John Lilly on Leveraging Community to Scale Mozilla | Blitzscaling 05

This is session 5 of technology enabled Blitzscaling, a Stanford University class taught by Reid Hoffman, John Lilly, Allen Blue and Chris Yeh. This lecture recaps the family stage and introduces the tribal stage. Alan Blue talks about the early days of LinkedIn and John Lilly talks about the early days of Mozilla. This podcast has been produced by Greylock Partners. For more podcasts, class notes, slides and videos, please visit greylock.com.

Okay, good, so, thanks. Third week. So the first couple weeks, no surprise, I think a lot of people knew the material. We intentionally went and found three investors that we thought were important and impressive and we respect a lot Ann and Michael and Sam to give different perspectives on how they think about the work, how they think about startups. And I think a lot of the feedback we got was you can see a lot of the themes that were same, some of the repetition and, and people wanted more and more specificity. So today you're going to get a ton of specificity. We're going to talk a lot about Mozilla, which is a story that I know really well and I'll explain in great detail why it's important in this new phase, the OS 2 sort of 15 to 150 person stage. And I'd like it to be as interactive as possible. So you're not going to find a person who knows it quite a lot, much better than I do. And so lots of questions would be good. And then so we'll do a little recap, we'll do a little intro to OS2, we'll do a lot of Mozilla and then Alan's going to have a lot of specifics around scaling and resourcing. And one of the things that you're going to find is that there's abstract comments that are actually abstract, there are specific comments that sound abstract and then there's specific concepts that don't generalize that well. And so we're going to talk about a lot and the trick will be we're going to go into a lot of specificity and generalizing out from that, that'll be the key. But I think you'll find that especially now, as you move from investors to operators, things are going to start moving more and more quickly and more and more specifically and then we'll prep for Thursday. That's it. So let's make this as interactive as we can. So what themes do people feel like were very, very common across Sam, Ann and Michael in the last couple weeks? Move fast, move fast and specifically make decisions quickly. Right.

What else Relentless and realistic.

User focus. User focus. Right. So making sure that you build something people care about. Firefast.

Make sure you're managing your personnel well.

Firefast. That's interesting. Was that a theme that was common? I don't remember. Sam did. Yeah. Michael maybe did too. Yep. So firefast. Fire quickly. Other themes that were common.

Don't you start a company that's personally out of you.

Yeah. Don't start coming unless it's bursting out of you. I think that would. You each got a different flavor of that specific comment. Other things that were common.

Don't do it alone.

Don't do it alone. Unless you are. Unless that's the deal. Yeah. Unless you are alone. Yeah. Yep. That's a good comment.

Forever alone. The authenticity of the founding story.

Yeah. Authenticity of the founding story. That's interesting. I guess that did come up certainly with Michael. Less so with Ann and Sam.

Right.

Other things that were. Yeah, okay, good.

Just a strong focus on product. Product development, product market fit. Ignoring everything else.

Yeah. What to ignore is a. Is a key. I think everybody who's gone through this journey realizes that there's. You're trying to pile about 40 pounds of work into about a three pound bag. And so figuring out which three pounds to take with you is key. So let's go forward. So here's the ones that. Oh, yeah. So what was most divergent across the three of them? Yeah. Diversity. And how much diversity matters, I think is a key. I think. Actually, I think it's a pretty controversial topic everywhere. I think people don't have a good sense of what the real benefits and cost of diversity are.

So early.

What else is divergent?

This was on proprietary power, but I don't think Sam focuses on that as much as he wants you to build something as small with the fuse as well.

Yeah, that's right. So Ann had a structured theme which was how do you build proprietary advantage, proprietary power. Whereas Sam just wants you to build things that people love. Yeah. I think Sam has a much simpler frame and actually that matches Y combinator's frame in a lot of ways. Build things that people love. The. The rest of it works out. We'll see. There's lots of ways that that's true and lots of ways that it's not so true. Other things that were divergent. The early financing structure.

So Michael hated on Safe Notes, which Sam came up with that yc.

Yeah. So Sam invented Safe Notes, which Michael hates. That's true. You guys really liked the financing discussion. That was surprising. But I guess shouldn't be that surprising in retrospect, financing is not that interesting. But we can talk about it a little bit more if you guys want to. So yeah, sure.

Decision making processes. More Reed. But Reid seemed to advocate kind of like an autocratic just move fast as a unit. Whereas Michael was talking about a more almost like market based decision making process even in early stages.

Oh, interesting. So Michael and Reid diverged a little bit on how to make decisions inside the company. Where you said, Michael said let the markets win. Reid says internal market inside the company. Yeah, internal market. I wonder if Michael really meant that. I mean Michael really really believes in markets. Really really. And Reid really believes in how smart he is as a single founder and people like him. And it turns out it's pretty true. People like Reid are very good at making decisions very fast. So that's interesting difference other divergences. All right, let's move forward then. Sure.

Oops. All right, so let's see. We talked a lot about, we talked about a bunch of things in the sort of OS1 phase, which is this small phase, but things are about to move more quickly. Just to remind you where we are, we had five phases we're going to be talking about during the quarter. So we talked about the OS 1 phase quite a bit. We're going to do basically two weeks on each of these. And we're changing our focus right now to what makes OS 2 organizational scale 2 what it is. Those numbers again are just ballparks. They're just like ways in which you can sort of identify kind of roughly where somebody actually is. But I think one of the things which really changes what you're focusing on. So when we talked about OS1, this is basically what we were talking about. So got to identify a non obvious market opportunity where you have a unique advantage or approach. Right. So remember when Ann went through her types of power in an organization, she talked about proprietary power in a lot of ways. This unique advantage or unique market is a great example of proprietary power and it's actually a big component. This is essentially proprietary power. And the second one is product power, that ability to build customer fit between the product and the market. Just as an example, just to remind people sort of where we are. If you're talking about LinkedIn in this, what we're talking about was we had a market. It was basically, we thought it was every professional, every professional would be doing search on a regular basis. Our unique approach was to build a social network in order to build up a huge search space in order to allow people to do it. And our product market fit was with people who wanted to search again. We thought that was everybody. It turns out that that turned out to be recruiters for us. But that's an example of those various pieces. So now you've got this plan and you've got this notion of value. People have read the Lean Startup, I assume Eric, when he talks about, he talks about two concepts you need to test early in the process. The first one is, is a value hypothesis. The value hypothesis is, can I actually provide value to the people who are in my market? The second one is the growth hypothesis. And the growth hypothesis is, okay, we've got a product market fit, we've got value, how are we actually gonna get to the next scale? So this is really the message for OS2. The core concept is I've got something which is working in the market, how do I effectively get it to large market scale? So pretty much everything we're gonna be talking about when we talk about OS 2 scale companies is how you a great idea with good product market fit, but in a limited space, getting out to extremely broad growth and basically delivering that value to everybody. There are three parts of basically what you need to do. So the first one is you need to create a plan for growth. You need to execute it, learn from it, rethink it, and build market share. So there's a lot of information about this. Eric talks about it in his book. We're going to be talking about it today, specifically about how Mozilla grew. The second thing is you need to adjust your product market fit as you go along because you're going to learn things about it. One thing which is crazy about all this stuff is that everything you think you know about your plan and everything you think you know about your product market fit is up for debate. So you're going to learn that. And the importance of being able to learn effectively from the situation and react to it quickly is truly essential. The third thing you have to worry about is you have to worry about competition because you're now in a position where you actually probably have other startups who know who you are and know what you're working on and find the space you're in actually interesting. The question is, how do you actually make sure that you get to market share before they're able to get to market share? And I know this is a big component of what we're actually talking about today with Mozilla. The key component of this is being able to move really, really quickly. Okay, so this is the basic goal for OS2 and what you actually need to achieve. How do you do it? Well, you kind of have to become the tribe. You need to have more resources to be able to get things done. So it means a bigger team in order to learn and build effectively. It means new functions that you haven't had to have before because you need to interact with customers at a large scale, whether you're an enterprise software consumer. Go ahead.

