Lets create a Startup Incubator in Second Life

[Wili Clip]

21 minutes ago, Garnet Psaltery said:

So you want to make something and hope LL like it enough to buy it.  I see where this is going.

No actually I want to enable the creation of a virtual business cluster of incorporated shareholding companies by most successful content creators that all could co-own each others shares so that the interests can be aligned to move the virtual world industry forward all together instead of competing against each other.

If that happens then either LL (the owners) strategically invest in the most successful ones and align interest with where the most creative energy is flowing to additionally benefit or they don't do anything.

In either case Linden Lab benefits. Because if content developers create more and higher quality virtual products and games that could grow active SL user base 10 - 100 fold the value of everyone grows due to more SL users equals to larger money flows into platform.

 

Edited February 24, 2021 by Wili Clip

[Paul Hexem]

As someone that enjoys investing in projects, I gotta ask, what are you offering that's different than a place like Builder's Brewery?

All I see is pointless "inspirational quotes" and rambling. Gotta get to the point if you want people to take you seriously. 

[Mollymews]

30 minutes ago, Wili Clip said:

 I want to enable the creation of a virtual business cluster of incorporated shareholding companies by most successful content creators that all could co-own each others shares so that the interests can be aligned to move the virtual world industry forward all together instead of competing against each other

this needs to be done in the real world by real world people, same as any other incubator that targets digital

[Silent Mistwalker]

I'm still trying to figure out if we're talking virtual world content creators or virtual world creators here. To me, it sounds like it's more geared towards virtual world creators rather than VW content creators which is what you find the most of in SL so I'm having trouble with it even making sense to do within SL. Maybe it's just me but it has the SLBBB kind of feel to it.

[Wili Clip]

37 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

As someone that enjoys investing in projects, I gotta ask, what are you offering that's different than a place like Builder's Brewery?

All I see is pointless "inspirational quotes" and rambling. Gotta get to the point if you want people to take you seriously. 

Hi!

I am not making a sales pitch. Just looking for like minded people who would like the idea of a SL business incubator. Those that like the idea of businesses working together and understand how cooperation can enable greater things can join [SL] Business Consortium group 

As for my startup that I plan to make it all depends if I can get green light from product managers of LL. Players in my community already know what its about as we had public presentation and posted its excerpt in our social network.

[Wili Clip]

48 minutes ago, Mollymews said:

1 hour ago, Wili Clip said:

 I want to enable the creation of a virtual business cluster of incorporated shareholding companies by most successful content creators that all could co-own each others shares so that the interests can be aligned to move the virtual world industry forward all together instead of competing against each other

this needs to be done in the real world by real world people, same as any other incubator that targets digital

Yes we are real people and I am talking about incorporating real shareholding companies.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

1 hour ago, Wili Clip said:

No actually I want to enable the creation of a virtual business cluster of incorporated shareholding companies by most successful content creators that all could co-own each others shares so that the interests can be aligned to move the virtual world industry forward all together instead of competing against each other.

I see one slight flaw in your cunning plan, and that is that everybody in secondlife is an individual  (1) who is only likely to cooperate with others if it's a dance in a club or the chance to give somebody else a dam good verbal thrashing and apart from that, lives and breathes to compete for Lindens, Kudos, bears, forums points, or inventory size.

Getting them to cooperate would be like trying to teach cats line-dancing.

 

(1) Not me, I'm different

Edited February 24, 2021 by Profaitchikenz Haiku

[Scylla Rhiadra]

38 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

I see one slight flaw in your cunning plan, and that is that everybody in secondlife is an individual  (1) who is only likely to cooperate with others if it's a dance in a club or the chance to give somebody else a dam good verbal thrashing and apart from that, lives and breathes to compete for Lindens, Kudos, bears, forums points, or inventory size.

Getting them to cooperate would be like trying to teach cats line-dancing.

Not necessarily true! I know lots of long-standing and very successful collaborative, collective ventures in SL.

Of course, most of those are left-leaning collectives that value collaboration.

This, on the other hand, is a self-described capitalist venture. Isn't capitalism about winners and losers? Isn't the American version all about "rugged individualism"?

(Unless of course we're talking about those charming and quiet little "Gentlemen's Agreements" of the sort that anti-trust laws were designed to defeat.)

[Madelaine McMasters]

The economics of SL endeavors sit at least three decimal places away from that of RL endeavors. In the state of California, the cost of maintaining an LLC, even if it does no business, is L$200,000/yr. It's L$32,500 to form an LLC in Wisconsin (where I live) and L$8,750/yr to maintain it. The moment you need a lawyer, you're looking at a minimum of L$75,000/hr. Nobody will invest in a business that doesn't legally exist, so these are your starting points.

There are a few creators who've managed to eek out a real living in SL,. They didn't do it by kibitzing with others in a virtual business incubator. Incubating investable businesses in RL is very difficult. Doing it here? A thousand times harder.

Molly is right, this is something you actually do in RL. You'd pretend to do it here.

 

Edited February 25, 2021 by Madelaine McMasters

[Paul Hexem]

3 hours ago, Wili Clip said:

Hi!

I am not making a sales pitch. Just looking for like minded people who would like the idea of a SL business incubator. Those that like the idea of businesses working together and understand how cooperation can enable greater things can join [SL] Business Consortium group 

As for my startup that I plan to make it all depends if I can get green light from product managers of LL. Players in my community already know what its about as we had public presentation and posted its excerpt in our social network.

You answered that like a politician. I hate politicians. I'm out. 

[Arielle Popstar]

5 hours ago, Wili Clip said:

Startup Incubator would basically be a place in Second Life where various business educational meetings are carried out by the people who know what SL is and what its virtual business needs are as they've been part of it for years. For example:
- how to successfully run business in SL
- how to create a brand
- how to do marketing in a virtual world
- how to increase sales
- how to cooperate with other content developers - success stories, pitfalls
- what to be careful about
...

