Tag: LL News

Linden Lab to sell payments platform Tilia to Thunes

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Tilia.io

It has been announced that Tilia.io, the all-in-one payments platform established by Linden Lab in 2019 and which manages payment processing and cashing out for Second Life (as well as supporting a number of other platforms and virtual environments), is to be acquired by Singapore-based business-2-business (B2B) payments infrastructure firm Thunes.

The acquisition of Tilia will be for an undisclosed sum, and follows an agreement being reached between Thunes and Tilia majority owner Linden Research (the formal name of Linden Lab). However, it is still currently awaiting regulatory approval, so has not  – as of the time of writing – being finalised.

News of the acquisition was made public via a press release widely circulated by Thunes on Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024 (see links below for some of the reporting on the announcement), and has sparked comments, discussions and questions on a number of Second Life related forums.

Who Are Thunes?

Thunes is regarded as a start-up company, although it has been operating for some eight years. As a B2B payments company, Thunes powers payments for major brands such as Uber and Deliveroo, and also to global Fintech companies such as PayPal and Remitly.

They boast that with a single connection, businesses and their customers can both send payments to, and receive payments from 133 countries around the world, with support for 84 currencies and some 550 alternative payment methods (ATMs), including 129 recognised mobile wallets. Whilst headquartered in Singapore, the company has regional offices in London where communications on the deal with Linden Lab are being handled), Paris, Shanghai, New York, Dubai, and Nairobi. In addition to providing a B2B payments infrastructure direct to businesses across the world, Thunes also provides payment services to the banking industry, a service it is aggressively growing in order to more fully compete with SWIFT, the world’s dominant international financial network.

In December 2023 Thunes achieved a market valuation of some $900 million, with its series C funding round bringing the company some US $202 million investment – including from the likes of Visa, the global payment giant, Singaporean government investment vehicle EDBI, and US-based Endeavor Catalyst.

Why Would They be Interested In Tilia†?

Tilia is particularly attractive to Thunes as it is already a fully licensed Money Service Business (MSB) across 48 US states and territories, thus allowing Thunes to readily extend its services to business owners and customers across the United States – including Tilia’s current customer base, which obviously includes Second Life, as well as VRChat, Upland, Avatus and Unity. In addition, through brand recognition within the content creation market and its expertise in managing token-based virtual economies such as the Linden Dollar, Tilia provides Thunes with a ready-made means of expanding its presence in these markets both in the United States and globally.

What Does This Mean for Second Life‡?

This is perhaps harder to quantify from the side-lines. However, there are some points which may be worthy of note:

  • Following regulatory approval, Tilia will be re-branded Thunes, but will continue to be based in San Francisco.
  • The agreement is subject to an exclusive 5-year collaboration, Thunes will provide payment processing and payouts to Linden Lab across Thunes’ global network.
    • This should allow Second Life users and creators to enjoy more options for buying Linden Dollars and for cashing-out “in a more cost-efficient manner and with increased transparency”, with the Lab adding via a comment on a Reddit thread, “without additional costs”.
  • In support of the above, the Thunes press release includes the following statement from Brad Oberwager, Linden Lab’s co-owner and Executive Chairman:
Thunes is an exceptional company that directly connects nearly every payment method and market worldwide. The combination of Tilia and Thunes will give Linden Lab’s customers more payment choices, and the ability to receive pay-outs in real-time, anywhere, into the wallet or bank account of their choice. It will be business as usual for our people and our customers as we bring Tilia and Thunes together.

I reached out to Linden Lab on hearing the news, and was informed that although the company has nothing further to add to the Thunes press release at this time, those from the company who will be attending the forthcoming Community Round Table (informally announced during the April 19th Lab Gab session, and featured in my summary of that event) will be prepared to discuss the acquisition. I’ll have a post on the Round Table as soon as all information relating to it (where, time, how to attend / watch) is publicly released.

With thanks to Coffee Pancake for the alert.

Related Links

† Please note I am not an financial services expert, this section is therefore a subjective best guess.
‡ Again, please note this is a subjective best guess, even given the supporting quotes.

Note: updated to better reflect Tilia’s relationship with Second Life.