This isn't the previous slide. I was just curious with the competition stuff. Are there certain things that early competitors to LinkedIn that you in hindsight realized.

That they did wrong specifically so we can talk about it. So we had exactly the situation. Repeat the question. So were there early competitors to LinkedIn? Basically people who we saw, who we think we. And why did they mess up? So yes, the answer is yes, there were a bunch. When we launched LinkedIn, within two or three months, there were three other competitive products, all of which were heading for the same space, which entered the market during that time.

Were they all kind of like tier one backed as well?

They were all tier one. They were all tiny little companies that were trying to build product market fit.

They never scale. None of them scaled fast enough and.

None of them scaled fast enough.

It's a race to scale.

It's a race to scale. And the reason that it actually worked out for us and it didn't work out for them is because we took this very seriously. This idea that you have to grow in order to generate value. They moved very quickly to advanced features or they moved very quickly to how do I monetize this without actually locking in the market share necessary to make the thing successful. So they were trying to build features on top of it and try to sell the product before they actually had effective value to sell. And that meant we got to continue to concentrate on growth, which is how we were able to exit the OS 2 phase and move on. They actually did different stuff a little bit. So two of them did that. One of them had an approach which simply didn't work. And there was a fourth one which basically had. Actually two of them had approaches that didn't work. One of them thought the entire social graph lived inside the enterprise. It's called Visible Path. And basically its whole idea was mine, people's email to discover what those connections are and auto generate your group. The problem, you want to join your social graph? The problem was that in order to do that, they had to get inside each company and inside each email service to be able to actually make it happen. So it was too slow. The other one is called Spoke. And Spoke was entirely focused on one vertical and not a diverse network. It was only for salespeople. So basically no one else wanted to be part of it. So they couldn't effectively grow. They had built something into their approach which prevented them from growing.

But another piece that I think people don't talk about a lot here is that it's a little confusing figuring out who your competition is.

Do you want to step. I don't think it's.

Yeah, sorry. So I remember in 2007, I was with Reid talking about his growth and he was really, really thinking about how to grow faster. LinkedIn, because they clearly left Spoke and those guys behind at that point. But Facebook was what he was thinking about a lot. He's like, why aren't we growing? I don't even remember.

In 2007, we had about three and a half million, four million.

So he was looking at Facebook, he's like, well, Facebook's growth is much, much faster. Do we need to get on a trajectory there? Do we need to go to college? That kind of st. Facebook looked like a clear competitor, which in hindsight was not.

Right.

Facebook isn't really competitive.

They're separate, separate, quasi competitive. Along those same lines, I think we.

Talk a lot about product, market fit. Like Sam said, build something where users want. But how do you address market choice? Being really more of a choice that you're making about who are my competitors. So your competitor or do we just not care about that?

So the question is you sometimes choose your market and you choose your competitors at some level, but the truth is you don't really do that so much as your customers do.

Well, and so this actually goes back to the very first idea up here is this non obvious market opportunity with unique approach is actually the bet that everybody makes at the beginning. You have a market you're actually trying to reach, you have a unique way to do it. The question is, is your way going to be more successful than this way over here? You are in fact choosing the competitors and basically defining the competitive space. When you pick your approach for LinkedIn, it was build a social network in order to build a huge search space, which was different than the.

So this is what I'll think the marketing.

So kind of depends. I'll tell you what happened in LinkedIn's case.

The question is the balance between what the founders think is the market and what users are telling them is the market. Yeah.

So the really challenging thing for LinkedIn was that we actually had truth Be told, pretty weak product market fit. In the early days, we didn't. This is why we, one of the reasons we didn't grow. And when we get to the end, we'll talk about growing through value, which matters a huge amount. Facebook, any messaging platform you look at right now, they're all growing through value. The reason there's 700 million people who are using WhatsApp is that people to get their value, they attract their friends into the system. That didn't exist on LinkedIn because the value was search. We started with an empty search space and the growth of LinkedIn was to build the search space in order to get the product market fit. So in some ways we didn't have a feedback loop which is telling us what the value was, except saying, there's no one here who I want to find. And so that's what we basically paid attention to, is we, we trusted our original approach, but all we could do is we could just move forward and say we're going to get the value someday.

So there are some people, you know, like Sam ultimately says, you know, find a very small group of work, small group of users together to have a small group of users who want to be product and whatever, Right?

Yep.

So I guess like when you're building LinkedIn, you said you really didn't have great product market fit from the very beginning. It sounds like your strategy.

We had potential product market fit. Yeah. Because we identified, for instance, recruiters are a great example. Recruiters absolutely loved the concept of the product. But the problem is when they went in and searched, the search space was too small. But the product market fit was actually there. But only with this, with specific people who could envision what it would be like when we had a ton of.

People in the network, did you guys focus on the growth aspects Exactly. When you weren't necessarily sure whether or not the product market is there? Yes, if that's the case, I guess, like in what cases, you know, in what instances does that actually make sense?

Does it make sense in what cases? So the question is, in what cases does it make sense to focus on growth rather than focusing on product market fit? I would really, I think that the LinkedIn case was actually a fairly unique one. But I don't know, John, you can talk to more examples of actually get the product right.

Get the product right. Because if you, if you getting the. We're focusing on growth before we get the product right. Is this excellent way to piss away a ton of money.

And the only reason you just keep.

Pouring it in and people just don't use it. And this has gotten more and more and more acute as the number of startups has exploded.

And the. And the only reason we did it is because we knew that we had to get to growth before we could get to product value.

And they found their super user. So LinkedIn found. We'll talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so we'll wait, we'll hold this and we'll come back to it.

So three things you need to do. Becoming a tribe requires you to bring on new capabilities and new services, which means expanding the group, certain kinds of investments in technology, business, operations. Basically, now that you've got between 10 and 50 people in the company, you need to have an office, you need to have keys and so people can get into the damn office. The reason this is important is that basically you're kind of setting up two teams. So you have team one, which is basically the team which is affecting, which is working on the scale, the growth. Then you got team two, which is defending team one. Team two is there to make sure the founders and the engineers don't get distracted by having to deal with things like ordering food in on a regular basis. So we got two. That's what number three is. And then the right financing and capital allocation because at some point you're going to pay all these people a salary. Your financial needs are different in the world of OS2 than they were in OS1. So with that, we should talk about Mozilla.

