[music] Netscape is, of course, known for its Netscape Navigator product, first commercial browser on the web. So, first tool. First generation really used to get on the web, and that was successful for a while. And then competition became quite stiff from Microsoft. The different way to compete would be by building a shared asset. Instead of Netscape versus Microsoft. That Netscape would gather contributions of volunteers and other commercial part, commercial partners, and then build the product that would be shared. And that group of people knew that to be open source, you have to be real. You couldn't just say, oh, we are open source, love us. You really had to manage it differently. So at the time there was six or seven or eight of us who were employed by Netscape as Mozilla.org staff. And another 100 or 150 employed by Netscape as Netscape engineers, building the Netscape product and contributing their work to the Mozilla open source project. So we were all in the same buildings. We all went to many of the same meetings. But we had slightly different goals. Because although we call it the Netscape product, Netscape had been purchased by AOL already. And so the client itself was diminishing in importance, and the importance of the Netscape client was to push traffic to the AOL websites. But we, of course, at mozilla.org were an anomaly. Because our charter was to build a successful open source project. And so, that worked for quite a while. You know, there, there were tensions. These were the dark years for Mozilla. We came to understand we needed to rebuild our core technology. That took a long time. While we were doing that, market share continued to slide. And there was a set of tensions over what does it mean to run a real open source project. And as it turned out, there were two competing views. And one view was that open source is phenomenal, we're very happy that the code is out there. Anyone is very welcome to take that code and use it. We absolutely want to build a large and engaged contributor community. But all decisions and all authority will be held by the management group and we'll make those decisions as we think best, which is, of course, to benefit the client we're trying to build, which was the Netscape browser. We at mozilla.org were convinced it wouldn't be successful, that building a product to benefit AOL only wouldn't generate the kind of interest either from individual volunteers or from commercial partners that we needed to be successful. And that we found the difference in perspective from the volunteers made the quality of the project much higher. They were under immense pressure to ship this product because the company needed it. And not only was it difficult technically and in an engineering sense, but we at mozilla.org were saying, and there's these other things, right? You may think it's good enough, but we're telling you it's not because this is the feedback that we're getting. And you need to change some of the development processes and management practices. And so they thought well, I, I'm not sure what they thought. But we experienced it as no, we really need to keep going on the way that we're going till we get this product shipped. But unfortunately, here the Mozilla community was correct because when that product shipped it was a failure. That was Netscape 6. Universally acknowledged as a bad product and pretty universally acknowledged as the end of the Netscape product line. You know there are all those people that had held on and hoped through the Netscape 4 days and waited and waited and waited for for the update once they got it pretty much gave up. So that's what we experienced. So that certainly didn't help us, that was unfortunate. It did reinforce our view that, you know, our view of the world wasn't crazy. And, so we continued on and it was still long and slow to get technology and product that we liked. And the tensions continued. The management tensions continued. You know, the failure of Netscape 6 didn't make anything easier. And certainly, for the, the AOL folks, it really didn't make things easier either. And we fought a lot about the UI. I think UI's a constant source of tension. But in our case, it was worse. Because some of these fights would be. It makes sense to AOL to put something in the product. In the interface of the product. Either a button to an AOL site, or something that has an ad in it, or some feature that a partner has paid for, so it generates revenue. We think it might send people to our site. You know, some of our users might really like it. So it all made sense from their point of view, but if you're not building the AOL client to benefit AOL, and you're trying to build an open source product that is used for many people, then, of course, those features are a big negative. And so those were very fierce fights, because, because the management of the client group had very clear opportunities in hand that they wanted to build into their product. And we were this small group saying no. >> You were diametrically opposed. >> We were pretty opposed in that case, and we would say no, you can't put it into the core product. You're welcome to have a build system on your own and add it in later. And that's how we ended up doing these things. So we, so we did develop a system for it. But it was, of course, it's awkward. And you're always rubbing against what should go where. And it turned out, even in the very early days, that the open source Mozilla versions of the product got a lot more testing than the Netscape versions. And we also tried to build in some quality mechanisms that again, seem normal today. So you can't, you get hired as an employee, you don't automatically get the right to check your code into the