Mozilla

Adding Capacity at Mozilla Corporation

August 18th, 2006

The Mozilla world has grown enormously in the last year and the Mozilla Corporation has followed. We’ve added many new employees, expanded our network infrastructure dramatically, increased our interaction with other companies and organizations, broadened our community marketing significantly, to name just a few. Firefox’s role in the Internet ecology has grown to such a state that many people take it for granted now.

As part of this growth, I’ve been doing two distinct types of work. One aspect of my role is focused on the goals of the Mozilla project – how we accomplish these, how the Corporation fits into the overall project, and how we build an organization that lives among the commercial entities and also remains an authentic open source, community-based effort, and how we communicate these messages as broadly as possible.

The second major area is in operations and execution. This involves developing an organization that operates effectively, balances between today’s tasks and building for the future, and gets the things we understand done crisply so we have the energy to dig into the new things.

Each of these roles is growing larger; each is at least a full time job. So I’ve asked John Lilly if he would take the role of COO (chief operating officer) for the Mozilla Corporation, and John has agreed. This is a new role at the Mozilla Corporation. John will focus on the nuts and bolts of execution and the operational and organizational tasks required for the Mozilla Corporation to operate effectively. I will continue as CEO, and will focus on meeting the goals of the Mozilla project, developing our products with these goals in mind, maintaining the Corporation’s integrity as a member of the larger Mozilla product, and increasing communication about these topics.

I am thrilled to be able to devote more attention to the “Mozilla-ness” of what we’re doing, and equally thrilled that John is taking on the responsibility for our operations. Please join me in welcoming John to this new role.

Categories: Mozilla

4 comments for “Adding Capacity at Mozilla Corporation”

  1. 1

    Rafael Ebron said on August 18th, 2006 at 10:56 am:

    If I may, I totally vouch for John. When we talked to partners together when I was there, he was an awesome representative for Mozilla, completely in tune w/ Mozilla’s values with a high regard for the Mozilla community and Mozilla users.

    He joined Mozilla as an “outsider” and he got up to speed really quickly, and Mozilla’s really lucky to have him.

    The concern when he joined as biz dev, it’s a biz dev guy, they’re all shady. I didn’t see that one bit. The challenge is especially hard because *everyone* wants to work with Mozilla.

    So yea!

  2. 2

    David Baron said on August 18th, 2006 at 3:42 pm:

    I’d like to echo what Rafael said. John hasn’t had a very public role, so I think a lot of people in the community but outside of the Mozilla Corporation don’t know who he is.

    Hearing John talk about Mozilla Corporation’s relationships with other businesses showed me that he has a clear sense of the values of the Mozilla Community. And listening to his comments in lots of discussions among Mozilla employees made it clear that he has lots of good ideas about how the company ought to operate.

  3. 3

    Asa Dotzler said on August 18th, 2006 at 8:41 pm:

    A big thanks to John for moving over to this roll. It’s something we clearly need and there’s no one better equipped to take it on.

  4. 4

    Tristan Nitot said on August 20th, 2006 at 7:28 am:

    I think this is great news for all of us. John is a great guy who has already done a lot for the project and I’m sure he’ll do more in this new position. Congrats to John for the job and to Mitchell for making the right decision.

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