Okay, so we're going to talk about Mozilla for a little while now. So it's going to be 30 or 40 minutes and so please ask questions all along the way. As I was going through this, I went back to board decks. It's one of the things I'm going to share actual board decks with you. So we'll talk about some specifics. What I realized is the context is the world is so different in 2015 than in 2004 when Firefox launched. But I need to explain it a little bit. So we're just going to talk about the period from 2005 to 2008. There's other interesting stuff on both sides of that, but this is the period we'll talk about. So here's some context. So 2004 and nobody's going to remember this. So instead of Macs out there, actually most people didn't have laptops in class so much in 2004, but a few did, but they were all windows and IE was something like 95% market. Share. And this is not an exaggeration, it's 95, 96% market share and that's what that looks like. So not only did they have market share, they also had 100% dominant distribution, which is ie came bundled on your machine. So you got a machine and you got a browser and there was no app store, there was no nothing really. And so if you wanted something else, you had to say, you had to make a decision. You had to say, I don't want this thing, I want another thing that's like it and I'm going to go find it to get it. Which Sounds ridiculous in 2015, but that's where it was. And so most people, Microsoft included, said, well, the browser is done. Microsoft killed Netscape, Microsoft killed aol, they launched ie and in fact Microsoft disbanded most of the IE team after this. They moved them on to something called Silverlight, which obviously was super important. I make that joke a lot, so it's kind of a cheap shot, but whatever. I like Microsoft better now than I used to. But they really, it's like they had the mission accomplished banner. It's like, okay, we won the web, let's move from IE6, which we launched in 2001, and they moved off and they really didn't launch IE7 until something like six years later. That's an amazing, amazing thing. So by the end of 2004, Mozilla had built Firefox 1.0. And I guess I should mention some things about Mozilla. So this was an unlikely thing to matter. Most people had decided Mozilla didn't care by 2004 because Mozilla actually started in 1998 as part of Netscape. And this is like pretty pre history. So a lot for me this all stuff all as I was putting this together, it all seems exactly like yesterday. I can see all these decision points for all of you. It seems like prehistory from when you were kids or before you were, were born maybe. No, probably not before you were born. Close but. So for Mozilla was this open source project inside Netscape. And the way that Mozilla started was a guy named Bob Lisbon who was running the Netscape project. He was thinking about how to compete with Microsoft. And this is a big, this is a really important lesson. He was up late one night and he was worried that Netscape wasn't going to keep pace with Microsoft because Microsoft is hiring a ton of people and starting to spend more and more and more engineering resources. And so software used to have this thing called an about box. And the about box would list the engineers names on it, who worked on it. And so one night he went through the Microsoft products that he competed with Netscape gm and he started counting each of the people's names. And he had 200 people working on products in Netscape. And he quit when he got to about 2,500 people he encountered at Microsoft. And so for him, he looks at it and said, they have more than 10 times the people we have in 1998. There's no way for us to compete symmetrically. And so we have to figure out how to do something different. And so from Bob, and this is well before my time at Mozilla, but from Bob what I learned is this idea is like you have to compete asymmetrically in a market that exists. You cannot compete on the same field. And so like the war metaphor is, you have to be more like the Americans, not the British marching in lines. You have to be guerrillas. You have to. Guerrillas. G U E R Not G O R I but both are good. So anyway, so that was Bob and they started this open source project. And the open source project of Mozilla, they really wandered around the wilderness for a long, long time. They had this thing called the Mozilla suite, which was a browser and an HTML editor and email client. Because obviously you want all those things. Everybody who is browsing the web obviously needs an HTML editor. That was the thinking. I swear to God, this is what the world was like. You think I'm joking? And your email client was edited in HTML, whatever. So you play forward. In 2003 and 2004, there was a split in the Mozilla project. And some people, Blake Ross and some others, what their insight was is that maybe what people wanted was not an HTML editor. Maybe they just wanted a fast browser. And that's when Firefox was born. And that was a very, very contentious debate. But by 2004, by the end of 2004, November 2004, they came out with Firefox 1.0. And it was kind of a lightning bolt. There had been no new browsers. Really, the Opera guys will. This is the part where the Opera guys will start to complain. I'll talk about that in a second. But really no new important browsers for a number of years. And this is what it was. It was fast pop up blocking, tab browsing and integrated search. And so the feature that most people came for was pop up blocking. And if you guys, anybody who's browsing the web in 2004 you'd browse for a few hours and you'd have 200, literally 200 little windows pop up with ads. Back before content blockers, the sustainable feature is that people really love tab browsing. And Mozilla was really the browser that popularized tab browsing. This is the part where the Opera guys really screamed because they probably came up with it first. It's hard to tell. But the trigger was that IE was insecure. So because as a consequence of IE not investing in their team, Internet Explorer not investing in their team, Microsoft, they had security holes. And so US Cert Security, part of the arm of the government, said you should not just use ie, you should have IE plus something. And so there was important product design happening, but there was a hot trigger that happened that enabled it to succeed. And so when they launched. So the key here though is the product is important, but not enough. So competing asymmetrics is a thing. So they launched in November of 2004 and naturally they launched an ad. This is the craziest thing and it's this story. So Mozilla said, well, we're going to launch. We don't have any money, but we have a lot of community, we have a lot of people who work on this with us. It's an open source project, we have localizers in every country, so we're just going to do a fundraise. And this is one of the funny things about history, is that anytime you have a weird idea that works, within a few months, it becomes not a weird idea at all. It becomes the status quo. And so this is a Kickstarter campaign, essentially, well before Kickstarter. And so that doesn't seem like a shocking development. This is a shocking development. So what Mozilla did is they ran a thing for 30 days and said, if you send us $10, we'll put your name in the New York Times. And so if you look at that, so that's what happened in the New York Times. So what they said is, we know people love Firefox. And it turns out they raised twice as much money as they needed. And so they had a second page which was actually an ad you could actually read. But they shipped this in November and it got so much attention. And a couple things happened. Number one, everybody whose name was in it went and bought a New York Times and showed it to their mom and their dad and said, look, look, look, my name's the New York Times. And then the second thing that happened is that we got a bunch of process stories written and A process story is not about Firefox itself, but it's like, look what this crazy company is doing to get attention. So there were a lot of stories about us using this ad. And so there was just a big boom. And it resulted in 10 million downloads in the first month. So the key for us was that. And this was before I got there. But the key was that Mozilla was the community. It was the community. That's the asymmetric advantage. And so the way to take advantage of that is let people see themselves in Mozilla and help them help give them tools so they could help, so they could proselytize, so they could evangelize. And what happened as a result is that people felt ownership because they say, my $10, I sent it in, my name is in the paper now. I want to go put Mozilla. I want to put Firefox on my library computers and my school computers. And that's literally how it spread and became a little bit of a movement. And a lot of the language the early Mozilla used and a lot of the techniques they used were derived from a lot of the things that plural political campaigns to grassroots campaigns. And again, this is off. The core insight was the community was everything from Mozilla doing similar stuff from.

Grassroots campaigns by design.

