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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
by 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 agoMitchell 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 agoYes, 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 agoThe most important skill is being in the right social class. The rest is just justification.
- gkoberger 3y agoImagine 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 agoThat 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.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> don't see why it needs particularly rare skills I don’t either! But apparently they’re rare. One pays dearly when trying to go cheap, or broaden the pool in seemingly innocuous ways, in executive recruiting. > lots of people do really hard jobs Fortitude is necessary, but by itself insufficient.
- Dylan16807 3y ago> I don’t either! But apparently they’re rare. One pays dearly when trying to go cheap, or broaden the pool in seemingly innocuous ways, in executive recruiting. Do we have good evidence for that, or is it just what the people that hire CEOs tend to think? When I think of disastrous CEOs that I've managed to hear about, they weren't cheap. They got paid huge amounts to cause their disasters.
- x0x0 3y agoI suspect a ceo could have asked for a pay package of massive bonuses correlated with marketshare. My understanding is the board has pretty wide discretion to set pay, and following years of steep marketshare losses, who would question such an arrangement?
- gkoberger 3y agoBased on this thread, I think... everyone would question such an arrangement.
- Dylan16807 3y agoThey've been dropping long enough that a pay package almost entirely based on increasing market share would have gotten a lot less objection from me at least.
- x0x0 3y agoI think people are mostly questioning her quite large pay packages when measured against the abject failure on every metric except for the cash-paid-by-google-to-disguise-their-monopoly metric. At the last company I started, a b2b saas, as of 5 years in, there were under 10 logged-in pageviews from Firefox. Ever. It's dead; the coyote is 50 feet past the cliff; and we're just waiting for gravity to appear. Mozilla has also clearly given up on Firefox, though people get mad on here when you point that out. I just don't know why they're operating under the delusion that anyone will listen to Mozilla about privacy when everyone realizes they no longer build a browser that matters.
- lexicality 3y agoyeah but she ran it into the ground
- wkat4242 3y agoFor a company that has a declining marketshare like Mozilla it's really way too high IMO. Her salary kept going up as the marketshare was going down...
- bawolff 3y agoI mean, being a succesful ceo at a declining company is much harder than being one at a growing company. At a growing company you just have to not screw up, and a declining company you have to actually turn things around. It doesn't seem totally unreasonable to get higher pay doing a harder job (presuming she is actually good at her job)
- lolinder 3y agoGiven that nothing has turned around, it's hard to point to any evidence that she's doing a good job. The best she can claim is that had anyone else been CEO things would have declined even faster, and that's not something anyone can prove.
- bee_rider 3y agoWhat more do people want at this time? She’s quitting. Now we can see how the next CEO somehow manages to defeat the multiple massive anti-competitive behemoths Mozilla is up against.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoWe just want to not be gaslit into believing that she did a great job, which she clearly didn’t I’m not sure why all the excuses made for her
- b112 3y agoI wonder if they'll work on the little things. Like text reflow for their mobile browser. We have a massive aging population, and text reflow helps immensely, and only Opera does jt well.
- 3y ago
- brnt 3y agoOn the other hand, if you work elsewhere, your not turning around Mozilla. I worked in academia, now government, in HPC/data-sciency positions, so the overlap/competition with finance and big tech is large (and a lot of people move there and back again). Let's just say, we have far more interesting problems ;)
- mardifoufs 3y agoNot really. A Non profit ceo will always take a pay cut. You can't expect big tech salaries in a non profit, and if they can truly get a better salary elsewhere that's probably what they should do if they want that type of revenue. The thing is, they usually can't. A non profit ceo is not typically very well suited to be a big corp executive, and vice versa.
- fzzzy 3y agoMozilla corp is not a nonprofit. Mozilla org is, but we'retalking about the ceo of the corp here.
- p1necone 3y agoI honestly can't fathom caring about the difference between 6.2m a year and anything higher than that. Once my salary gets that high all I'm caring about is whether or not I'm doing interesting things.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y agoWhat if someone is mean to you on an internet site and you want to buy the whole site to silence them?
