On February 6th, I published a short(ish) profile on Linden Lab’s new CEO, Ebbe Altberg. I’m the first to admit there were a few holes in it, as I was reliant totally on published sources.

However, on Friday February 14th, Mr. Altberg himself paid me a nice Valentines Day surprise by stopping by and filling-in the blanks.

Here’s what he had to say:

Hi! This is Ebbe…a few clarifications

The high school in Sweden was a ski academy and I was a ski racer.

At Middlebury I got a degree in Fine Arts with a concentration in Computer Applications…hopped between art studios and coding in the computer lab…left brain right brain…

Ingenio created marketplaces for people to buy and sell information over the phone. We enabled a lot of people to sell what they know and make money doing it. Take a call, provide a service, three days later we would direct deposit your earnings. We also invented Pay per Call (which is part of the reason why at&t interactive bought the company). I racked up quite a few patents there, but I don’t really mention that anywhere as I’m not a huge fan of the patent system. Also, after my interim ceo stint there I was the Chief Product Officer.

I left Yahoo! because I did not believe in the CEO they had at that time. But I’m very proud of what was achieved while I was there (a lot of fixing org and technical plumbing).

After Yahoo! I spent six months hanging out with my family and played a lot of golf with my younger son and watched a lot of Aleks’ car races. Aleks was very engaged in SL many years ago.

I really enjoyed my time at BranchOut and we made some big changes and made some really good progress. Talk.co is a cool messaging and group chat product. And they are working on something else as well that will be quite interesting. Great team. I did not leave for any other reason than not being able to say no to this incredible opportunity.

Finally, I’m a big sports fan…motor sports, soccer (Arsenal!), golf, martial arts…

There you go!

The reply did catch me by surprise (and I’ll also admit I checked the IP address from whence it originated, just in case someone was engaging in a little leg-pulling), but it sparked a little exchange on the subject of Formula 1 (an interest he and I both share) which was (temporarily?) halted by the arrival of the weekend. I hope we get some opportunities for a resumption, as I’m dying to know if he is, as I suspect (that’s spelt h-o-p-e), interested in space exploration (and astronomy?) …

Anyway, Thank you, Ebbe, for dropping by. I hope it’s not the last time 🙂 .