Well, Kingdon would be just about the ideal CEO for LL to do it. However if they had pretty much everything within the company ready for an IPO, it would likely be 18 months from now.

They really take a long time, and most of that period it is publicly visible.

The problem is that an IPO doesn't make sense for Linden Lab. IPOs don't make sense for every kind of company -- one of Kingdon's previous posts (PricewaterhouseCoopers) is a gigantic _private_ company. They never did it themselves - it didn't make sense for them.

Rumors about a Linden Lab IPO have been going around since 2003 or so. I'm not sure that they're any more credible today than they were then, though.

"It seems like about the dumbest move they could make", to quote an old boss of mine.