22 ms·

It's interesting to hear this, because from the outside Mitchell's tenure has seemed to be a disaster, with a complete inability to stay focused on one thing fo

It's interesting to hear this, because from the outside Mitchell's tenure has seemed to be a disaster, with a complete inability to stay focused on one thing for long enough to make a difference. Mozilla in recent memory has reminded me more than anything of the dogs in Pixar's Up ("squirrel!"), constantly chasing after the latest shiny tech fad while neglecting the fundamentals. They've been a follower on everything and have failed to lead on anything. Mitchell's justification for stepping down as CEO seems to me to follow this same pattern: she's stepping down in order to focus on AI and internet safety. It's good to know that she's a decent person and was good to Mozilla employees, but it's hard to square the picture you paint with the complete lack of direction I've seen during her tenure. Maybe Mozilla was in a much worse situation than I thought at the time she took the position?

gkoberger 3y ago
I agree with everything you said. All I can say in response is that being a great community leader and open web advocate doesn't always square with someone who has to make a profit for hundreds or thousands of employees. I have no inside information, but here's my guess at what happened. John Lilly was a great CEO. When he left, there was a gigantic void. They hired Gary Kovacs, who started the "squirrel!"-ing. He wasn't well-liked, and used Mozilla as a stepping stone. So going forward they only hired from the Mozilla community, which is a small pool – both of people who could do it and people who wanted to do it. I'm not sure if Mitchell wanted it or not, but I don't think there was a lot of competition. Being the CEO of Mozilla is not a good job, and I imagine it's really hard to fill. There's a ton of pressure, relatively low salary, no equity, no exit.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- animal_spirits 3y ago
  Mitchell baker was making 6.2 million dollars a year at Mozilla in 2023. Source: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/01/02/mozilla_in_2024_ai_privacy/ https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/01/02/mozilla_in_2024_a...
  - gkoberger 3y ago
    Yes, that's a lot of money. But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. If nothing else, you'd get stock, which would correlate with your performance.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      > But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. Why? Why does pointing mozilla in the right direction require such rare skills? Or is this because we're only looking at existing CEOs for hiring? If the rareness is about having the right industry knowledge and vision in a CEO, I bet you can get better results by hiring a company aimer and separate managerial co-CEO and using the money you save for 20 more devs and 5 more marketers.
      - confidantlake 3y ago
        The most important skill is being in the right social class. The rest is just justification.
      - gkoberger 3y ago
        Imagine running a company. That's hard enough. Now imagine your market share is down a ton (and decreasing), and there's no clear way to change that trajectory. Then imagine that despite being CEO, you're owned by a non-profit. So, you have a boss, and your boss has different goals than you do. Then imagine attracting and retaining top talent, while not being able to give out equity. Then imagine that your product is free. You can't charge more for it; you give (almost) everything away for free and there's no clear path to monetization. And then imagine that almost all of your money comes from your biggest competitor, and your only lever is to negotiate (from a position of weakness, because they're much bigger) a deal every 3 years in order to keep paying your employees.
        Dylan16807 3y ago
        That sounds really hard! But I don't see why it needs particularly rare skills. And lots of people do really hard jobs for much much much less money.
- gertlex 3y ago
  Maybe relatively low salary for a typical CEO (no comment)... But doesn't seem like Mozilla is a typical company; not built around selling a product... so maybe that merits a different type of CEO with different skills not normally desired by the companies paying 10s of millions to their CEOs. I'm no business person, so I could be completely wrong about what's needed at the C-level to keep Mozilla afloat. My view my be warped by assuming the vast majority of companies do not make money the way Mozilla does; but maybe there are more Mozillas than I know about.
- paxcoder 3y ago
  [dead]
- andrewpolidori 3y ago
  No exit but racked up 10s of millions of dollars in increasing salary since 2017 while laying off 250 employees
- ekianjo 3y ago
  low salary lol
javajosh 3y ago
>was good to Mozilla employees, but it's hard to square the picture you paint with the complete lack of direction Isn't there a fundamental tension between "be good to employees" and "strong sense of direction"? If you are focused as CEO, then you must neglect a fraction of your employees at any point in time. This is a side-effect of focusing on one direction, while maintaining capability to go in other directions in the future. If you don't neglect some of your employees and project, then you come off as being distracted and without a strong sense of direction. Is there some way to square this circle?
- romanows 3y ago
  I would think you could have a company focused on one thing; e.g., "making the people's browser" (with more explanation so the goal is clear). Hire people who believe in that goal. Make it relatively easy for people to leave so they're not tied to their job; e.g., generous severance, active help networking with other prestigious tech companies. Maybe even force people to take a break and work elsewhere for a couple years every N years before coming back, to keep people from getting stuck in a rut. Keep the company relatively small so that it _has_ a primary direction.
riversflow 3y ago
It's pretty straight forward to me. "$CORPO_STOOGE does all the things that make you a great leader and talks in platitudes that seem genuine! That makes them a decent person!" Nah. I have a quote that I think about often on this topic, from none other than Bojack Horseman[1]: Bojack, "Well, do you think I'm a good person... deep down?" Diane, "That's the thing, I don't think I believe in deep down. I kind of think that all you are is the things that you do" $CORPO_STOOGE is just a sociopath who follow the suggestions of "Lean In" as a behavioral guide of motions to follow. That doesn't make them a good person, just maybe a more pleasant manipulator. [1] S1E12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkG7x-hwqN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkG7x-hwqN8
- Geisterde 3y ago
