apply pinky to corner of mouth

by Christopher Blizzard

…and say millions.

First, a little background. Hi. My name is Christopher Blizzard and I sit on the board of the Mozilla Corporation. This is the wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, which was created a short while ago. Before the creation of MoCo, I sat on the board of the Mozilla Foundation (MoFo). I joined the MoCo board to bring a bit of history and perspective to the group.

There have been a couple of articles written about the amount of money that the Mozilla Foundation has raised through various means. This entry says “72 million” and has been repeated over on digg.com. I won’t comment on the dollar amount except to say that it’s not correct, though not off by an order of magnitude. I also won’t comment on sources of that money, except to say that some of the assertions that I’ve seen in the comments are pretty far off, both in terms of numbers and sources.

People get easily distracted by the dollar amounts. I think that inside of Mozilla the dollar amounts are interesting, but they aren’t the focus of our efforts. When thinking about the money you need to keep a few things in mind:

1. The Mozilla Corporation is wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation. The Foundation is a non-profit corporation, and there are no other shareholders in MoCo. As a taxable subsidiary MoCo pays taxes like any other corporation. However it doesn’t have to worry about a return to shareholders as its primary mission. I see people talking a lot about the huge profits here, but we don’t think about the excess as profits. Some of that money does roll up to the Foundation proper, but we work with them to determine when and where that happens. There’s no chance of an IPO and it’s not being put into anyone’s bank account. Simply put: no one here is getting rich.

2. Money is just a tool. There are quite a few people who work full time at the Corporation now. Engineers, marketing folks, release engineers, community folks, lots. It allows us to build out our infrastructure to scale with our user base. Money means that we can direct our own development and make changes that really make a great product. As one of my fellow board members would say we can really “move the needle.”

3. Money is one of our last concerns. When we make decisions our priorities are as follows (as laid out by one of our good bizdev folks): 1. User Experience; 2. Distribution; 3. Money. This means that we don’t make choices that might increase our revenue that would sacrifice user experience, and very often we will take large distribution deals even if there’s little money involved.

So that’s the context. Money is one of the last things we worry about and people shouldn’t get hung up on the numbers, except to realize that it gives us options.