But most importantly a place where we network, make friendships and find ways to cooperate with each other or invest in each other or co-invest together.

To make a move from small to middle business into trying to grow a large business enterprise is stressful for anyone. The idea of Startup Incubator in Second Life is to create a support structure to make this transition easier and to make more content creators to decide for real life incorporation of their virtual businesses started in SL in a form of a shareholding companies. Currently most successful content creators in Second Life are happy as they are in comfort zone. If we want to extend the life of Second Life as a platform we need to start doing larger waves.

 

The section I quoted sounds good and somewhat reminds me of something like Wealthy Affiliates wherein mentors with different experiences create tutorials and generally help newer people find, develop and market niche product that appeal to the consumers. I'm thinking some sort of motivator would be needed for the experienced ones to share their knowledge otherwise they would just be creating competition for free.

The rest of what you wrote sounds good in a hazy sort of way but not everyone is going to be looking to take it to the point you are promoting and it muddies the waters for those who don't really know how far to go with it till they get a taste of it.

[Wili Clip]

2 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

The economics of SL endeavors sit at least three decimal places away from that of RL endeavors. In the state of California, the cost of maintaining an LLC, even if it does no business, is L$200,000/yr. It's L$32,500 to form an LLC in Wisconsin (where I live) and L$8,750/yr to maintain it. The moment you need a lawyer, you're looking at a minimum of L$75,000/hr. Nobody will invest in a business that doesn't legally exist, so these are your starting points.

There are a few creators who've managed to eek out a real living in SL,. They didn't do it by kibitzing with others in a virtual business incubator. Incubating investable businesses in RL is very difficult. Doing it here? A thousand times harder.

Molly is right, this is something you actually do in RL. You'd pretend to do it here.

 

What are you talking about? 🙄

->

 

LLC vs. Corporation: Setup & Annual Costs

Edited February 25, 2021 by Wili Clip

[Madelaine McMasters]

4 minutes ago, Wili Clip said:

What are you talking about? 🙄

->

 

I'm talking about reality. The Delaware costs outlined in the video you linked are higher than those of my home state of Wisconsin. You do yourself no favors by providing examples that bolster my case.

No matter, reality won't budge for you.

[Rowan Amore]

9 minutes ago, Wili Clip said:

What are you talking about? 🙄

->

 

Updated July 7, 2020:

How much an LLC costs in California is a question that many entrepreneurs in the state of California have. There are filing fees and annual fees associated with the formation and maintenance of an LLC. You can expect to pay at least $900 in fees when starting a California LLC. Since these fees can be significant, it is essential that entrepreneurs know about these fees before going through the process of forming an LLC.    

200,000L is a little less than $900.

Edited February 25, 2021 by Rowan Amore

[Wili Clip]

Oh I didn't see he/she was converting incorporation fees into L$. The incorporation offices will definitely not accept L$  hehe 😃 Its a late hour for me 💤.
Those fees are nothing to be afraid of and are definitely doable (I was kind of afraid that they are way bigger)

Madelaine McMasters I miss-read your post sorry about that. There is cost for doing business everywhere and anywhere in the world. It is normal. \O.. O/

Edited February 25, 2021 by Wili Clip

[Prokofy Neva]

23 hours ago, Wili Clip said:

I am interested to meet people with various knowledge & experience from the business world with interest of setting up a startup school / incubator in Second Life.

It would be a place in SL where people with ideas & various skills, knowledge & experience meet, learn together & network.

Its aim will be to help scale up or increase sales for existing SL creators & help them reach next level of growth.

I have long had an idea of creating such place in a virtual world SL. I am inspired by a story of how Silicon Walley came to be as a result of Frederick Terman, the legendary dean of Stanford engineering school during the 1940s and 1950s. He created the tradition of Stanford faculty starting their own companies.

It is all about creating a space and a climate of positive, friendly, creative and growth inspired people who seek to achieve technological breakthroughs, progress and growth. Builders. I believe SL can become such a space on an international scale. If we make it into.

I have been doing business in SL now for 10 years, ever since my student years. Everything I learned about being an entrepreneur I learned through SL by actually doing things & learning from experience. I did everything 1st on a small scale and then kept learning how to make it bigger.

With my 1st ever "big" project in SL and upon introduction of my business plan I've been laughed at by then SL community on SL Universe forum. Now SL Universe with most of those people is gone but my 1st big project on which I was able to learn to then make even more projects which were more successful still runs successfully. Now if ever anyone laughs at me I am ok with it and it doesn't affect me as its just a reflection of that persons inflated ego or even ignorance.

With like minded people I would like to create an environment that will encourage people starting something new and learn ( even a project that fails is a learning experience ). A place where people with new ideas are encouraged to learn to execute them and find like minded, similarly highly driven friends who can help with their knowledge, experience, connections towards growth and new breakthroughs.

The reality is that most people never start anything because they are afraid of failing. Most people are afraid of taking risk and settle for comfort zone (that never leads to growth and new learning experience). Also failing leads most people into self doubt that can lead to depression. Because that is what we are all taught in schools.

Schools were not designed to produce people who are comfortable thinking outside of the box. Although some teachers and professors are amazing at adding that component in their teachings. Most unfortunately don't.

The tight online forum communities that are always looking for their next laughing target are not helping making the world a better place and one could argue that its even a form of online bullying (I am sure we'll have some of it in this topic too). This demotivates many people from trying to break through their comfort zone and innovate. Why would anyone enjoy at bringing other people down emotionally? (Some people are just like that because it boosts their self esteem as they are lacking their own or seeing others succeed makes them feel bad about themselves so they want to prevent it if its in their power). I've learned to move away and ignore such people. It is an important part of becoming confident as an inventor, innovator, entrepreneur and not only that but also it helps you be a better person.