  The most psychotic person ive ever known started his leadership by saving someones job after they made a mistake. Everyone assumed he would be a great leader, my skepticism proved right.
chrsig 3y ago
> Mitchell was a great community leader. That doesn't always translate to being a good CEO or leader of a business I think this statement from the parent addresses your point. Perhaps them stepping down as CEO will result in more focus? Time will tell.
karmelapple 3y ago
I think the "squirrel!" behavior has to do with getting revenue in the door. I'm not following extremely close, but it seems like Mozilla is chasing what can be turned into a product. Things that involve setting up a monthly subscription, whether it's VPNs, keeping your name out of certain tracking databases, etc. I wonder how Mozilla used to be funded vs how it's now funded? The web is a better place with a non-profit-driven group like Mozilla in it... but is Mozilla Corporation becoming more money-driven than it used to be, even if it can't turn a profit? Or can it turn a profit, because it's not the Mozilla Foundation [1]? 1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/
- dralley 3y ago
  Mozilla Corp is allowed to turn a profit. Distributions of that profit are the primary source of funding for the Mozilla Foudnation.
- stubish 3y ago
  Or is that backwards? Revenue comes in the door, and we must spend it, because empires must be built. No longer 100 developers working on a browser, but thousands working on all sorts of unrelated things and all the support staff. Whereas the alternative would be staying small and focused, sticking that money in the bank, and become financially independent. A new CEO could even do that. Conservatively invest one year's 600M revenue, rake off 20M per year, and the nestegg would still grow with inflation. And that is enough to develop a web browser provided you don't do it in silicon valley. Two or three years revenue and you can even market it. I think we see this a lot, with companies pulling in too much money from IPOs or venture capital, pissing it away on unfocused growth, and if they are lucky back where they started. Or unlucky and bankrupt.
geoelectric 3y ago
I also worked for Mozilla in that time period (I left just before they canceled FxOS) and found Mitchell to be an inspiring leader. OTOH, the track record over the last few years suggests she's not as great an executor.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  It was an impossible situation. Chrome can be funded and promoted by some of the most dominant web properties in the world. Even Microsoft is struggling to get a foothold with Edge, and that's after turning it into a Chrome reskin. Not saying the comp package was justified. But it was a job doomed to fail.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Yeah, to the extent that I’d criticize her it’s for not calling more for antitrust enforcement and since that’s basically asking Google to cut the lifeline, I don’t see how that could have worked in the current climate.
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      Mozilla sold defaults to a variety of vendors, most notably Yahoo, and others outside the US. Arguably they should have refused Google money from the jump.
      - acdha 3y ago
        The thing is, they’re in a really expensive place and almost everyone on the web has been trained to think of browsers as free. I don’t know what alternatives they could have picked at the time.
        paulryanrogers 3y ago
        My point is they had no way out. It was a glass cliff. Only regulations can stand up to competitors as powerful as Google and Apple.
patientzero 3y ago
I think people remember a Mozilla that never was. Mozilla was saved by Firebox which Mozilla the organization would have successfully blocked if their institutional processes were not the reason their community was frustrated. I don't think their processes have ever been better, they got initial and later injections of code from outside. Rust/servo was the moment when I thought they might turn it around, but their bus has always gone in the direction of the same cliff.
- avar 3y ago
  > Rust/servo was the moment when I thought they might turn it around. Because greenfield parallel rewrites of giant production codebases have such a fantastic track record, that we might as well add "in a novel programming language we're inventing while we're at it" just to make it interesting?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - patientzero 3y ago
    They had decades to ship next and they didn't want to be bug for bug backwards compatible. Local optimums in hell don't have a path to heaven. I think demise by drastic jump stories work because the examples are few and notable. Most projects accumulate experts in moving around the wrong optimum who then block plans of getting free that aren't too conservative to possibly work.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    But Rust is actually a successful language, and the idea of writing a web browser in it is actually a good one. Security is a huge concern for something like a web browser, which is a thing that keeps on increasing more and more in complexity. So far it seems Java is dead in the desktop space, and .NET has a very minimal impact, so it seems a compiled language is the way to go. And Rust's excellent support for multithreading is also a big boon since now multicore CPUs are a standard and keep on getting more and more cores. Overall the idea of building a very safe and performant browser seems like a great one.
byAltAccts 3y ago
Many serial killers are said to have gentle, gracious personalities. Except while doing all the killing anyway. It’s not hard to train oneself to act empathic, socially normal, but lack vision, ideas of your own. OP described how little it actually takes to make such a lasting impression; two conversations. In 2015 some colleagues and myself were invited to pitch an idea for an Instagram clone. The financier was recently widowed woman who was all kinds of generous with us. But she also mentioned she feels there’s plenty of nobodies in the world, Zuckerberg can share. They can peddle products on her platform as her husband wasn’t that rich. We learn to be a certain way publicly.
woolion 3y ago
They did lead on with some very cool ideas like panorama (now tab groups, still a Firefox exclusive feature!), Ubiquity, ... The problem is that they killed them with the rest (and got the good people behind to leave). With regards to be a good "community leader", it sounds like it might be true for the devs, but it is completely false with regards to its user base. Pocket and other commercial moves were made in a very underhanded way that angered many, for good reasons, and they repeated these types of mistakes many times over. Since a very long time the worst enemy of Firefox has been Mozilla, let's hope it changes.