Yeah. So Chris's question was doing stuff similar as political campaigns and grassroots campaigns by design, or was it accidental? They looked at the Howard Dean campaign, which again, nobody's going to exactly remember, but the Howard Dean campaign was special because it was one of the first campaigns that raised retail. Raised money. Retail, raised money in ten fifty hundred dollar increments. And so they really understood how to. They made a real connection until Howard Dean did this thing in a forum like this where he made a funny noise and his campaign went like this after that, after this, after that. But yeah, it was very intentional. And then later, the Obama for America campaign in 2008 took a lot of cues from both the growth of Facebook and the growth of Mozilla. And that informed a lot of how I think about technology spread now, which I think seems obvious, which is it looks like political and social spread as much as anything else. Sure.

How and why did the initial community inform.

Yeah, well, so hang on a second. So the question was how and why did the initial community form to get to that point? I'll get to that in just a second. So key, let people see inside. And this was successful, the launch work. 10 million downloads in the first 30 days, which 10 million was a big Number. Even then, growth is super strong. The financials are super strong because of another thing that happened, which is the product. What the Mozilla folks realized very early is that search was becoming a first class way to access the web. It used to be just the URL bar where you typed a long URL. And what they realized is that more and more people were typing just words into search. And this is early, this is a time before it was obvious that Google was going to win. It was Google and Yahoo were the two, and I'll talk about that in just a second. And they built Google and Yahoo and search into the search box. So Mozilla was the first browser, I think, to have a search box in the top right. And we worked the deal with Google to be able to pay for ads and clicks basically. And so as a result, the financials were strong. Very, very clear product, market fit, and only 15 people in the organization. There was many, many more people outside the organization because it had been a long period of buildup where you had probably hundreds of people contributing source code outside the organization. You had dozens of localizers localizing into French and Italian and German and Polish. And then really it was just. And then lots and lots of people took ownership by a campaign called Spread Firefox, which I'll show you, which was if you want to make this thing work, you all should help us spread it. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. The question was, how do you convince Security is kind of amorphous, esoteric benefit, and how do you convince users that they should care? The press did it for us. So Walt Mossberg did a review, said Firefox 1.0 is incredible and it happens to not be insecure like ie. And you get a lot of that stuff. And so it's very, very hard to say for you to say, well, we're super secure, Much, much easier for other people to talk about it. And one of the things about Mozilla, you know, one of the commonalities in the first sessions was people said, don't buy into the pr, pr, don't spend money on pr. Mozilla was not like that. So like we felt community and messaging and pr, partly due to the guy who's CEO now, a guy named Chris Bearded, which is just strong communication, strong messaging and direct to the audience was always going to be the way to do it. And so we had a lot of people telling it for us. And so you said, well, if you want Spread Firefox to win, tell your school principal, tell the IT guy at school that Firefox is more secure. Tell the library administrator it's more secure. And that really caught in a way that security doesn't usually. That's right. So this is when I got there. And I'll just tell a brief little story. So I'll illustrate what product market fit feels like. So I was actually looking for a different job. So in 2005, I left my startup and I wanted to do VC. And it turns out like being a VC is a fairly quirky job seeking process. Super, super quirky. And I went to Mozilla to help because I knew Mitchell from another board that I was on. And I went in to see them maybe three months, four months after Firefox had launched, because I was on another board with her and she always seemed very tired. I'm like, how's it going? She's like, well, there's a lot going on. I'm really tired. I gotta go. Bye. And so I just went to visit Mozilla and I went in, I had this amazing session where she said, well, here's all the stuff that's happening. Here's all the help we need. How can you help us? I'm like, okay, let me think about it. And so I went home because I was unemployed at the time. And so I did a PowerPoint. This seems ridiculous in retrospect. So I did a little PowerPoint. Here's what I think you should do. I think you should think about this and this, and here's a framework for how you think about it. And I sent it back to Mitchell, who's the founder of Mozilla, and then Chris Beard, who's now the CEO. And I heard nothing back from them. And one of the things, when you're unemployed, time goes super slowly. You're like, oh, I wonder if they got my mail. Maybe they don't like me. What's wrong with it? Is something wrong with me? Did they not like what I was doing? And I'm like, I just sent a PowerPoint deck to like an open source project. That was probably wrong. So anyway, so I went back and I had another session with them and it was an amazing session. We talked about all the things they could do and all the ways that they could go from there. I'm like, this. Ha ha. This time I went home. This time not a PowerPoint. So I wrote a long email about all the things they should do and I sent and two weeks, nothing. And I'm like, well, what the hell? Do they just not care? And are they schizophrenic? Do they like me in person and not like me? Are they conflict avoidant, don't want to tell me they don't like me. It was very weird. It was very weird. I thought and being unemployed, you're very self conscious and you're not quite sure what's going on. And so I went back and I just started showing up and I just said, well, if they're not going to answer my mail, there's something important happening here. So I'm just going to start showing up and helping. And this is definitely not what I want. I don't want to work for a non profit open source granola thingy, but I can help a little bit. So I started showing up and then Reid and I were talking about it a lot and to Reid's credit he's like, you know what's happening? This is working, this is a good thing to join. And he and I debated it for a little while and then I made probably the best career decision which is said, well, I threw up in my hand and I thought I would join but I was still on the fence. And I remember this again, There was like 10 or 12 people and it shows how busy it was and how much the wheels were coming off the place. So Mitchell and Brendan, the co founder, the investor of JavaScript and then Chris, the head of marketing and product, but now the CEO. In 2015 they were going to see Jerry Yang at Yahoo. And so they said, why don't you come along John, the guy who's kind of a consultant, just hanging around and so a little weird, right? So it's going to be an interesting meeting, just come with us. And so we go. And so we go for an hour long meeting and 45 minutes in, Jerry hadn't shown up yet. And Jerry was like, I don't know, CTO or chief strategy officer or something like that of Yahoo. He's a pretty important guy. And 45 minutes he didn't show up. He had his people there, we were making small talk, but then he comes in at 45 minutes and he started yelling at us almost immediately and I kind of tuned out. It was a funny thing. So Jerry's a lovely guy and he's a good friend and we invest together and he built this nice building over here and he's a really nice guy, but he was really angry, really angry at us. And what he was angry about is that Google was built in as a default to Firefox search and Yahoo was the second choice. But what we knew about default is like people don't change them. And so Yahoo and Google were locked in a battle for who was going to win Search. Google was getting traction, but Firefox accelerated Google's traction, and that was making a real difference. But I remember while Jerry was yelling at us, just thinking, he's like, man, if we can get a guy like Jerry very successful. So angry, like, we're probably doing something interesting. And so it was like, while he was yelling at us, I said, well, I probably should stop. Like, stop screwing around is just join. And that's when I decided to join. And that's a totally true story. And so at the same time, I joined. Re. Joined the board. And then we recruited a guy named Joey Ito who runs the Media Lab at MIT now, to join the board as well. And we were off to the races. So small organization, we started growing. So 2005, Mozilla had a few percent. It was a nonprofit. Nobody understood what to make of that. It was open source for consumers, which, again, was not common in the slightest in 2005. And suddenly it was a big deal, and people started noticing it, but people really didn't understand it much. But we were spreading because we had a global community that we empowered and we loved and we invested in, invested in and invested in. So here's what it looks like. So spread Firefox. This is actually from about 2005. You can see, hey, ha ha. We ran, we won. Like, we made no days left. $250,000, 10,000 names. You want to be in the Boston Globe? We're doing a story about Firefox supporters. And we did this get Firefox buttons, which showed up everywhere on the web pretty fast. This looks so janky by 2015 standards. But I'll tell you, the thing about communities is you want to look important enough that people should give a damn about whether you win or not, but you want to look fragile enough that people feel like if they don't help, you might not succeed. And so the analogy that I'll use is in 2008, when the election was happening, I remember. So I was CEO of Mozilla, I guess. Yeah, I was CEO of Mozilla. And I went and did phone bank calls for Obama, called a bunch of people in Western Pennsylvania that were interesting, no offense. They were interesting to talk to. But I went, because I'm like, man, I really want that guy to be our president, and he might not win if I don't go make calls today. And that's a bizarre thing to think, right? But that's the essence of community. And that's the essence of getting involved. Because if I felt like it was stronger and didn't need me, well, I had plenty of other stuff to do. Yes, I'll talk about the community of Mozilla in a little bit. But it's everywhere. So there were open source contributors, there were localizers into different languages, there were people who were installers and doing customer support for it was everywhere. It really felt much like a political movement. So everything you can think of was really community. And this was still an organization that probably had 15 people on the payroll. Okay, so here are some critical decisions that we made. And this is the crux of it. So we decided I was employing over 15 or so, and Mitchell and I decided that hiring and getting great talent was key. So what that means is we had to figure out how to pay people, which was we had a pretty good relationship with Google, so that was working and we decided to pay people pretty well. But we never wanted to win on salary. And so that's explicit because we were happy to lose people who wanted more salary. So if we had a conversation where people said, man. So in 2005, it was like us and Facebook was growing and Google was growing. And if people came in and said, gosh, I'd really like to work for you, but Google's offering me $10,000 more a year, the answer was always go to Google. And we didn't care. It was fun. So this is a different environment. So 2015, I think the guidance you'll get mostly is you shouldn't lose Google $10,000. And so it's not apples to apples advice for us. What it was is our North Star about whether people wanted to be there or not. And so if you wanted to be there for comp, then we didn't want them. If you wanted to be there because of the mission around opening the web then, and they were willing to be comped well, but not perfectly. We were happy to have them. So that was part of it. The second thing. Oh, and as a result, like, we brought on some people who are unbelievable. The first person I went out and got is a guy named Mike Schreffer, who's the CTO at Facebook now. Dan Portillo, who runs talent for us at Mozilla, was our first recruiter. Brad Record, who runs talent at Sequoia, was our second recruiter. This is just such a list. Once you decide to go get talent and you decide to go get people who are wired a little funny and want mission over just comp. Life got better. Sure.