After 10 years of learning and growing in SL I have reached a point where any additional work input no longer leads to increased growth output. I have so many projects and active daily user base in SL is currently only at 50-60k.

I realized that any new successful game product I create in similar fashion as I did before would cannibalize on all my others. This is also why I paused my next project massively multiplayer game specifically designed to work in SL environment just before 1st ALPHA release. I don't currently find it worth investment of my energy and time. I believe it similar with many other people with strength and skills set to potentially develop the next big product or killer app for in SL that would positively affect Second Life's user retention rate and number of concurrent active users daily.

I am not primarily motivated by money. Since I studied economics I see it as a tool to build. Money for me is capital. I already have enough to live comfortably being with my income in within average of top 25% programmers in US (stats from 2019). When I was a student 1st year I quit IT university because being a programmer was not what I saw myself in the long term. I switched to economics - business school but been learning about both IT, economics and many multidisciplinary fields.

I am not the best programmer because I actually write code very slow & sometimes it takes a lot of effort for me to do it. But I have managed to earn more with my programming work than most programmers that are way faster and time efficient at solving algorithmic problems. It is not about how I program but it is all about what am I programming. I learned what works best for average consumer/player in SL. I am a CEO that most often does customer support work himself (it is a very good way to get most valuable 1st hand information about how your  product is doing to be able to surgically target investment into product improvement that will have the highest impact). A lot of implicit knowledge is needed from various fields (psychology, sociology, economics, neuroscience...) to be able to innovate in tech industry. (But even if you are highly educated and with PhD you are not going to perform and actualize your potential if you don't take risks and stay within your comfort zone. Many people who are highly educated are afraid of loosing reputation and are afraid of doing anything and they stop growing).

I have been successful in Second life as a programmer creator but now after 10 years of every day hard work and while in the eyes of many I am seen as successful I feel like a failure because despite good income I stopped growing. I realized few days ago that in all that time I could do so much more if I had a whole team of highly skilled people at my hand. But for that I will need a startup that I can raise investment capital with.

Since 14 days ago I started purposefully pushing myself out of comfort zone and started doing things I've been afraid of doing and starting to do before. My life has improved. I keep reaching for newer and higher goals.

A day ago I've decided to instead keep working hard its time to start working smart. I have sent an email to Linden Lab's VP of product management Patch Linden with a (detailed product description) of a new game system I plan to base my startup as a joint-stock company. So that I can raise investment capital to set up a team and develop 1st and then many more projects. Before I can make the next step I will need a formal approval of my product design by Linden Lab. So 1st step has been already made with sending formal request to LL and now waiting for reply.

My goal is to keep doing what I am good at. Inventing games in SL and keep gamifying SL to make more people want to spend time in SL for. But this time on a much larger scale with more risks and larger rewards for everyone involved. With a backing of US corporate-venture capital instrument. But in the long run I want to become investor and some day support life extension research. To me that is best investment anyone who reached the top can make. As results benefit everyone.

I've been learning and running business for 10 years I am ready to take the risk. I am an ex competitor in martial art judo. I Iive to compete and reach new bigger goals. I work all the time and last year I even moved my office into a kitchen (it just made sense to be close to water). I hope I can create a success story of SL and inspire other content creators and that maybe we can join our efforts either through joint investments or direct cooperation to move Second Life forward.

I want to set up a startup incubator organization in within SL with like minded people from all over the world. I want that we create a highly innovative and encouraging environment that will make it much more easier for young developers to develop and reach their true potential faster. To be able to launch companies that can reach multi million valuation a lot more skills, knowledge and connections are needed than 1 successful individual content creator can have. Especially because when you are creating content you need to be focused on it. We need an incubator that can make growing business from within SL easier and faster.

We are organizing in a SL group called:

SL Business Consortium

Its open to join.

 

 

So, you're right about SLU, and it's good to give them a pass, but it sounds to me like you want to get a slew of eager young hungry coders, so to speak, and pay them nothing, to get yourself a free work force to grow your own business, and you are trying to sugarcoat it with a narrative about creating a start-up community blah blah.

These things happen pretty organically when there are groups of like-minded people already collaborating in various ways or at least being friends, not when one dictatorial guru is able to convince 10 adepts to worship at his altar. Now, we all know that Steve Jobs is exactly that sort of persona as are others. So, sure, try that if you like.

I bet you will simply not get an answer from Patch Linden

But I'm surprised you have not done any homework given all the years you say you are in SL (I don't recognize this name at all). Stock markets are outlawed in SL. So are banks. So are credit unions. So are mutual aid societies on the scale you would require -- because they are illegal. They are not lawful. SL's lawyers cannot allow such liability for an entity that is under the scrutiny of the IRS in a climate where the IRS now has a line at the top of your return with a check-off box -- "Have you owned any Bitcoin in the past year?"

SL isn't Bitcoin obviously, but it sure is not unrelated. The founder of Mount Gox who committed suicide got her start in SL. Did you know that?

I watched the entire stock market thing unfold personally and I have a lot of field observations from this and data up to a point and like many things, the real life media did not cover it properly, and a certain newly-baked lawyer who was a coder with an ideological agenda to take over the virtual world space in various ways used it to try to create a career for for himself. And succeeded in part. And the original stock market founders, who might have had noble goals, at least as publicly stated, to challenge the monopoly of a certain RL backed land baron in this toy world, were in the end outright thugs and crooks. And the -- let us say, to be charitable, high-yield investment project -- called a Ponzi scheme later -- faltered on a simple vulnerability: it relied on gambling in SL for a base, and that was outlawed online by the US Congress. And LL got the word very clearly from credit card companies that if they persisted in tolerating such unlawful practices they would withdraw their services, and no business of course wants such a thing, and here we all are.

