IMVU

If you know the lean startup thing, I don't know if people still talk about lean startup, which is kind of a play on... or extending the ideas of agile to sort of like the entrepreneurial four steps to epiphany kind of customer discovery stuff.

Eric Reese wrote that book, but he was working at a company called IMVU or MVU, which was kind of just a social chat environment, but they hired a lot of game developers, really talented people.

And they had ended up with this really powerful system organizationally that was sort of allowing people to make features and anybody could make a feature and deploy it and see how it impacts the bottom line.

And they had the safety to do that because they had good test coverage and a pre-commit SVN hook.

Baker found a place to go at night.

It was a website called IMVU, a three-dimensional chat world where users built an avatar, dressed it, and, like, could talk to strangers.

God

damn it.

Long story short, these issues often cause her to want to isolate, sleep a lot, and generally not want to hang, so I get lonely.

When she was feeling okay, she would spend all of her time on IMVU, which is a 3D virtual social network and chat platform where users interact using customizable avatars rather than text-only messaging.

It functions less like a traditional video game with goals and more like a digital hangout space or a 3D instant messenger where you can join rooms, dress up your avatar, and socialize with others globally.

My life is so good, I literally needed a second life.