gkoberger 3y ago

I agree with everything you said. All I can say in response is that being a great community leader and open web advocate doesn't always square with someone who has to make a profit for hundreds or thousands of employees. I have no inside information, but here's my guess at what happened. John Lilly was a great CEO. When he left, there was a gigantic void. They hired Gary Kovacs, who started the "squirrel!"-ing. He wasn't well-liked, and used Mozilla as a stepping stone. So going forward they only hired from the Mozilla community, which is a small pool – both of people who could do it and people who wanted to do it. I'm not sure if Mitchell wanted it or not, but I don't think there was a lot of competition. Being the CEO of Mozilla is not a good job, and I imagine it's really hard to fill. There's a ton of pressure, relatively low salary, no equity, no exit.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
animal_spirits 3y ago
Mitchell baker was making 6.2 million dollars a year at Mozilla in 2023. Source: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/01/02/mozilla_in_2024_ai_privacy/ https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/01/02/mozilla_in_2024_a...
- gkoberger 3y ago
  Yes, that's a lot of money. But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. If nothing else, you'd get stock, which would correlate with your performance.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    > But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. Why? Why does pointing mozilla in the right direction require such rare skills? Or is this because we're only looking at existing CEOs for hiring? If the rareness is about having the right industry knowledge and vision in a CEO, I bet you can get better results by hiring a company aimer and separate managerial co-CEO and using the money you save for 20 more devs and 5 more marketers.
    - confidantlake 3y ago
      The most important skill is being in the right social class. The rest is just justification.
    - gkoberger 3y ago
      Imagine running a company. That's hard enough. Now imagine your market share is down a ton (and decreasing), and there's no clear way to change that trajectory. Then imagine that despite being CEO, you're owned by a non-profit. So, you have a boss, and your boss has different goals than you do. Then imagine attracting and retaining top talent, while not being able to give out equity. Then imagine that your product is free. You can't charge more for it; you give (almost) everything away for free and there's no clear path to monetization. And then imagine that almost all of your money comes from your biggest competitor, and your only lever is to negotiate (from a position of weakness, because they're much bigger) a deal every 3 years in order to keep paying your employees.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        That sounds really hard! But I don't see why it needs particularly rare skills. And lots of people do really hard jobs for much much much less money.
gertlex 3y ago
Maybe relatively low salary for a typical CEO (no comment)... But doesn't seem like Mozilla is a typical company; not built around selling a product... so maybe that merits a different type of CEO with different skills not normally desired by the companies paying 10s of millions to their CEOs. I'm no business person, so I could be completely wrong about what's needed at the C-level to keep Mozilla afloat. My view my be warped by assuming the vast majority of companies do not make money the way Mozilla does; but maybe there are more Mozillas than I know about.
paxcoder 3y ago
[dead]
andrewpolidori 3y ago
No exit but racked up 10s of millions of dollars in increasing salary since 2017 while laying off 250 employees
ekianjo 3y ago
low salary lol