So -- no.

I think this was a useful realization on your part: "I realized that any new successful game product I create in similar fashion as I did before would cannibalize on all my others." I don't have anything like your business or your aspirations or your culture in my own SL at all, but I think this is a certain hard-stopped reality: there are 50,000 concurrents. 35,000, sometimes. There are only X that spend $25 US per month or more. We had those numbers 15 years ago and could see that breakdown and the ratios are likely no different today, even allowing for the gatchification and breedification of the economy. (It was prim hair and weapons in the old days). So if you buy a new sim and make a new rental (in my case), many of the people flee out of an old rental to come to it -- you don't gain a lot of new people. There are only so many avatars. I'm amazed when I go to all kinds of shopping and music events that I see my former and current tenants who I think as very diverse and far flung. Reason: it's a small world, like where I grew up in RL, population 3,004, and then my neighbour has another baby and a man comes out and paints it over to 3,005 where it sits for a year. Like that.

I love SL. I think it still has a lot of space for new inventions, new methods. But I think it might be better growing the non-governmental and governmental spaces than the corporate spaces for lots of reasons. I can't imagine LL attempting a thing like they did in 2006-2007 to woo real business like IBM or Sears. I mean Sears died in the meantime. IBM isn't what it was. I imagine they have an internal corporate hurt and taboo about even discussing what happened then. No one from then is still at the Lab, except for perhaps a few very ancient old coders who are probably kept busy fixing Cloud stuff so they don't remember.

Pro-tip: never rely on a Linden advising you, supporting you, or even answering your emails for anything you do in SL. At a very deep level, they don't care, and they can't care. That is, they have their culture, their set of internal corporate goals, their things here and there that they like culturally or for business reasons, and it is an extremely narrow set of things. There's very little room for any new entries there. I have seem amazingly successful businesses that never had a Linden foot on their sim, to the point where eventually, the Lindens had to court them to be relevant in some of their big events. But basically, the Lindens are not creating a world. They are making a platform.  I used to point out that their not-world and not-game stance in fact created this very unwieldly, shabby, and destructive world in fact, that they really ought to step up and govern and a hell of a lot better. And to their credit, they did various things in the years I've observed them (16) -- reformed the group tools to get rid of the hippie/collectivism craziness; banned child pornography etc and policed it; cracked down on blatant copyright abuses; curbed griefing. They made it respectable and not an Anonymous griefer filled laughingstock. But what they stopped doing in 2006 was making it easier for you to run a business in SL. They don't care. They don't need you. They don't want you, as you are merely a big animal to feed that they can't feed. So don't ask them to feed you.

Just a little tiny anecdote. I was flying around on Alchemy the other day. What a dream of a viewer. I refuse to go on Firestorm for a lot of historical and practical reasons, but Alchemy I will, I know one of the developers pretty well and I trust them. Alchemy has search working clearly like a breeze -- not broken and sprawling like it is on the SL viewer. I cannot run my little rentals without search/places and my listings and also other look-ups -- I've been crippled with search broken now more than two months. That's outrageous. As I noted, I turned to Artizan Avatar Finder which is a huge boon given that search is broken -- hey, I need to reach my customers to explain things to them, send them help cards, etc before they refund in frustration, you know? 

And on Alchemy, I go to do a build on one sim, oops, I still have my group title from another sim -- but guess what, Alchemy simply enables a prim to be rezzed with the correct group for that sim without me changing my tag. When I copy an item, it doesn't leave one item in the correct group and then return the other because I don't have the group tag on. It just does that behind the scenes. LL tried that experimentally for a brief period years ago and dropped it. But what a great boon when you have dozens of tickets to get through, multiple builds to fix, numerous tenants who want this or that put down for them, and you have to keep watching the damn tag or eating those stupid returns.

Now, why so many groups? Because groups don't work. Because they don't load. Because they become literally non-functioning after about 500 members with say 100,000 meters in them. 

Etc. The Lindens don't care about any of these things. They don't explain why they are broken. They don't care about changing anything. They don't care about trying to help small and medium business. They aren't the Small Business Administration. They aren't City Hall. They do what they want to do, which is Windlight and EEP, in which I have zero interest frankly.  They do things that make sense within their context of keeping up with game engines or Steam games or their peers in Silicon Valley doing XYZ -- they get infatuated with social media in a world where most people want pseudonyms, and then after getting people on it, they dump it and cease servicing their APIs because they change too often, making blogging much harder. 

I have no idea what sort of fad or Big Idea the new owners or a new CEO will have, if they have one. Seemingly, they are just chugging along like the Little Engine that Could and not doing anything radical to upset what is actually a profitable entity. I have a 100 things I wish they did and ideas I think could work and so do you. But they don't care. Don't break your head on that. It's not worth it. Either be content with what you have and refine it, or go to another RL or virtual space as others have before you. 

If you can't do a thing without the Lindens, if you can't do it without making 10 people show up to be your slaves or your followers and not your customers, then you don't have a thing, dude, I have to tell you.

Edited February 25, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Luna Bliss]

13 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

No matter, reality won't budge for you.

What reality?  I know lots of inworld businesses with LLC's...

[Madelaine McMasters]

39 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

What reality?  I know lots of inworld businesses with LLC's...

Were they started in incubators and funded by investors?

Did you read either the OP or my response?

Edited February 25, 2021 by Madelaine McMasters

[Luna Bliss]

15 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

54 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

What reality?  I know lots of inworld businesses with LLC's...

Were they started in incubators and funded by investors?

Did you read either the OP or my response?

Yes, I did read your responses, where you droned on and on about the high costs of LLC's. I would expect, if the incubator and investor issues were such a problem for you, that you would have spoken to these issues in detail and not primarily to the assumed high cost of LLC's.

