Another thread from Robert Bloomfield’s interview with Philip Rosedale covered the investment side of things – interesting insight for operators who have recently embarked on their own virtual journeys. An extract is below (with the full piece here) and Christian Renaud’s thoughts over on the Technology Intelligence Group blog are just a click away here.

PHILIP ROSEDALE: for all the excitement around Second Life, this has been a company thats been well financed. Everythings been done in a simple straightforward way. Interests have been well aligned all the way along. In other words, all the investors have had a very similar view of what we were doing, what the longevity of the project was, what kind of metrics and outcomes we were looking for. You know, its been a pretty comfortable process. As a technology entrepreneur, actually I hadnt been on any other technology company boards in a startup sense. But I think the process weve gone through over the last… Well, we raised our first round of venture investment in March of 2001, and I think from then to now it has really been a pretty friendly environment. Weve had our ups and down, but…

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: You obviously have had access to capital given what youve been able to do?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù

PHILIP ROSEDALE: Well, the other great thing was that this was always a project where we took careful little steps and tried to see what we could achieve at each point, in my opinion, rather than overinvesting and then being wrong in a costly way. So the capital cost of bringing this company to profitability, in terms of investment, was in the neighborhood of like 20 million dollars. Whats nice about that is, its just fortunate to be involved in a project where the cost to reach profitability, more or less, was 20 million bucks. Thats appealing because you dont have the highest levels of tension in that environment. Thats not a huge amount of money, in the technology world, to invest in a company. Im really proud that we got from inception to basically to operational profitability without spending more money than that. I think its a delight now. And basically the same group of investors. I mean we had some great angels in the beginning, and we added a couple of venture capital firms, and basically thats it. Benchmark and Globespan.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Company directory, Virtual Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.