Say hello to Linden Lab’s New VP of Engineering, Mojo Linden, aka Andrew Kertesz

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Linden Lab

Some time between August 11th and August 19th, Linden Lab quietly slipped out a biography of their new Vice President of Operations, who has come aboard to take up the post vacated by Oz Linden at the end of February, when he retired from business after over a decade with Linden Lab.

The new VP of Engineering is Andrew Kertesz, a 20-year veteran of the gaming industry, who joined Linden Lab at the end of July 2021 from Level Ex Inc., a company creating “industry-leading medical video games that challenge physicians to perform at the top of their game”, and where he served as Principal Software Engineer / Principal Engineering Manager for a period of just over year.

The official biography for Mr. Kertesz posted by the Lab (and accessed via the About Linden Lab page on their corporate website) reads as follows:

Andrew Kertesz

WITH OVER TWENTY YEARS OF EXPERIENCE IN THE GAMES INDUSTRY, ANDREW IS AN EXPERT AT BUILDING TEAMS AND LAUNCHING GROUND-BREAKING GAMES ACROSS GENRES THAT PUSH THE LIMITS OF THEIR RESPECTIVE PLATFORMS. HIS PRODUCT AND TECHNICAL EXPERTISE SPANS ACROSS MULTIPLE MOBILE, PC AND CONSOLE GAMES, AS WELL AS PLATFORM AND SDK DEVELOPMENT, WEB APPLICATIONS AND CLOUD SERVICES.

PRIOR TO JOINING LINDEN LAB, ANDREW HELD SENIOR-LEVEL POSITIONS AT LEVEL EX, ZUME, DOUBLEDOWN INTERACTIVE, IGT, AND MICROSOFT. ANDREW HAS WORKED ON ICONIC FRANCHISES SUCH AS HALO, FORZA, MOTORSPORT, FABLE, CRACKDOWN, AND WHEEL OF FORTUNE. ANDREW HAS A DEGREE IN COMPUTER ENGINEERING FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON.

Like Oz Linden before him, Mr. Kertesz – who has taken the name of Mojo Linden – will have overall responsibility for managing both the viewer and the simulator engineering teams at the Lab.

As noted in his biography, he comes to the Lab with extensive experience in a range of games development environments, and perhaps most interestingly, he has experience in mobile app development and exposure in managing cloud-based services and applications, both of which are of considerable relevance to Linden Lab.

It is unclear whether he will be as directly hands-on as Oz Linden in terms of chairing in-world meetings such as the Open Source Developer and Third-Party Developer sessions – both of these were particularly within Oz’s sphere of interest, as he was originally brought into Linden Lab to manage the open-source side of viewer development, and so he directly formulated those meetings as we all came to know them. However, we will hopefully get to see Mojo active at least on occasion through the likes of these and sessions such as the Simulator User Group meetings over time. Currently, he’s likely focused on getting his feet firmly under the desk and getting up to speed on everything, and there will doubtless be other opportunities to get to meet him in the future beyond any of these particular meetings as well (Lab Gab, anyone?).

The updated Management Team page on the Linden Research corporate site, with Andrew Kertesz

In the meantime, here are some relevant links.

Oz Linden announces his forthcoming departure from Linden Lab

Posted on by Inara Pey
Oz Linden, circa 2014

On Tuesday, February 16th, 2021, and in a surprise to Second Life users, Linden Lab’s Vice President of Engineering, Oz Linden (aka Scott Lawrence in the physical world) announced his forthcoming departure from the Lab.

Oz joined Linden Lab in 2010, taking on the role of Director of Open Development. At that time, the viewer was in something of a state of flux; the “new” Viewer 2 had not long been launched, the development of which had largely excluded the user community and, particularly, developers who had long been associated with viewer development through the submission of code contributions.

As a result of this and other factors, users and developers alike were at the time feeling alienated and disenfranchised – facts that Oz immediately recognised and sought to address.

In the first instance this was done by replacing the open-source viewer Snowglobe project with a new Snowstorm project, intended to bring as much of the viewer development out into the open as possible – an approach Oz continued to push for throughout his time at the Lab, thus bringing order and surety out of a time that might be best described as having been “chaotic”.