tree, right? Someone has to, you know, look at your qualifications and say, at Mozilla and the way we work, we understand your coding level, we understand you know how we work, we understand if something goes wrong with your code, you know where you need to be, and all of these things. And that's a very difficult setting for a hiring manager to say, well I've just hired you, and you can't be as efficient as you think you can because there's yet another vetting process by this other group. So I understand, yeah, why it was difficult, but on the other hand as an open source project, if you can't control the quality of the code and you don't have any say in it, you're not very real. AOL client fortunes declined and the Netscape browser declined and declined precipitously after this Netscape 6. And so AOL was interested in laying off people and in one of the big layoffs, I was included. And that was, see, that was in 2001. And that was seen as a power struggle as well. Because by that time the fights back and forth about what we were building and who was making decisions were pretty well known within the engineering organizations. It's hard for them not to be. I mean, it's true anywhere, right, but, but in some cases the fights and the bugs are all very public as well. But, and, and so, so I was laid off, fired, depending on your, you know, how you want to describe it. And as it turned out, it wasn't really possible to take my place and I continued as a volunteer and the Netscape engineering organization was very clear whose leadership they were most interested in following. And so [laugh] we had to work out a way in which the management at Netscape AOL that remained and I worked out a, you know, sort of a way to work together enough so that they could ship the product they wanted to ship, but that I continued to lead the project. And I think that was a surprise not, not so much to me I think. And so I worked as a volunteer on the Mozilla project, and for a number of years, including the years in which we shipped our first product which we called Mozilla and which we were very proud of technically. And for its day, many people were surprised at how good it was but it didn't have a good user experience. But eventually I ended up working on another open source project with Mitch Kapor for a while. And that was lucky. He had started this open project and reached out to talk to Brendan and I about it to learn something. And the day that he was scheduled to come down and talk with us was the day that I was laid off. And so it, it was an odd sort of timing. >> Chandler Investment, by any chance? >> Yeah, that was Chandler. That was pre-Chandler, but it was, yeah. So I, I worked on that for a while. And Mitch was always a supporter of Mozilla. Even before Firefox, when he didn't like the product. But he recognized that we were an important part of the ecosystem. And that went on until 2003 when AOL decided to stop investing in a client almost completely and, fortunately, they knew that just killing it wasn't good. They knew enough about Mozilla and the name and the brand to think it would be good to do something with it. And, so eventually I ended up working with them, and, and they, some of the people there knew Mitch as well. And I was working with Mitch, and they knew him, and so we all, you know, spent a chunk of time trying to figure out what was possible. And my partner Brendan was still at Netscape, very eager to make a move, and many of the key people we wanted were also desperate to keep working on Mozilla. And so we ended up getting a two million dollar seed money from AOL and Mitch was helpful with that, and few other things, trademark, name Mozilla, and the four giant servers which were so important to us at the time and which would have taken almost 18 months to get through the purchase cycle at AOL. And so I think we still have those boxes sitting around, because they were so important to us at the time. And so in 2003 the Mozilla foundation was formed. And Mitch was the first chairman because he had done so much and had so much to offer. And Brian Belendorff and, and Chris Blizzard, who worked on Mozilla forever, and Brendan and I were on the board. And AOL understood that there were three or four people that would be leaving, when they, they did some kind of re-org or when they closed down the client group. And that those people would be coming to join us. And of all the people that we thought would be most helpful at Mozilla, they all came. That was about nine or ten. So we were, and Mitch continued to support me and one other person in Mozilla part time. So we were maybe 10 or 11 people. And I, and Brendan and I had always felt that we needed employees. It was exciting. It was a little scary because we knew that two million dollars wouldn't go that far, and that we had a lot of work to do to make ourselves real. We were still 18 months away from shipping, well 15 months away from shipping Firefox. So that part was scary. But it was immensely exciting. One of the friends of Mozilla showed up, and they had a big lease, and a little bit of space they could sublease to us. So we found a funky little room, way in the back, not even a sink. [laugh] Very odd, but, but we were really happy with it. And we worked away on building our product. At that time, we made what was a pretty fundamental change that was critical, and we decided unambiguously it'd be a consumer product. That seems obvious, but when you're a bunch of developers it's not that easy, and it means that you have to strip out a lot of the things that are clunky for a general consumer. You really have to be determined that you're building for a general consumer, not yourself. And I think many open source projects probably