javajosh 3y ago

>was good to Mozilla employees, but it's hard to square the picture you paint with the complete lack of direction Isn't there a fundamental tension between "be good to employees" and "strong sense of direction"? If you are focused as CEO, then you must neglect a fraction of your employees at any point in time. This is a side-effect of focusing on one direction, while maintaining capability to go in other directions in the future. If you don't neglect some of your employees and project, then you come off as being distracted and without a strong sense of direction. Is there some way to square this circle?

romanows 3y ago
I would think you could have a company focused on one thing; e.g., "making the people's browser" (with more explanation so the goal is clear). Hire people who believe in that goal. Make it relatively easy for people to leave so they're not tied to their job; e.g., generous severance, active help networking with other prestigious tech companies. Maybe even force people to take a break and work elsewhere for a couple years every N years before coming back, to keep people from getting stuck in a rut. Keep the company relatively small so that it _has_ a primary direction.

riversflow 3y ago

It's pretty straight forward to me. "$CORPO_STOOGE does all the things that make you a great leader and talks in platitudes that seem genuine! That makes them a decent person!" Nah. I have a quote that I think about often on this topic, from none other than Bojack Horseman[1]: Bojack, "Well, do you think I'm a good person... deep down?" Diane, "That's the thing, I don't think I believe in deep down. I kind of think that all you are is the things that you do" $CORPO_STOOGE is just a sociopath who follow the suggestions of "Lean In" as a behavioral guide of motions to follow. That doesn't make them a good person, just maybe a more pleasant manipulator. [1] S1E12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkG7x-hwqN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkG7x-hwqN8

Geisterde 3y ago
The most psychotic person ive ever known started his leadership by saving someones job after they made a mistake. Everyone assumed he would be a great leader, my skepticism proved right.

chrsig 3y ago

> Mitchell was a great community leader. That doesn't always translate to being a good CEO or leader of a business I think this statement from the parent addresses your point. Perhaps them stepping down as CEO will result in more focus? Time will tell.

karmelapple 3y ago

I think the "squirrel!" behavior has to do with getting revenue in the door. I'm not following extremely close, but it seems like Mozilla is chasing what can be turned into a product. Things that involve setting up a monthly subscription, whether it's VPNs, keeping your name out of certain tracking databases, etc. I wonder how Mozilla used to be funded vs how it's now funded? The web is a better place with a non-profit-driven group like Mozilla in it... but is Mozilla Corporation becoming more money-driven than it used to be, even if it can't turn a profit? Or can it turn a profit, because it's not the Mozilla Foundation [1]? 1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/

dralley 3y ago
Mozilla Corp is allowed to turn a profit. Distributions of that profit are the primary source of funding for the Mozilla Foudnation.
stubish 3y ago
Or is that backwards? Revenue comes in the door, and we must spend it, because empires must be built. No longer 100 developers working on a browser, but thousands working on all sorts of unrelated things and all the support staff. Whereas the alternative would be staying small and focused, sticking that money in the bank, and become financially independent. A new CEO could even do that. Conservatively invest one year's 600M revenue, rake off 20M per year, and the nestegg would still grow with inflation. And that is enough to develop a web browser provided you don't do it in silicon valley. Two or three years revenue and you can even market it. I think we see this a lot, with companies pulling in too much money from IPOs or venture capital, pissing it away on unfocused growth, and if they are lucky back where they started. Or unlucky and bankrupt.