The most obvious areas in which this was demonstrated was his adoption of weekly Open Source Meetings, initially held on Mondays before moving to their current Wednesday slot. These meetings continued alongside other technical in-world meetings such as the Server and Scripter meeting(now the weekly Simulator User Group), which took place even during the drought of other office hours meetings. He also implement the fortnightly Third Party Viewer Development meetings, allow Third Party Viewer developers to discuss all matters relating to the viewer directly with him and members of the Lab’s viewer engineering team.

In 2013, Oz oversaw the complete overhaul of the Lab’s internal viewer develop process, officially called the Viewer Integration and Release Process, which greatly simplified viewer update and viewer feature development. This project also brought me into my first direct contact with Oz when I offered a summary of the new process.  It marked the start of a long and informative acquaintance that I’ve continued to appreciate over the years.

As well as direct contributions to the viewer, Oz also helped open the door to user-led projects aimed at providing broader capabilities for the viewer. While constraints on what could / could not be accepted would always have to be enforced, this approach nevertheless resulted in the adoption of materials in Second Life, and helped to encourage project-based contributions to the viewer that have included capabilities such as the hover height slider, and graphics and camera presets. This approach also included major lab-led projects such as Project Bento also encompass direct user involvement pretty much from their outset.

While it has always been the Lab’s policy to try to recruit personnel from the ranks of users as and when there is a suitable “fit”, in his time at the Lab, Oz has become perhaps one of the most enthusiastic proponents of this approach, frequently seeking – and often succeeding – to recruit qualified users into technical positions under his management.

Oz in his human form. Credit: Linden Lab

As the Lab opted to start work on Project Sansar, Oz decided to pro-actively campaign to take on the work in continuing to develop Second Life, drawing to him those within the Lab who also wished to stay engaged in working on the platform. It is not unfair to say this resulted in one of the most intense periods of Second Life development we have seen, interrupted only be the need to focus on the work of transitioning all of Second Life and its services to run on AWS.

In 2019, Oz – together with Grumpity and Patch Linden – officially joined the Lab’s management team, taking on the role of Vice President of Engineering and putting an official seal on what Grumpity refers to as the Troika: the three of them being largely responsible for determining much of the product and feature direction for Second Life.

In announcing his departure, which sees his last day with the Lab being Friday, February 26th, 2021, Oz states that it has been something he’s been considering for a while:

Some time ago, I reached the point that I could afford to think about retiring but decided to stay to finish moving SL to its new cloud platform. I can’t imagine a better last act in my working life than ensuring that Second Life has this better platform for its future growth. Now that project is done (well, except for a few loose ends), and it’s time for me to move on to the next phase of my life.

He also emphasises – hopefully to prevent the rumour mill turning its wheels – that his decision to leave the Lab is not in any way connected to the company recently being acquired by new investors:

I want to emphasise in the strongest possible terms: my decision has nothing at all to do with the change in ownership of the Lab; the timing really is a coincidence. If anything, I regret that I have overlapped with them for only a few weeks; in that time (and in the time leading up to the change) I have come to respect and appreciate the skills and energy they bring to the company.

For my part, I cannot claim to know Oz as well as I would like to – but I’ve always found find his enthusiasm for Second Life never to be anything less than totally honest and infectious, and his high regard for users utterly genuine and sincere.

As such – and while his actual departure from the Lab is still more than a week away,  – I’d like to take this opportunity to offer him a personal and public “thank you” for all the times he’s provided me with insight and / or encouraged me to get involved in various projects, all of it has been greatly appreciated. I am, and will be, genuinely saddened to see him leave the Lab; we are all losing something in his departure, and the void left will not be easy for the management team to fill.

Linden Lab’s board of directors: snippets of news

Posted on by Inara Pey
Linden Lab’s new board of directors (l to r): Brad Oberwager, J. Randall Waterfield and Raj Date

Back in January, I provided a piece on the Lab’s new owners / board of directors, including their biographical notes as posted by the Lab (see: Meet Linden Lab’s new board of directors).

Since then, user interest in the new owners has remained fairly high in some areas, with questions being asked on social media, in-world, during user group meetings (the most recent being the Web User Group), etc.

