I’m extremely excited that John Lilly is taking on the CEO title at Mozilla Corporation. (Note that I’m using “title” here instead of “role.” I, like Mitchell, believe that he’s already filling much of this role and now it’s time to make it official.) John came to Mozilla Corporation in a business development role and quickly grew into a COO role. As part of his COO role inside of the organization he’s proven that he understands our unique position in the industry, the change we’re trying to create and how we do things. (In a lot of ways the thing that makes Mozilla unique is not just what we do, but the way that we do it. It’s an important distinction.) In that role he’s clearly taken on a lot of what a CEO would normally do and this change in title makes that official.
Also, it’s clear that Mitchell is not leaving the project and not leaving the organization. There a lot of levers that she would be really good at pulling around larger issues that affect the future of the Internet – open standards, personal privacy on the internet, the rights of individuals who use these tools day to day – and she can have a large impact there. More than most of us. And I know that’s what she’s interested in doing and I’m glad that we’re going to give her the chance to execute on that. She has proven that people can create change through direct action and I hope that she’s able to take what she has learned here and now and apply it in different areas, while still keeping that work in the Mozilla family.
I think that it’s very important to understand this change in the context of the organization that we’re all a part of it. We’re a hybrid. Part open source project, part business, part non-profit. But we have a very specific mission that covers all of those moving parts: all the way from the Mozilla Foundation board, to the people who are actually employed by the Corporation, to individual contributors who work on this project because they love what we do and they want to be a part of it. We’re all taking part in that mission together.
One part of our project is The Mozilla Corporation. It’s built to take our ideas and values and turn them into action. Action in the form of a product: Firefox. John’s role will be to make sure that the part of the project thrives and grows and properly executes on the opportunities that are created as a result.
Mitchell will be growing into another kind of role, one to which I think that she is uniquely qualified. And one that the Mozilla project gives her a great platform to execute on. I’m lucky enough to have known Mitchell for nearly a decade, and I believe that we have grown into quite close friends. I know very few people who bring the kind of intelligence and fire to topics of personal interest and who are so good at creating actions in others at the same time. I’m hoping that she’s able to use the platform that we have and use it to create the kind of change that we all need as Internet users. No matter what the form.
I used the word “opportunity” above to describe part of John’s role at the Corporation. In that context I’m talking about the kinds of things that you might expect in a business context. The chance to build a revenue stream to support the mission, create relationships that create more leverage for Firefox and open standards. The kinds of things that the Mozilla Corporation does today.
But there are larger opportunities in front of the Mozilla project as a whole, not just those for the Corporation that I listed above. I think that John should be very jealous of what Mitchell has in front of her because she’s going to get to work on the larger questions. For example: What does it mean for users of the Internet when a very small group of people can create change for the benefit of everyone? What can it mean for the future of open standards, open source software and how open the Internet will be in the future? Is there a model here that others can execute on? How can we continue to protect the rights of users and the ability for companies and individuals to continue to innovate on top of the Open Web and the Internet? How can we make sure that the very platform of the Internet also continues to grow and learn and doesn’t get locked up on top of a proprietary implementation or standard that slows the extremely beneficial development we’ve seen to date? I think that these are the kinds of questions that Mitchell will be able to tackle and I hope that she does. If so, we’re all better off. Trust me. I’ve seen it happen before.