Would you say that you wouldn't advise people to do that?

Yeah. So the question is whether I would advise people to do that today. I think that, I think you should figure out what you care about and what your North Star is on people and hiring and figure out what that test is and be true to it. So you know, there's startups that I'm involved with that we pay way higher than I would really be comfortable with. On the other hand, like I would be less comfortable if we lost the people they were trying to hire. There's a search company that I'm involved with, for example, where we just pay over the top because that's how you get great search people. And so I think it's horses for courses. I'll say a lot, which is. Or different strokes for different folks, whatever you want to say. But like I think every startup's a little bit different. And the question is like, which are your North Stars? And it's good to write them down. It's good to understand everybody understood this. So I never got a hiring manager or recruiter saying, should we go over the top on Facebook software? Should we go over the top on Google? Never. Other questions. Okay, the second thing is that we decided we were not going to all be in local and this was self defense. It was also sort of true to our DNA. In an open source project, in the best ones, you have people all around the world who are contributing. And we decided that rather than try to compete with other people in Silicon Valley for a time with Google and Yahoo and Yahoo and Zynga and Microsoft and everybody else, we would just, we would find the best people who were already contributing, we'd hire them and we'd try to hire their friends. As a result, we had an office. There was somebody in New Zealand, for example, in Auckland, who was one of our best contributors. And he's like, well, I think I'm contributing now a lot, but I think I'm gonna have to ratchet it down so I gotta get this job. And we're like, well Rob, why don't you just come work for us? He's like, well, I don't really want to work on my own, Rob, why don't we just start like, do you have any friends? And he's like, I've got a ton of friends and they're all PhDs in computer science. I'm like, Rob, like, why don't we start an office? And so as a result, we have this office in New Zealand in Auckland and we have an office in Berlin, office in Paris, an office in London, and one in Tokyo. And our point of view was we were going to our hiring strategies. We were going to find the best people who were motivated not by money, but by the community and by the mission. We were going to figure out where they were in the world and how they wanted to live their lives, and we were just going to live that way. And so as a result, we got this big distributed company. It wasn't a philosophy that I love distributed companies because I don't. I mean, there are other people who really do. Like Matt Mullenwig from Automatic really loves distributed companies. I don't love them. I think they're a humongous pain in the ass. For us, it was how to take our challenge and turn it into an advantage. We ended up with a lot of people in a lot of places. I learned a lot about employment law, which is super boring. And then always treat communities, insiders. So we, lots of times we would let people speak to the press on behalf of us who didn't work for Mozilla. They could have business cards, a lot of this stuff. And it's because we were trying to get as many people owning the product, owning success as possible. Because again, we needed to do asymmetrically with Microsoft. So the question was, how do we compete? How do we get assets in a way that they can't do? And the funny thing is, they just didn't even recognize it. For us, when Microsoft is this big software company and they see this weird place, political movement, full of, like, people in Poland and Germany and like, what they were like, what the hell is that? And it just didn't look at all what they thought a challenge would look like, which meant that they didn't really pay attention until too late. But mostly, like the community was what built Mozilla in the first place. It's why Mitchell and Brendan committed to being a nonprofit. They wanted to say to the community, we'll never take advantage of you. We'll always put a poor money back in. Sure. Yeah. Wow. What makes you think it didn't. What makes you think it didn't get chaotic? So I've got a different presentation. This question is like, the community was so diverse. How did you keep it from getting chaotic? And I'll tell you, it was motherfucking chaotic. There's no way to put this, like, gently to most humans that have ever worked in companies walking into Mozilla, they're like, what the hell is happening? Because so many people are going in so many different directions. And we could talk about that for hours and hours and hours. But again, what you do is you figure out what's the DNA of the place and what is our superpower, and you figure out how to feed that. And language turned out was okay. Everybody had to speak English. Everybody was living on Bugzilla, which is Mozilla's not amazing bug tracking system, but it was one of the first of its kind. And then we just. We just. We had a lot of beers together and we flew people in the same place a lot. Like, one of the things over time is that I had a travel policy which was anytime anybody wanted to get the group together, they could in whatever city they wanted to do it, and it could do it in Toronto or Australia or Sydney or Tokyo or wherever. And my promise is that I would yell if people were spending too much money. And I just never. They never spent too much money. Everybody's very responsible, but I said, look, if you need to spend time with your group, do it. Don't ask anybody, just do it. And so we just. We just did a lot like that. Yeah, this is a theme. Ignore everything else. Like, every six months, people said to me, man, Boeing would totally adopt Firefox if we just built these horrible features into it. And then six months later, it would be. Fidelity would do the same, and it'd be amazing. And our center of gravity was, we need to build software that humans give a damn about, and if we do that, the rest of it will take care of itself and the enterprise will adopt in spite of us not having these things. And that turned out to be true. That's also. Let me see what was happening with Dropbox early. And it's why I got involved with Dropbox. We were seeing the same kind of behavior. And then our mission. Our mission was not pure market share. It was, how do you make the web more participatory? Okay, questions?