Some of the more common questions that have been answered by Lab staff (and that I’m aware of) comprise:

  • Have they been in-world? – Yes, they were in-world prior to the deal being finalised, and still hop in as needed.
  • Do they understand SL? – Yes, they are enthusiastic about the platform and have already been contributing thoughts / ideas.
  • Have they seen any Adult regions? – Yes, they have.
  • Will they be talking directly with users (e.g. via a Town Hall)? – There have been no direct discussions as yet about this.
  • Do they have specific aspirations regarding SL / LL? – None that have been directly discussed; it’s been more a case of gaining a deeper familiarity with the platform and its potential.

For my part whilst writing Meet Linden Lab’s new board of directors I ruminated on Raj Date possibly being involved in Tilia Inc, the Lab’s micro-currency transaction management service, commenting:

His background with consumer affairs, finances, and his post-CFPB founding of Fenway Summer would appear to help lend significant weight to Linden Lab’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Tilia inc; while he is not currently listed as a member of Tilia’s board, his background and expertise could be used in an advisory capability, and his name certainly brings a further level of gravitas to Tilia.

Since then things have moved forward.

In particular, Tilia’s Meet the Team page has been updated to reveal that both Raj Date and Brad Oberwager have joined the board, whilst former “non-Linden” (so to speak) board member Ben Duranske is not longer listed as being directly involved in the company. Both Mr. Date and Mr. Oberwager now hold seats on the board alongside of the Lab’s Chief Financial Officer, Anton Waldman, who has held both the position of Tilia Inc., CEO and Director and Treasurer on the board since taking over as the Lab’s CFO some time ago.

This is a move that makes a lot of sense, as it ensures a continuity of board oversight across both Linden Research and Tilia  Inc., potentially helping with the growth of both entities.

Meet Linden Lab’s new board of directors

Posted on by Inara Pey
Linden Lab’s new board of directors (l to r): Brad Oberwager, J. Randall Waterfield and Raj Date

Following confirmation early this month that the the acquisition of Linden Research Inc., (to give Linden Lab its formal name) has been completed (see the second half of 2021 Update: Life in the Cloud from the Lab and also my own Linden Lab gives cloud migration update & new ownership announcement (updated)), the Lab has updated the Board of Directors section of the About page on the official Linden Research website.

The acquisition, sees three new board members replacing Jed Smith, Bill Gurley, Dina L. Evan and Bing Gordon. Two of them have been previously mentioned: Brad Oberwager and J. Randall (Randy) Waterfield (you can read my own notes on these two gentleman here: Linden Lab announces it is to be acquired). However, what may come as news is that there is a third member of the Lab’s new board: Raj Date.

The following are the biographies for all three as found on the Lab’s About web page:

Brad Oberwager

Brad Oberwager has spent his entire career in technology and consumer focused companies as an entrepreneur and board member.
Currently, he sits on the board of two public companies, Asure Software (NASDAQ: ASUR) and Better World (NASDAQ: BWACU). He is the chairman of two companies he founded, Jyve and Sundia and is also on the board of TEGSCO (aka AutoReturn). He owned Bare Snacks, acquired by PepsiCo in 2018.
Brad was Vice-chair of YPO International, a global organization of 25,000 CEOs.
Brad received his BS from Georgetown University, his MBA from the Wharton School and lives in San Francisco. 

J. Randall (Randy) Waterfield

Mr. J. Randall (Randy) Waterfield, is the Chairman of Waterfield Holdings, which traces its origins to 1928. After selling the largest private mortgage company in the US and largest Indiana based bank in 2006 and 2007 respectively, he diversified into technology, manufacturing and other industries.
Randy holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation and is a graduate of Harvard University. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Red Oak Partners, Waterfield Technologies, Linden Research, Inc. and has previously served on the boards of YPO (and was the 2017-2018 Chairman of YPO), Asure Software ( NASDAQ: ASUR), SMTC Corporation (NASDAQ: SMTX), RF Industries (NASDAQ: RFIL), among others. He is also the Co-Chairman of Missouri Cobalt, LLC, the largest cobalt mine in North America.
Randy supports various education, environmental and community development charitable causes through the nonprofit Waterfield Foundation and J. Randall Waterfield Foundation.