geoelectric 3y ago

I also worked for Mozilla in that time period (I left just before they canceled FxOS) and found Mitchell to be an inspiring leader. OTOH, the track record over the last few years suggests she's not as great an executor.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
It was an impossible situation. Chrome can be funded and promoted by some of the most dominant web properties in the world. Even Microsoft is struggling to get a foothold with Edge, and that's after turning it into a Chrome reskin. Not saying the comp package was justified. But it was a job doomed to fail.
- acdha 3y ago
  Yeah, to the extent that I’d criticize her it’s for not calling more for antitrust enforcement and since that’s basically asking Google to cut the lifeline, I don’t see how that could have worked in the current climate.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Mozilla sold defaults to a variety of vendors, most notably Yahoo, and others outside the US. Arguably they should have refused Google money from the jump.
    - acdha 3y ago
      The thing is, they’re in a really expensive place and almost everyone on the web has been trained to think of browsers as free. I don’t know what alternatives they could have picked at the time.
      - paulryanrogers 3y ago
        My point is they had no way out. It was a glass cliff. Only regulations can stand up to competitors as powerful as Google and Apple.

patientzero 3y ago

I think people remember a Mozilla that never was. Mozilla was saved by Firebox which Mozilla the organization would have successfully blocked if their institutional processes were not the reason their community was frustrated. I don't think their processes have ever been better, they got initial and later injections of code from outside. Rust/servo was the moment when I thought they might turn it around, but their bus has always gone in the direction of the same cliff.

avar 3y ago
> Rust/servo was the moment when I thought they might turn it around. Because greenfield parallel rewrites of giant production codebases have such a fantastic track record, that we might as well add "in a novel programming language we're inventing while we're at it" just to make it interesting?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- patientzero 3y ago
  They had decades to ship next and they didn't want to be bug for bug backwards compatible. Local optimums in hell don't have a path to heaven. I think demise by drastic jump stories work because the examples are few and notable. Most projects accumulate experts in moving around the wrong optimum who then block plans of getting free that aren't too conservative to possibly work.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  But Rust is actually a successful language, and the idea of writing a web browser in it is actually a good one. Security is a huge concern for something like a web browser, which is a thing that keeps on increasing more and more in complexity. So far it seems Java is dead in the desktop space, and .NET has a very minimal impact, so it seems a compiled language is the way to go. And Rust's excellent support for multithreading is also a big boon since now multicore CPUs are a standard and keep on getting more and more cores. Overall the idea of building a very safe and performant browser seems like a great one.

byAltAccts 3y ago

Many serial killers are said to have gentle, gracious personalities. Except while doing all the killing anyway. It’s not hard to train oneself to act empathic, socially normal, but lack vision, ideas of your own. OP described how little it actually takes to make such a lasting impression; two conversations. In 2015 some colleagues and myself were invited to pitch an idea for an Instagram clone. The financier was recently widowed woman who was all kinds of generous with us. But she also mentioned she feels there’s plenty of nobodies in the world, Zuckerberg can share. They can peddle products on her platform as her husband wasn’t that rich. We learn to be a certain way publicly.

woolion 3y ago

They did lead on with some very cool ideas like panorama (now tab groups, still a Firefox exclusive feature!), Ubiquity, ... The problem is that they killed them with the rest (and got the good people behind to leave). With regards to be a good "community leader", it sounds like it might be true for the devs, but it is completely false with regards to its user base. Pocket and other commercial moves were made in a very underhanded way that angered many, for good reasons, and they repeated these types of mistakes many times over. Since a very long time the worst enemy of Firefox has been Mozilla, let's hope it changes.