Edited February 25, 2021 by Luna Bliss

[Madelaine McMasters]

4 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Yes, I did read your responses, where you droned on and on about the high costs of LLC's. I would expect, if the incubator and investor issues were such a problem for you, that you would have spoken to these issues in detail and not primarily to the assumed high cost of LLC's.

The OP proposed an incubator for investable businesses. I've been involved in those in RL, where the success rate is perhaps 1% (10% get in the door, 10% of those fly out). I did not get the impression the OP was intending to pretend to incubate, pretend to invest, and pretend to succeed. If the intention is real, the economics must be real as well. There are creative people who can work within the economy of SL to make a RL living (Anshe Chung), but I challenge you find even one who's business was birthed in an SL incubator and obtained public or private funding from actual investors, who will require any business they invest in to be... real.

[Luna Bliss]

12 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

27 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Yes, I did read your responses, where you droned on and on about the high costs of LLC's. I would expect, if the incubator and investor issues were such a problem for you, that you would have spoken to these issues in detail and not primarily to the assumed high cost of LLC's.

The OP proposed an incubator for investable businesses. I've been involved in those in RL, where the success rate is perhaps 1% (10% get in the door, 10% of those fly out). I did not get the impression the OP was intending to pretend to incubate, pretend to invest, and pretend to succeed. If the intention is real, the economics must be real as well. There are creative people who can work within the economy of SL to make a RL living (Anshe Chung), but I challenge you find even one who's business was birthed in an SL incubator and obtained public or private funding from actual investors, who will require any business they invest in to be... real.

The biggest mistake one can make is attempting to transpose in every way the business models from real life into SL. Some do apply yes, but they need modification. It's why I was able to sail on by making loads of $ when creating projects for RL companies within SL while the RL companies who came into SL as attempted creators for these businesses mostly failed.

I'm not all too sure the OP plans to use RL business models to the extent you're imagining, although he uses the words of RL business. In any case, if those who join him know the ways of SL (and they do if they managed to have a successful business, and that's the type of creator he did state he's looking for), they will have already figured out what does work here.

I see any possible failure resting primarily in the type of project they choose to create.

[Wili Clip]

12 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

it sounds to me like you want to get a slew of eager young hungry coders, so to speak, and pay them nothing, to get yourself a free work force to grow your own business, and you are trying to sugarcoat it with a narrative about creating a start-up community blah blah.

I am a coder myself, a fan and supporter of open source and decentralized systems. I have never worked for anyone and I don't know much about employee - employer experiences; I know lots of employees have had a bad experience (in my mind I always saw employment as a form of volunteered slavery). My idea is simple. Incorporate a startup, raise capital and set up a team of skilled people whose goal will be to produce a game platform/system/ecosystem on top of which the company can offer APIs, open source script libraries and systematic solutions to make it easier for other content creators to create new gaming experiences in SL.

As for salary for coders, brand & marketing designers I admit I don't have much experience with hiring and paying employees as I was never an employee myself. I'd try to do it fairly and in the public eyes. My way to get at it would be to have a publicly available Google spreadsheet document where all the company expenditures and work that someone was paid for would be listed.

Team would be made out of people who have the right skills but are not primarily motivated by money. If we're successful as a team and make a breakthrough there will be enough money & equity rewards for everyone who contributed anyway (both employees/contractors who contributed and risk takers investors). I've learned that people with talents and skills are already successful and have made enough to live comfortably. 

I am inspired by the term called a learning organization - an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights. ... Whatever their source, these ideas are the trigger for organizational improvement. (Harvard Business Review).

I would like to find a way to create an organization in a way that helps those who work for it realize their human potential. I don't like how the world is currently but one has to participate in it, learn about it to then later maybe have a shot at changing some things.

To build a good team you don't need know it alls, you need people who are flexible, prepared to learn and progress.

I am not a business guru or guru of any kind. I am in a way a product of SL. I am an autodidact / a self learner who as a child thought that he is stupid and started researching all about psychology & intelligence and learned about scientific thought. I am a humanist and transhumanist committed to continuous self improvement and life learning. About 15 days ago I started making short 15 tik tok video logs (called fixing my life) just to prove to myself that I can lead sport active, healthy and stable life to be able to take upon a challenge of trying to build, establish an enterprise. I am not a narcissist and am actually a very introvert type of personality (very rich internal world that I was always unable to express on outside) but I am hacking my brain out of it with purposefully pushing myself out of comfort zone to be able to grow and self actualize. There is neuroscience behind it. In life you need to take upon new challenges and push yourself otherwise you get stuck in a comfort zone and you stop growing and start having negative view of the world and some people fall in depression.

Like any human I am not perfect and I have flaws. I don't base my self-worth on external factors but solely on my past track record and achievements. And my achievements despite my hard work are still relatively very small (in comparison to general international business world). But what I did gain from running a small and growing business in SL for 10 years is knowledge & experience which I want to acquire even more. But I can not experience and learn about the things without actually doing it.

I am otherwise very risk averse person. I invested in bitcoins at about similar time as (billionaire investor) Mike Novogratz. He was able to invest millions while I only did couple thousand usd. I would have been a millionaire if I was a bigger or risk taker (or a fool). But millions are not what motivate me. If I want them it is only to have a larger capacity to build and try to improve the world or have positive impact on it. That is what motivates me and I am not ashamed to put myself out there.

I never listen to advice of normal people. Their advice is sound and safe like (go to university get a degree and find yourself a good job). I am not normal, I will never be normal, I do things out of the box and always looking for ways how to improve things. People from my SL community know me as a fixer.