Raj Date

Raj Date was the first-ever Deputy Director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). As the Bureau’s second-ranking official, he helped steward the CFPB’s strategy, its operations, and its policy agenda. He also served on the senior staff committee of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and as a statutory deputy to the FDIC Board.
Before being appointed Deputy Director, Raj acted as the interim leader of the new agency, serving as the Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury. He led the CFPB for most of the first six months after its launch.
Currently, Raj is the Managing Partner of Fenway Summer, an advisory and investment firm focused on financial services and financial technology. In that capacity, he chairs the investment committee of Fenway Summer Ventures, a fintech venture capital fund, and works with clients of FS Vector, the fintech advisory firm. He also serves as a Director for a number of innovative firms in financial services: Prosper, the marketplace lender; Green Dot, the bank holding company; Circle, the digital asset firm; Grasshopper, a de novo bank; and College Ave, a private student lender.
He is a graduate of the College of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley (highest honors) and the Harvard Law School (magna cum laude).

Without wishing to take anything away from Mr. Oberwager and Mr. Waterfield, Raj Date’s credentials are especially impressive for a relatively small company like Linden Research; having joined the CFPB in February 2011, on what he thought would be a 2-3 month tenure, he was asked by Elizabeth Warren, who oversaw the establishment of the CFPB as a Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury, to lead “the guts of the policy apparatus” within the Bureau. When Warren sought to (successfully) run for the U.S. Senate later in 2011,  Date was nominated to succeed her as the CFPB’s Special Advisor to Treasury, and (as the Lab notes), its first Deputy Director, under Richard Cordray.

His background with consumer affairs, finances, and his post-CFPB founding of Fenway Summer would appear to help lend significant weight to Linden Lab’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Tilia inc; while he is not currently listed as a member of Tilia’s board, his background and expertise could be used in an advisory capability, and his name certainly brings a further level of gravitas to Tilia.

Thus far, the acquisition and arrival of the new board has been handled in a relatively low-key manner. While some might be tempted to see the negative in this, it’s likely more a case of the Lab wishing to demonstrate that, from their perspective and that of the incoming board, things are very much “business as usual” rather than being indicative of any kind of radical change.

Linden Lab gives cloud migration update & new ownership announcement (updated)

Posted on by Inara Pey
The former co-location cage used to operate Second Life and its services. Credit: Linden Lab

Update: since this post was published, Linden Lab have clarified the fact that the acquisition process is in fact complete, revising their comment on the acquisition process.  I have therefore revised the end of this post to reflect the updated comment on  the acquisition. See also: Meet Linden Lab’s new board of directors.

On Tuesday, January 5th, Linden Lab provided a short update on the cloud migration work and on the current situation regarding the company’s acquisition.

The physical move to AWS services was completed at the end of 2020, and the blog post expands on some tweets made by April and Soft Linden over the Christmas period.

In her December 23rd tweet, April Linden confirmed that the last of the Lab’s services had been migrated to AWS services, and that the remaining systems within the Lab’s (now former) co-location facility in Arizona had been powered off.

April Linden confirming the migration of the last of the SL services to AWS

In discussing the fate of the data held on the old hardware in late 2020, Oz Linden had indicated that Linden Lab had arranged for all of the hard drives from  the co-location facility would be shredded – and on December 31st, 2020, Soft  Linden tweeted that the work had been completed by a professional data destruction company, with a total of 10,588  hard drives and solid state drives that had been contained within the Lab’s old hardware had indeed been shredded.

Soft Linden on the shredding of the Lab’s old disk drives

The January 5th blog post builds on both of these tweets by providing a photograph of the cleared-out cage at the Lab’s former co-location facility, and a short video of drives being shredded, both of which I’ve included here.

Linden Research Acquisition Complete

Turning to the July announcement that an agreement in principle had been reached with an investment group led by Randy Waterfield and Brad Oberwager to acquire Linden Research Inc., (as Linden Lab is formally known), the blog post confirmed the acquisition process has been completed, and Linden Lab is now under new ownership:

Another noteworthy development for the new year is that Linden Lab has new owners! As announced in mid-2020, an investment group led by Randy Waterfield and Brad Oberwager signed an agreement to acquire the company subject to regulatory approval by financial regulators in the U.S. related to Tilia Inc.’s status as a licensed money transmitter as well as other customary closing conditions. We are pleased to share that the regulatory review has been completed and Linden Lab is now under new ownership.

At the time of writing, the official About Linden Lab page had yet to show any changes in the board structure to reflect the acquisition completion – I expect that will come in due course.

Read the official blog post for more.

Related Links