Good.

All right, so. And then the period we're talking about, I got there in the middle of 2005, when about 15 people. And we'll go through about the middle of 2008, which is about 150 people. And then, you know, we got bigger over time. Then we got a little fatter. So move ahead another year. From 2005 to 2006, market share is a little more than 10%. We had about 75 million MAUs and 25 million DAUs in a product that is not viral in any way. There was no app store. There was no, like, Send a friend SMSing There was none of that. And so this was all organic, all political. The organization had doubled to amazing. 30 people. And I remember Mitchell saying, well, when I got in, Mitchell said, well, we're glad to have John. I'm not sure how many people we really need here. And then we got to 30. He's like, well, maybe we'll get to 40 people. But I can never imagine us getting to 100 people people. And it's one of those things where you just see growth and you see it happening and you're trying to figure it out. And things just work very, very, very well on the Internet when they work and you start to find things. But here's the key. So with product market fit, your issues change. Everybody notices you in a different way. So this is what it looks like now. So this is better. It's not great in this. I told you opera would. Would grasp. So Safari was only on The Mac and IE was 83%, which still seemed okay to Microsoft. They hadn't really put the group back together, that kind of thing. So with product market fit, relationships change. So this is some actual board deck. Excerpts from 2006. And the board at that time was myself. I don't know. I wasn't the CEO yet. Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich, who invented JavaScript, Reid Hoffman and Ellen Semenoff, who runs a company called Shmoop now. And I remember we were talking like, should we get an EA for Mitchell? Like, to help her scale. Should we get an EA for John? What about Strip? And so project managers? We really needed a VP of operations, maybe somebody, a lawyer who knew some stuff. And like, this is the actual stuff. This is actually how we started the board meeting. It's like, we probably need some more people. What do you think? And then. And this is what it feels like to be in uncharted territory. We were like, well, what's a good goal? So we're at 12, 13% now. Is 20% good? Like, I don't know. And is 20% achievable? I don't know. Here's what we said six months ago. Let's recheck it. And one of the things that Alan was talking about is being iterative. Like, that's part of what setting. The reason why you set goals is to learn to get better at setting goals and learn to get better at leading you. And so a lot of times when you set goals, your first set of goals will be terrible. It's a little bit like when you go to the gym the first time you're trying to exercise and your muscles don't all fire together. And so you're trying to teach yourself in your organization how to make commitments and live up to them over time. And so goal. You get better at setting goals over time, too. And one of my rules is you never, ever, like, say, like, in your goal, period, whatever your goal was, you are black and white about whether you hit it or not. If you hit 98% of your goal, you missed it. Now you can. Then you could interpret it over time, but you had to be very, very clear about what the goal was when you started, what modifications you made to the goal, and whether you hit it or not. Live there? Sure.

What's the messaging like for the team when they know that you're setting goals without knowing whether the goal is right? Did you miss it?

Yeah. So the question is, how do you explain, how do you motivate the team? How do you help them understand goals? How do you explain to them what's happening? And you know my deal. And how do you help them? How do you figure out how to feel like when they miss a goal? We, over time, you get better at this. For me, it was repetition and talking and just being very, very open. So we had weeklies every week. On Monday, we all had lunch together, and I got up and talked. Every Monday for years, every quarter, we would talk about goals and what we hit and what we didn't hit. It turned out we ended up. It's funny, other companies are like this, too. We landed at about 7. If we hit 71% of our go, give or take, that was about right. That was a pretty good quarter. If we had 66% of our goals, it was a kind of a shitty quarter. And so it's a funny, funny zone. But I've talked to other people who said that too. Like, you want enough goals that are stretched that you're trying for more. And so I actually didn't like. I remember our RIT group, they hit 100% of the goals every time. I'm like, you guys have to stop doing this because it means you're not shooting for enough. So you're not stretching enough. So for us, we just talked it out a lot. We talked a lot about. I was very open with board decks. I was very open about what we talked with Reed and Ellen about. And I said, here's what we're doing. And then the other thing that became very clear over time is that market share is a lagging indicator of success. So on the Internet, market share can keep going up Even when your fundamentals are not great. And so the metaphor I use is we're trying to teach ourselves how to look around corners a little bit and be predictive of issues coming down the pipe. Okay, Right. So we were trying to figure that out. And I was honest about goals. I'm like, look, nobody's ever done this before. There's never been an open source, 20 person organization that's attacked Microsoft. Seems like it's going, okay, here's where we could probably do a little better.

So when you miss the goal and you talk to Steve about it, is it, hey guys, we missed this goal. What do we need to do better in order to hit next time?

No. So when you get to this stage, you're starting to manage through pretty good managers. And So I was COO, but I had two or three or four excellent, excellent VPs. So Mike Schreffer, you're never going to find a better VP of engineering. Chris Beer, you're never going to find a better VP of marketing. And Justin Fitzhugh, who's running IT and ops. As a management team, you want to be good. As sub teams, you want to be good and you want to be open and transparent. So you start to do a lot of things in the organization to encourage people to be self aware and aspirational and honest. And, you know, it helped like we were winning. Like we were really trying to do something that nobody had ever done before. Okay, sure.

Can you give a little bit of context? I don't want to have you spend too much time on this. But why could you guys monetize an open source project?

Why could we monetize an open source project?

Yeah, like why wasn't there an alternative like Chromium or whatever, the Firefox that didn't.

There was. There's a project called KHTML, which became WebKit that Apple was investing in. So we'll talk about that in a second. But like just the fact that there's another open source browser doesn't really have an impact on whether we were able to make money or not. We got users, we had tens of millions of users who used the product. They searched in the product, they clicked on ads. And so if that happens, the economic engine all runs irrespective of what anybody else does. Okay. It's interesting to me that an organization with 10 employees, roughly, well, we're probably like 30 or 40 now. Yeah.

Stepping back, 10 employees, two co founders would bring in a COO.

They didn't, so they brought me in. So Andrew said it's weird that they brought a COO in and they didn't. They just brought me because I was hanging around. As I mentioned, I was hanging around that I could help. And we just got along. And so I came in with a title that was goofy. I had just come off being a founder of my own company and my title was Vice President of Business Operations and. No, vice President of Business Development and Operations, which who knows what that means. It doesn't mean anything. So nobody really knew what to make of that. I just started showing up. I think a lot of startups is just showing up and doing the work that needs to get done, whether it's moving desks, ordering food or making business deals or whatever it is. So I just started showing up and we started building a company.

What does that mean? You just like literally just show up, sit down, and I can.

So did I literally just show up and sit down at a desk? Yeah, I mean, kind of. I said, hey, Mitchell, is it okay if I come by? It was okay, sure.

One step deeper. And I talk a lot about mission.