- bbor 3y agoI’ll do it! At this point I’d like to see some actual data to back up this so-often-repeated claim of “being a CEO is super hard, there’s only a few people in the country smart enough to do it well, so they need to be paid millions of dollars a year” That sounds… plausible, at this point. I wouldn’t say probable. Especially with tech making everything so interconnected. I loved the kind note at the root of this thread, but the idea that the CEO is some market visionary who is carefully keeping the whole company afloat seems rotten.
- confidantlake 3y agoIt is about as plausible as only the pharaoh can rule us since he is a god.
- bee_rider 3y agoHey, at least Firefox stayed in the game, Nadella takes 10x as much and IE didn’t even stick around.
- jodrellblank 3y agoSatya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, since then MSFT share price has 10x'ed, from $300Bn to $3.3Tn, making it the most valuable company in the world. He turned it around from a 30% drop in value under Steve Ballmer. Global cloud marketshare has Amazon AWS at 31% and dropping down from 34%, Microsoft Azure at 24% and climbing and Google GCP at 11%. Microsoft has transformed their business offering from "Office in your datacenter" to cloud-backed Office apps accessible from any device, Office apps in a browser, in Teams. Microsoft took Teams from 20M users in November 2019 to 1.4Bn users in October 2022, used by 91 of the Fortune 100. Microsoft got the jump on Google with OpenAI and integrated it promptly into Bing, Edge and M365 offerings. If that isn't company leadership worth paying for, nothing is. > "Hey, at least Firefox stayed in the game" Not according to other people in this thread: - "As a test professional at the time, one of the most discouraging things I saw after leaving Mozilla was Firefox dropping off all the test plans I knew about when [FireFox market share] hit single digits. I’d poke at that decision where I had influence, and would basically get back a response that “Firefox is dead, just look at the numbers.”" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39309843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39309843 - "At the last company I started, a b2b saas, as of 5 years in, there were under 10 logged-in pageviews from Firefox. Ever. It's dead; the coyote is 50 feet past the cliff; and we're just waiting for gravity to appear." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39309564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39309564 (and I'm typing this from FireFox, although on my work machine I'm moving to Edge because it's good. Click a link in Outlook, the link opens with Edge and the sidebar opens with web Outlook open showing the email I clicked on to reference, for one example. Vertical tabs for another, I stopped running TreeStyle Tabs in FireFox years ago, though I no longer remember why).
- squarefoot 3y agoThe real question is: will the new CEO start promoting Firefox as it should have been since the beginning, or Google money is too important to piss off them with actual competition?
- FireBeyond 3y agoLeaving aside small business, are there (m)any larger organizations where the CEO makes >1% of revenue? Mitchell making $6.9M in cash compensation of a $600M revenue company is the equivalent of: - Chuck Robbins of Cisco making $655M/year - Mark Benioff of Salesforce making $360M/year Maybe let's look smaller: - Fidji Simo of Instacart making $29M/year - Patrick Collison of Stripe making $166M/year When you look at it like that, Baker's compensation is quite absurd. (And for more comedic value than anything serious, similar to Tim Apple making $4.4B/year...)
- int_19h 3y agoArguably those compensations are what's absurd.
- FireBeyond 3y agoThey don't make those amounts. I'm saying if they were paid similarly to Mitchell, at 1.2% of revenue. Instead, Chuck Robbins makes $31.8M. Benioff makes $28M. Simo, $2M. Collision, $6.3M. Cook, $15M.
- itzprime 3y agonearly everyone that is not in the insanity that is the US Exec market.
- matwood 3y agoIt’s a lot of money, but it’s not a lot of money for a highly visible tech CEO. It’s a similar problem many non-profits have when hiring tech in general.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gertlex 3y agoMaybe 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 agoNo exit but racked up 10s of millions of dollars in increasing salary since 2017 while laying off 250 employees
- ekianjo 3y agolow salary lol