 

12 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I watched the entire stock market thing unfold personally and I have a lot of field observations from this and data up to a point and like many things, the real life media did not cover it properly, and a certain newly-baked lawyer who was a coder with an ideological agenda to take over the virtual world space in various ways used it to try to create a career for for himself. And succeeded in part. And the original stock market founders, who might have had noble goals, at least as publicly stated, to challenge the monopoly of a certain RL backed land baron in this toy world, were in the end outright thugs and crooks.

I didn't just watch but after those big ones and on the one of the last standing virtual stock exchange systems in SL I participated with my ad network system. With my business partner we were the most successful "virtual stock company" on there and we achieved 400% growth of our share price because we were actually growing our system - Ad Network that benefited SL. Not only that we came out with new successful products. There was a lot of drama and few individuals always tried to manipulate things to hurt the share price so that they could buy in and make waves. I didn't like that. From the simulation I actually learned quite a lot about how stock markets work and how the investors and human behavior works. I am thankful for the experience and knowledge I got from it. I miss the positive pressure I felt from being responsible for other peoples money and pressure to perform - for my type of brain it works best. But in the end the guy who was running the stock exchange simulation system he went to jail for something that he did in real life. He and few individuals around him tried to make a scapegoat out of me. When the news that he is going to jail came out as it was in NY local paper all the share prices on the exchange tanked and went to 0. So these few individuals around him bought up all the shares at near 0 price and then sent me an extortion mail and blackmailed me to pay them out or they will ruin my reputation on the internet. I didn't let myself be blackmailed so they did it and opened topics on online forums that would get highly SEO indexed on google under my name in connection with word scammer. So whenever anyone searched for Wili Clip on Google for many years they would find their writings. Back then I did set up a forum and tried to gather my virtual investors to offer to pay them out (but not the ones who tried to blackmail me) but most of them were just involved with play money amounts. The biggest players with biggest investments all managed to sell their shares when we had 400 % price growth and through dividends I basically paid out back the money that I raised through initial IPO.   

12 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Pro-tip: never rely on a Linden advising you, supporting you, or even answering your emails for anything you do in SL. At a very deep level, they don't care, and they can't care. That is, they have their culture, their set of internal corporate goals, their things here and there that they like culturally or for business reasons, and it is an extremely narrow set of things. There's very little room for any new entries there.

I have had a successful and effective communication with product managers of Linden Lab about the same product I plan to create and raise investment for. My 1st game design that was already launched in alpha and had growing and excited player base (over 1000 in short amount of time). I contacted LL to ask them about it (as SL TOS doesn't didn't define any limitation) and it raised the worries with LL of it potentially being able to be used for money laundering and other legal implications. They actually worked with me when I asked them how I could re-design the game product so that its ok with them. They are ok people. They are busy and work in correspondence with their legal team and that took time but after about a month of corresponding they gave me an ok from their legal team.

This time I sent a mail to Patch Linden after 6 months just because I built on top of my product design that they approved and just want to make sure they are ok. The game systems I learned to create in SL are innovative and more complex. A lot of time and energy goes into making it so before an input of time, energy and possibly investment this is the only and the right way. I corresponded with LL employees as a friend and with a mutual understanding that our interests for success of SL are aligned and that we are in a way silent business partners of whose mutual success is mutually beneficial.

There is this thing in life if you have a negative world view and if you expect negative things you align your own behavior with it and with that you create a self fulfilling prophecy that makes things happen in negative ways as you expected (George Soros created theory around this that he used it in investment world, he calls is reflexivity). I say spread negativity and negativity you shall receive. There are ancient Chinese teaching (Lao Tsu) that at that time I was greatly influenced and inspired by. 
For example:
If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself.

(I will give you an example of media and serial killers; When serial killers see "their work" covered on the media one can argue that this stimulates them to do even more killings to become even more notorious).

12 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

LL tried that experimentally for a brief period years ago and dropped it. But what a great boon when you have dozens of tickets to get through, multiple builds to fix, numerous tenants who want this or that put down for them, and you have to keep watching the damn tag or eating those stupid returns.

I do know that every work/task (upgrade/update/addition) in a multi hierarchical company such as LL is needs funding that needs to be approved by higher manager and higher managers need to follow their profit goals. There are always going to be some divides between the company interests and the users interests. Solution to this division and to make it smaller in my mind is mutual ownership of the company between owners and its users -- even if its only a small share of a pie it leads to a greater transparency and that leads to a greater mutual understanding of reality. Or just simply greater transparency but that takes company culture changing and sometimes that is hard especially with older long established companies.

I don't know much about internal company climate of Linden Lab but I know as a programmer that with the complex system with lots of code and interrelated functionality sometimes when you fix 1 bug you can create 1 other or even 10. In such extreme cases its better to leave the bug if its not a too serious one

The way I design my systems and the way just is with all new systems is that they come with bugs that can take you years to find them all and fix. Such was the case with my game system I built in SL. I made it in a matter of week but took me months and years to fix bugs and add improvements/upgrades to the product to make it marketable and more successful.  

Edited February 26, 2021 by Wili Clip

[Prokofy Neva]

2 hours ago, Wili Clip said:

I am a coder myself, a fan and supporter of open source and decentralized systems. I have never worked for anyone and I don't know much about employee - employer experiences; I know lots of employees have had a bad experience (in my mind I always saw employment as a form of volunteered slavery). My idea is simple. Incorporate a startup, raise capital and set up a team of skilled people whose goal will be to produce a game platform/system/ecosystem on top of which the company can offer APIs, open source script libraries and systematic solutions to make it easier for other content creators to create new gaming experiences in SL.

As for salary for coders, brand & marketing designers I admit I don't have much experience with hiring and paying employees as I was never an employee myself. I'd try to do it fairly and in the public eyes. My way to get at it would be to have a publicly available Google spreadsheet document where all the company expenditures and work that someone was paid for would be listed.