don't want to do that and shouldn't try if you don't want to, because you have to keep at it. So we started doing that. Out of the blue, some visual designers appeared from Prince Edward Island in Canada and so we started to get nice looking logos, which we'd never had before, and visual elements. And then we tried to figure out what to do with the start page, because we knew that Mozilla development tools weren't the right answer and we just, took us forever and we looked at all sorts of things and finally decided the one thing we knew that everybody did was search. You know we'd have people who'd say well it's obvious you should have the BBC, at least an English-language version. It's obvious. And then, you know, our engineering guy would look up and say well, it's not obvious to my 17-year-old daughter that that's what she wants. It's not obvious to my son either. So, but everybody used search. So we thought we'd have the search box. Maybe we should put that on the start page too, make it easier, maybe it'd be more obvious to people about search. So we went to talk with the search providers. We had very fruitful discussion with Google. I think they also saw the value of having a Mozilla browser in the world. They were very explicit about that and I believe them. And so, they were also open to doing a a business arrangement. And so often people ask how Mozilla gets paid, and we're like most businesses on the web, search and ads. You do a search, you know you'll see ads. If you follow those ads, revenue is generated. You know it goes through the system and we get a little piece of it. As do other browser makers. So it's very similar to the business model on the web. And we did something that I believe had never been done before, which was to make sure that Google and Yahoo were right there next to each other. I, you don't see them next to each other. You have to click on the arrow, but they're there. And today people laugh at me when, when I say that, because you only see one, but, but I negotiated that, and that was an absolute utter I will walk away from the deal term to everyone. Because I don't think I'd ever seen it before. And I wasn't. You know if you get on a plane and you want a Diet Coke, but the plane only has Diet Pepsi, because that's their deal, you're angry, and if you don't want a Diet Pepsi and you want a Coke. And I, I used that example. I said, I'm not going to have Firefox users angry at us because they wanted one or the other. You know, you have to agree you're both going to be in the product. >> But it also is your values, right? It is. >> Yes. >> Your values front and center. >> Yes, because the choice is there. We can do it. And, and to not do it would be to take away a choice that somebody really wants. And it matters to someone, so. So we, we have a choice in the search box. But we still didn't really know what to expect. So we shipped Firefox. And our sense that we were on to something turned out to be far more true even than we knew. We'd seen a, you know, rise in interest from 0.8 and 0.9 that was pretty noticeable but once we hit the release version it just exploded. And part of that was it was the perfect product. This time we had a product at the right time in the market. And then Internet capabilities have grown and now people could actually download a browser easily, and more people had bandwidth and ability to do so and a comfort level to try it. So that was good. We had a beautiful product, and it was an important product. And the alternative was horrendous and dangerous and awful. And so all of that combined to create this giant excitement. And so Firefox market share climbed by, you know, a percentage point immediately and started moving in these huge numbers. So it was a completely viral storm with nothing driving it other than, you know, the product and the need itself. And so that took everyone by surprise. You know, we were hoping to be able to generate a few million dollars to support ourselves for the next year. You know, we had 10 or 11 employees, you start to add that up, so we were hoping to make enough money to do that. And it turned out, you know, we generated that amount of money before the end of the year. Six weeks or eight weeks or whatever it was before the end of the year. And so, things, actually things got even more stressful and more hectic at that point. Because now you kind of got the proverbial tiger by the tail. We're still 12 people, right? So that immediate need to grow and that sense of pressure and stress combined with elation and success is probably, you know, I don't know maybe it's like having a child. Right, but it's that, it's that combination doesn't immediately get easier. >> It's a little easier to be anonymous. >> Yes, yes. >> You're nervous. >> That's for sure. We certainly see that. And so by the end of, Firefox shipped in 2004. Just actually, we just passed the eight-year anniversary. And you know, by the end of 2004, it was pretty clear that we were a different organization. We were, we were I would say still struggling with a different set of problems, but we had changed the nature of the problems really quite fundamentally. And, you know we'd done so in a way that, that our users loved. By 2005 we were in a really different world, where we began to be able to actually influence others, and that's always been the goal. I mean, market share is nice and it's nice when people love your product. Market share is a validation that you produced the right thing, so that's awesome on its own. But the more important, I would say not more important, equally important goal is to be able to influence not only ourselves, but others in the industry so that we start to see more of the things that we care about. [music]