Mission and hiring. Why I went there because the web sucked. The web sucked in 2004 and they were going to fix it. All my developer friends started using Firefox. That's about when something called the predecessor for this, when HTML mail came out. So right before Gmail, there was one that got popular. Odd post came out by Ethan Diamond, Stanford guy, I think. And it's just that you could see it, you'd see that the web was dead and dying. And this doesn't feel ridiculous. This feels ridiculous to everybody, but it was just dead. The IE was really terrible. And my idea is I couldn't stop thinking about it, and so I couldn't stop thinking about the web and the impact. And my skills kind of matched with what the holes in the organization at the time. And so I went, but this is more interesting stuff, so let's move forward. So 13% market share, give or take, varies a bunch, but worldwide, about 25 million users. We weren't sure whether growth is slowed or not. And part of the thing is we didn't have any data systems that were working. And so one of the first things we did is we hired a guy named Ken Kovash, who worked for the Freakonomics guy, and we started building data systems so we could tell what the hell was going on. It turns out it hadn't slowed, but we didn't know that, so we put it in the board deck. We're just trying to figure it out. And Then it was clear that Firefox 1.0, that had been about 18 months before, was diminishing. IE7 and Safari on Windows was coming. Ooh. Which we thought was a big deal. Apple releasing a browser on Windows seemed like a big deal. And then maybe itunes. Like I mentioned about not knowing your competitors, it's really hard to see. So this is actual board stuff, right? And they were trying to figure out, where do we find more users? And so what happens is you get bigger, your numbers get bigger and bigger. You try to figure out where the hell can we find, find more users. And it becomes less interesting. Once you have 100 million users, it's like, oh, I can only get a million users that way. That doesn't seem very interesting. And this becomes an innovator's dilemma problem. But the real thing that I want to talk about is that when you find product market fit people who were previously clearly your friends, you become frenemies, kind of sort of. And so it becomes more complicated to use Facebook terminology. So for us, Google was starting to think about this as we were starting to gain market share. And Google is a huge ally. Sergey and Larry made Firefox possible economically. Eric Schmidt was very supportive. But they were trying to think what they were realizing in 2005 is that the browser disintermediated them between their customer. The browser was in the way, and whoever controlled the last touch point to a user wins. So they were nervous about this. And so they felt like it was critical to their destiny, but critical, but not in their own hands. They didn't like that we were kind of independent and didn't really care what they thought. That was challenging part of the relationship. And they were not sure what was going to happen. When IE7 came out, we knew Webkit and Safari on Windows were coming. We were wondering what was happening. And for them, anything more than IE and one other browser was going to fracture the market. So they started thinking about it more and more. So they started doing scenario planning and we were kind of piecing this together. But for them, If IE has 80% and Firefox has 20%, well, that's okay, but not great. If Apple has 20%, that seems bad for Google. Even in 2005, if it's a split, then the web dies again because there's too much spread. And then they were hoping that we would start to use something called WebKit, which was Apple's version of open source technology. And we were using a thing called Gecko rendering engine. And so it just got complicated. So this is worrisome. And we more or less decided to stay the course and not so. We decided to keep our own technology, not move to the flavor of the day. Because our mission was to have a diverse, heterogeneous web. We decided to invest in more and more and more localizations. And we decided it's like we need to not be pigeonholed as just a product. We need to keep being a movement and keeping community. So those are like the three clear, crisp decisions that came out of that and that manifests itself in this way. At the same time, we were. This is how we were talking. What happens as you get bigger is your organizational complexity goes way up. And so I remember we had this meeting in 2007. I said, look, two years ago, we were 15 people, we had 15 million users, we had some money, we were working on Firefox 1. And then look at us now and like the big org charts and org charts are awful and mostly necessary, but we just started getting really complicated and hard to figure out. This is the preface for a reorg that I did. But then I said, look, here's where we were two years ago and here's where we are now. And just to give people a sense of why it was feeling so dislocating and why people were feeling alienated and why people were feeling a little bit disconnected from, from mission. And so a lot of what the job of the chief is during this growth period is to help people feel connected to the company and connected to mission. And so this is another way we think about as many people as were. We talk about one developer, somebody asked about the community and where the community came from. One developer, maybe 90 people on the whole team. We had hundreds of people contributing the source code and the open source code. This is before GitHub. We had thousand contributors, we had 10,000 people who were downloading the alpha every night. And this was also new. Like, most people weren't shipping software. So literally we would have interns come in, they would write code, it would get checked in and like 10,000 people would be using it the next day, which is a little terrifying when I'm coding. But we had millions and millions and millions of monthly users. So that's how we thought about it. And then, like I said, things that seem big aren't. I wrote this blog for Steve, gave a keynote where I said, this is the state of browsing now. This seems like this is bad, so we're going to make it more like that by launching Safari on Windows. And I'm like, Whoa. This is before everybody watched Keynotes, Steve Notes. But I was watching it. I'm like, did he just say that? And this is one of my favorite things. Anyway, it's just sort of. I used to work at Apple. I love Apple. I buy many of all their things. But they've never been very good at the web, and they certainly were not good at the web or understand the Web. Then they thought Firefox was kind of this dirty, weird, commie thing. I'm not kidding. And so I wrote a thing about them and Firefox and it got me on Facet of Jobs, which is very exciting. Anyway. But it just turned out to matter. All because who wants to frame Windows until we launched Firefox 3. And what we did is we went back to our roots and we said, we're going to do a Guinness record for the Most downloads in 24 hours, hour, period. But the pitch was, be part of the movement. Come in and be part of it. This is you again. We went back to, how do you see yourself in this? How do you get your friends to do it? And so we had people sign up. They said, I pledge to download Firebox. There's shrep right there. And then we had Firefox counters. This is like the first three or four days where we got 20 million downloads, which is a big number then. And then this is the map which actually got us in trouble because there are countries like Iran and Syria on there. Like you can see, Iran is a huge downloader, which turned out to maybe have been illegal. So we talked to the government for a little while about it. Anyway, so. And then this is the key. So we launched in 70 languages for IE7. IE7 launched in five. Microsoft giant corporation launched in five. We launched in 70. Because we had a huge activated volunteer community that wanted to. We launched in Mongolia in day of the. And so this is what happened. The piece of the web was so much bigger in the 2000s than it had been in the 90s, that IE came and dominated it and Firefox was so much bigger. We all thought of Netscape as this founding, this shot from heaven and this amazing start. But Mozilla Firefox had so many more users by the time it got to scale than Netscape ever had. And that's probably mostly because the market, market got bigger. So don't take it the wrong way. We'll see if Mark keeps retweeting my Chris's course notes after this. But then the gray is the rise of Chrome. So it worked. And we Doubled down on community. And in many, many ways, community is what sustained us. And so the last thing I'll say about this is there were some things on the Horizon. So in 2008, we were 150 people. I had just been named the CEO, give or take. These are the things we knew were coming. We knew Chrome was coming. We knew that Google had decided in the interim that they had to take control of their own fate. And to their credit, they did it in a very transparent way with us, in a very collaborative way. So there were no surprises. It's a little scary to be with Google, but it was a good collaborative thing. And then farmville, I swear to God, I told Mark Pincus this the other day in Firefox, we made one mistake on our technology investment, which was we had extension mechanism. If you wrote an extension, it could do anything into the code of Firefox, which meant that a lot of people wrote extensions that were bad and would cause Firefox to eat a lot of memory that would leak memory. And we couldn't test them because we didn't have them. And so in our test, Firefox was performing well and not leaking memory, but in many, many, many user environments, it was performing badly. And so we had this problem with a user problem that we couldn't see, and a lot of it was Flash. And then Flash's interactions with extensions really screwed us up. And FarmVille went from 0 to 70 million users in a year. It was a Zynga game that Mark made, and it really highlighted what a crashy browser Firefox was. And so this cultural movement that went up like this really shocked Firefox and it really caused us issues. But that was still on the horizon, but mostly mobile. And mobile is the real existential issue that Mozilla's struggling with even today. So that's what I say about Mozilla. And then we've got about 15, 10, 15 minutes more with Alan stuff. Any questions about Mozilla before we move over? Why is mobile not working for Mozilla? Now, I don't want to talk too much about it. What I would say is that things happen, Black swans happen because of particular context, particular points in time and Microsoft. Microsoft's neglect and the PC platform being open enabled this thing to happen that Mozilla was just very, very, very well poised to jump into. And then they caught hold of the tiger's tail a little bit, and then they used everything they could to get people like me and SREP and other people in and start building this movement. And so, I don't know. I feel very fortunate that they had been wandering around for years and years to build this foundation that we could do something with.

