himself into this and actually create an avatar and become part of Second Life.

After all, you must understand the goods you’re selling.

And I hope he will improve the communication between LL and its users, talk to us!

He already made a first good step by being on Twitter and actually responding 🙂

A good first step would be an interview with Draxter at the Drax files

I am sure his last name is no reason to worry us… mr “Alt Mountain” 😉

Mr Altberg is descrbibed on LinkedIn as follows;

Over 20 years experience managing teams that define, produce and operate world class software, packaged or hosted, on multiple platforms and across numerous product categories and technologies. Create fantastic and profitable experiences that positively impact millions of people. Specialties:Team development, strategy, provide vision, software and business inventions, product design, engineering, product/program management, quality engineering, operations. Manage teams that invent, create, define, spec, build, produce, test, ship, market and operate products.

Philippe CassereauVP of Technology at Disney describes him as;

Ebbe is a very strong business and product leader able to filter the noise and distill a crisp vision and direction for his team. He was instrumental in shifting the thinking in Yahoo Media from being vertically silo’ed to instead a strong platform SaaS horizontal approach at global scale. As a manager, Ebbe is able to inspire action and results without micro-managing his staff and trusting his teams to figure out the details, while setting a consistent direction and vision for his organization. He has great skills at filtering through the minutia and details of running a large organization and zeroing instead quickly of what is really important for the business.

Noelia Fernández ArroyoVP, Media Network, EMEA at Yahoo! describes him as follows;

Ebbe has been so critical in my career and the moment we live in Yahoo! He has a superb intuition and determination to build great teams and leaders, where people contribute to same goal and over perform. He also has a genuine and unique vision for Media on the Internet, how to create content in scale and leverage platforms and technology to create the best content experiences. He is also a true global thinker, as he sees beyond geographies and team sizes and allows and creates flexibility. He is an architect, a creator of ideas as well as a builder. This is so key in the leadership we need to day on the Internet, to keep reinventing and innovating. I look forward the day I can work with him again!

Nitin AhujaVP Engineering at SmartShoot.com says;

Ebbe has the unique ability to focus on a problem and always find an elegant solution. He is a natural leader and is able to rally everyone around him in working towards making the customer happy. Ebbe can absorb large amounts of technical information and use it build innovative and useful features and products. Having worked with him for over eight years I have come to respect his judgment and his flair for product design.

It is of course to be expected that praise on LinkedIn is always positive but it seems Mr Altberg is mostly someone who can run a company well.

I fear that we at Second Life need a bit more than just a good manager though.