Team would be made out of people who have the right skills but are not primarily motivated by money. If we're successful as a team and make a breakthrough there will be enough money & equity rewards for everyone who contributed anyway (both employees/contractors who contributed and risk takers investors). I've learned that people with talents and skills are already successful and have made enough to live comfortably. 

I am inspired by the term called a learning organization - an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights. ... Whatever their source, these ideas are the trigger for organizational improvement. (Harvard Business Review).

I would like to find a way to create an organization in a way that helps those who work for it realize their human potential. I don't like how the world is currently but one has to participate in it, learn about it to then later maybe have a shot at changing some things.

To build a good team you don't need know it alls, you need people who are flexible, prepared to learn and progress.

I am not a business guru or guru of any kind. I am in a way a product of SL. I am an autodidact / a self learner who as a child thought that he is stupid and started researching all about psychology & intelligence and learned about scientific thought. I am a humanist and transhumanist committed to continuous self improvement and life learning. About 15 days ago I started making short 15 tik tok video logs (called fixing my life) just to prove to myself that I can lead sport active, healthy and stable life to be able to take upon a challenge of trying to build, establish an enterprise. (link to video logs can be found in my SL profile if anyone is curios; I am open to share part of my life and not hiding behind my avi). I am not a narcissist and am actually a very introvert type of personality (very rich internal world that I was always unable to express on outside) but I am hacking my brain out of it with purposefully pushing myself out of comfort zone to be able to grow and self actualize. There is neuroscience behind it. In life you need to take upon new challenges and push yourself otherwise you get stuck in a comfort zone and you stop growing and start having negative view of the world and some people fall in depression.

Like any human I am not perfect and I have flaws. I don't base my self-worth on external factors but solely on my past track record and achievements. And my achievements despite my hard work are still relatively very small (in comparison to general international business world). But what I did gain from running a small and growing business in SL for 10 years is knowledge & experience which I want to acquire even more. But I can not experience and learn about the things without actually doing it.

I am otherwise very risk averse person. I invested in bitcoins at about similar time as (billionaire investor) Mike Novogratz. He was able to invest millions while I only did couple thousand usd. I would have been a millionaire if I was a bigger or risk taker (or a fool). But millions are not what motivate me. If I want them it is only to have a larger capacity to build and try to improve the world or have positive impact on it. That is what motivates me and I am not ashamed to put myself out there.

I never listen to advice of normal people. Their advice is sound and safe like (go to university get a degree and find yourself a good job). I am not normal, I will never be normal, I do things out of the box and always looking for ways how to improve things. People from my SL community know me as a fixer.

 

I didn't just watch but after those big ones and on the one of the last standing virtual stock exchange systems in SL I participated with my ad network system. With my business partner we were the most successful "virtual stock company" on there and we achieved 400% growth of our share price because we were actually growing our system - Ad Network that benefited SL. Not only that we came out with new successful products. There was a lot of drama and few individuals always tried to manipulate things to hurt the share price so that they could buy in and make waves. I didn't like that. From the simulation I actually learned quite a lot about how stock markets work and how the investors and human behavior works. I am thankful for the experience and knowledge I got from it. I miss the positive pressure I felt from being responsible for other peoples money and pressure to perform - for my type of brain it works best. But in the end the guy who was running the stock exchange simulation system he went to jail for something that he did in real life. He and few individuals around him tried to make a scapegoat out of me. When the news that he is going to jail came out as it was in NY local paper all the share prices on the exchange tanked and went to 0. So these few individuals around him bought up all the shares at near 0 price and then sent me an extortion mail and blackmailed me to pay them out or they will ruin my reputation on the internet. I didn't let myself be blackmailed so they did it and opened topics on online forums that would get highly SEO indexed on google under my name in connection with word scammer. So whenever anyone searched for Wili Clip on Google for many years they would find their writings. Back then I did set up a forum and tried to gather my virtual investors to offer to pay them out (but not the ones who tried to blackmail me) but most of them were just involved with play money amounts. The biggest players with biggest investments all managed to sell their shares when we had 400 % price growth and through dividends I basically paid out back the money that I raised through initial IPO.   

I have had a successful and effective communication with product managers of Linden Lab about the same product I plan to create and raise investment for. My 1st game design that was already launched in alpha and had growing and excited player base (over 1000 in short amount of time). I contacted LL to ask them about it (as SL TOS doesn't didn't define any limitation) and it raised the worries with LL of it potentially being able to be used for money laundering and other legal implications. They actually worked with me when I asked them how I could re-design the game product so that its ok with them. They are ok people. They are busy and work in correspondence with their legal team and that took time but after about a month of corresponding they gave me an ok from their legal team.

This time I sent a mail to Patch Linden after 6 months just because I built on top of my product design that they approved and just want to make sure they are ok. The game systems I learned to create in SL are innovative and more complex. A lot of time and energy goes into making it so before an input of time, energy and possibly investment this is the only and the right way. I corresponded with LL employees as a friend and with a mutual understanding that our interests for success of SL are aligned and that we are in a way silent business partners of whose mutual success is mutually beneficial.

There is this thing in life if you have a negative world view and if you expect negative things you align your own behavior with it and with that you create a self fulfilling prophecy that makes things happen in negative ways as you expected (George Soros created theory around this that he used it in investment world, he calls is reflexivity). I say spread negativity and negativity you shall receive. There are ancient Chinese teaching (Lao Tsu) that at that time I was greatly influenced and inspired by. 
For example:
If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself.

(I will give you an example of media and serial killers; When serial killers see "their work" covered on the media one can argue that this stimulates them to do even more killings to become even more notorious).

