second-life
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The Lawyer Who Built a 10,000-Person Company Inside a Virtual Bar
Amy Pritchard traded courtrooms for comment sections and built ModSquad - a 10,000-Mod, 90-country moderation network - without raising a cent. She has been running a fully remote company since 2007, a decade before the rest of us learned the word.
The Company That Rents You the Internet's Best Behavior
ModSquad started as an avatar hangout in Second Life. Fifteen years later it is a 10,000-Mod global network moderating communities and answering support tickets for the NFL, EA, and Spotify - without ever having raised a dollar.
Linden Lab
Linden Lab is the San Francisco company behind Second Life, the user-built virtual world it launched in 2003. More than two decades on, the platform still runs a multimillion-dollar creator economy where residents design avatars, sell virtual goods, host live events and trade in Linden Dollars - a quiet, persistent metaverse that predates the word itself.
Bradford Oberwager
Bradford Oberwager is the Executive Chairman of Linden Lab and CEO of Tilia, the fintech arm powering Second Life's virtual economy. A serial entrepreneur who built and sold companies in personalized vitamins, healthy snacks (Bare Snacks, acquired by PepsiCo), and labor technology (Jyve, acquired by Advantage Solutions), Oberwager led the 2020 acquisition of Linden Lab alongside investor Randy Waterfield. Since then he has staked $35 million on securing money transmitter licenses in all U.S. states to enable real-money payouts from Second Life's Linden dollar economy, grown monthly active users to 600,000, and championed a mobile-forward future for the world's original metaverse.
Hunter Walk
Hunter Walk is the co-founder and partner at Homebrew, a self-funded seed-stage venture capital firm he built with Satya Patel after careers at Linden Lab (Second Life), Google, and YouTube. He also runs Screendoor LP, backing underrepresented emerging venture managers. His 'Bottom Up Economy' thesis targets scrappy teams of 5-50 taking on category incumbents - and his portfolio hits like Chime, Plaid, and Gusto prove the thesis works. A prolific blogger, former TV assistant, and forever a product person at heart.