I do know that every work/task (upgrade/update/addition) in a multi hierarchical company such as LL is needs funding that needs to be approved by higher manager and higher managers need to follow their profit goals. There are always going to be some divides between the company interests and the users interests. Solution to this division and to make it smaller in my mind is mutual ownership of the company between owners and its users -- even if its only a small share of a pie it leads to a greater transparency and that leads to a greater mutual understanding of reality. Or just simply greater transparency but that takes company culture changing and sometimes that is hard especially with older long established companies.

I don't know much about internal company climate of Linden Lab but I know as a programmer that with the complex system with lots of code and interrelated functionality sometimes when you fix 1 bug you can create 1 other or even 10. In such extreme cases its better to leave the bug if its not a too serious one

The way I design my systems and the way just is with all new systems is that they come with bugs that can take you years to find them all and fix. Such was the case with my game system I built in SL. I made it in a matter of week but took me months and years to fix bugs and add improvements/upgrades to the product to make it marketable and more successful.  

Oh, Good Lord.

Well, at least we know what we're dealing with her.  I find most or all of these ideas reprehensible on so many levels and I'm not a socialist or a libertarian like some of your fans. The Connectivist "learning" theory you cite is a thorough-going bunch of Marxist clap-trap at root, I found, from participating in the first such MOOC. But it doesn't matter. SL is a big enough place, even with that little concurrency, that people can do their thing and experiment within the TOS and its jurisprudence and hopefully not encroach on others doing their thing. So if you have an idea to build a better mousetrap and you have 1000 mice to RP with, great, let's hope you'll all be happy.

I won't take the time to answer all of this now except to say that lack of education in the traditional sense sometimes shows. I say this to my own son all the time who has only a GED, who puts his successful top-traffic mall on the SL  teen grid on his resume and gets jobs that way, and has built up a successful RL business where you can now do SL things like make virtual real estate tours. He credits SL with teaching him so many useful things about business and communities. I lament how LL broke his little teen heart, along with his 4 buddies, by allowing the camping script. That enabled the falsification of traffic and destroyed authentic businesses. But that's part of the learning curve, too, I guess. Perhaps Blue Linden was good practice for what he had to face in RL later in Bayonne...

I actually happened to work for Soros for some years, you can look it up. I had many hours talking to him about his ideas. He was not well-read, in my view. That is, sure, he has higher degrees from LSE and obviously knows how to work the stock market, something I don't pretend to have much understanding of. I do grasp enough to understand that mere bad press alone can't sink a stock's value unless there's lots of other stuff going on as well. I mean, everybody got paid at WeWork who needed to get paid -- except the line workers, see the New Yorker article.

Soros had sort of one big thinker he was infatuated with, Karl Popper, from which he sort of developed one big idea (a hedgehog, not a fox, as it were). I remember vividly one day we sat eating hot dogs on the Staten Island ferry with a group of Russian leaders and economists from the "500 Days" program he was squiring around to the World Bank and such. I asked him if he had read this or that great thinker, one after another, I was just curious, trying to understand his intellectual horizons. He had not. I've found from observing such people that it's often not about intelligence or education or experience or brilliance as such that enables their wealth and success but more about their being, the ability to exert animal magnetism, if you will. Yeltsin was the same way. Soros' idea of reflexivity is not something novel; it was conceived by Niels Bohr and others before him in various forms, and even Soros the pragmatic hedge fund investor doesn't consistently act upon his much ballyhooed theory, which you've given here in truncated form (but even after reading his book you might not say a lot more about it). Reflexivity might explain GameStop for some people; it can't explain why GameStop then collapses in the real world and so many people then lose their shirts.

The Lindens are not going to allow stock markets in SL, real or "simulated". If there's some "legal game of skill" that they can squeak past their criteria for gaming, perhaps your plans will succeed. We have no way of checking any of these things you say as the Lindens have never commented and likely won't comment.

The Lindens have never formally announced that they have "silent partners" but of course they do, inworld and out.

Edited February 25, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

17 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

The section I quoted sounds good and somewhat reminds me of something like Wealthy Affiliates wherein mentors with different experiences create tutorials and generally help newer people find, develop and market niche product that appeal to the consumers. I'm thinking some sort of motivator would be needed for the experienced ones to share their knowledge otherwise they would just be creating competition for free.

The rest of what you wrote sounds good in a hazy sort of way but not everyone is going to be looking to take it to the point you are promoting and it muddies the waters for those who don't really know how far to go with it till they get a taste of it.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.

[Wili Clip]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Soros' idea of reflexivity is not something novel; it was conceived by Niels Bohr and others before him in various forms

Everything that someone learns or gets new ideas about comes from somewhere and people explain in their own words an call it their way. Because we are all observing the same physical world with more or less same senses (unless they're in defect) its possible for people through different times to observe same phenomena and describe it in their own words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory)

In epistemology, and more specifically, the sociology of knowledge, reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect, especially as embedded in human belief structures. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional with both the cause and the effect affecting one another in a relationship in which neither can be assigned as causes or effects.

I find reflexivity very fascinating and useful tool that can be observed and applied in various fields.

From it you can derive sayings like:
"What you are doing, you become", "You become the wolf that you feed", "fake it until you make it",  "be to become". Everyone is creator of themselves, their world, their circumstances.

Sometimes I do quick research on billionaires to try to learn few useful things from them. But I don't really follow or praise any and don't know personally. One thing I find common with all billionaires is they are good at knowing which direction the world is going.

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The Lindens are not going to allow stock markets in SL, real or "simulated". If there's some "legal game of skill" that they can squeak past their criteria for gaming, perhaps your plans will succeed. We have no way of checking any of these things you say as the Lindens have never commented and likely won't comment.

I do not have any plans to create stock market inside SL or develop any type of investment scheme or anything related to investing. Investments inside games or virtual worlds are prohibited by external world and regulations like for example by SEC.

 

 

Edited February 25, 2021 by Wili Clip