So, anyway, sure, looking back, it's also.

Pretty easy to connect.

The documents show how everything makes sense. But at the time, what was the most surprising?

Yeah, the question is, looking back, it's easy to connect the dots. Looking at the time, what were the most surprising things? I think you saw them in the slides. Like, we didn't know whether we were winning or not. We didn't know how to make sure that people ran projects, and the wheels always felt like they were coming off the place. And so I don't know what the surprising things were. I think the surprising thing was just that I could step off the plane anywhere in the world, and there would be people who wanted to come talk to me. Like, there were people. The first time I went to Tokyo, this contributor rode the train six hours each way just to have dinner with me. And the dude didn't speak English, right, And he really, really cared. And a lot of Mozilla, a lot of his identity was tied up in Mozilla and Firefox and freedom of expression and changing the world. And there are not a lot of things like that. And so, yeah, I don't know. That was always surprising. I feel very humble even now thinking about that.

How much do you think being a nonprofit contributed to your success as opposed to you probably ending up in the other campus?

I don't know. So the question is, like, how do you feel about nonprofit? So, like, maybe it's because you're successful, because you're a nonprofit. And I have a really hard time with this question because Mitchell and Chris and I are one of the only groups in the world ever to get 450 million users of anything. And people say, oh, sure, but you're a nonprofit. Of course you did that. And so I have a hard time answering this question because it sure didn't help. On balance, it would have been easier to be a company, but we only could have done what we did the way we did it. So I don't know how to answer that question other than there were good days and bad days. Okay, you ready? Yeah. Good.

So what was Mozilla's? I mean, not a total focus on growth, but clearly grew really effectively. So we were talking earlier about scaling. So what is Mozilla's hypothesis? What's their growth hypothesis?

It's awesome.

It'll scale.

So it's a really good browser.

Nothing scales on its own, but nothing.

Scales on its own. So, sorry, the community. So basically there's this bet and if you jump in here and correct me if I'm taking this wrong, but there's a bet, basically the community will actually be a primary carrier if we built.

Great things for communities to spread it. That they would spread it.

Yep.

Because it made their lives better. Because basically it's spread by customer support people. So he said, I'm supporting my mom and my dad, I want them both on Firefox, so I can support that and I can't support IE. But that played out 100 times.

Right. So basically you've got a kind of built in word of mouth thing. So this is what we're trying to achieve, but talking a lot about growth through value here. So we were talking about this a little bit earlier, about how you grow effectively. If in fact your idea is you want to make sure that people feel like they're supporting each other and they bring each other onto the platform in order to provide security, in order to provide the ability to do tech support, in order to support something that they actually care about. Those are reasons for people to come pick up the thing and use it. Obviously you guys didn't do virality. You specifically called it out as something you did not. But obviously during this time we had products which were already growing on the viral thing, where basically the product itself was spreading itself. So just really briefly on this and unfortunately, because we're short on time, I want to make sure we cover some of the specific lessons we can take away from Mozilla. But if you've got that product market fit, we talked about this earlier. If you've got a product market fit, you may not have it with all the users you actually care about. The question is, can you leverage the users where you have the product market fit in order to be able to drive stuff? So one possibility is, if you've got a strong community who cares a lot about it, can they do their spread use spreading for you? This to the point of LinkedIn's initial audiences was exactly the thing that we discovered. We basically discovered there's a set of people who really, really, really, really, really, really, really cared about network working. They love to meet new people, they love to add connections and so forth. And they were primary drivers of our early growth. They were a place where we had product market fit literally from day one. So sometimes you got to figure out a way to leverage that particular group of audiences. If you've got a place where you've got a Bunch of people who would not find it valuable or just find it a nice product. They're not going to grow your product for you. Okay, so the question is, how do you take advantage of people who find it want they want it or they need it? A lot of people wanted Mozilla, they wanted that browser. A lot of people, like recruiters needed LinkedIn. Those people, can they be your drivers and these are your options. Basically, you can improve your product fit for your nice groups. This was LinkedIn's primary resource for growing stuff because we had a lot of people who found LinkedIn nice. And we became probably best in the world at driving viral growth because we had to. Because we wanted to optimize the experience for these folks. We wanted somebody who just found LinkedIn a nice to have. We wanted to make sure we converted that into as much growth as possible. But if you can take full advantage of those want need groups or sorry, or you can basically optimize your nice growth, you can do a lot. You guys also used a bunch of different mechanisms for getting out. You mentioned pr. So PR is actually a fantastic opportunity to grow, to build awareness. Taking out a newspaper ad is about as direct a growth and awareness approach as you can possibly take incentives. Now we have Facebook, LinkedIn and other mechanisms by which you can actually spread something. So there's a little bit of different story in the enterprise and hopefully we'll get an opportunity to talk to folks about this as we go along. The enterprise has a different value. You're actually not trying to grow broadly around a large number of people. What you're trying to do is you're trying to grow among decision makers. So the things you need to do there are quite different. I listed out some of them here, primarily around beta customers and around building awareness, basically through the things that beta customers actually pay attention to. So let me give you an example. At LinkedIn, we have a recruiter product. It actually represents a very large component of LinkedIn's revenue. How do you get to the place where people are actually adopting that at scale? Well, the growth hypothesis here is pretty straightforward. It's basically try it out. If you find real value from it, then basically somebody within the company will try to buy it essentially for their entire group. But you got to get in front of that set of people, the first set of customers who actually see it. You have to be able to get to those people in some way. So the growth hypothesis basically run a beta, then use those beta as light, what we call lighthouse customers, people who basically will go out and speak on your behalf about how valuable the thing actually is and then take advantage of these places where decision makers are currently looking. Marketer, your gardener, all that stuff. And consumer bottoms up. We can talk about it at some point. Resourcing. So what did Mozilla have to do in terms of resourcing their growth? John talked about it quite a bit, about adding SREP and a few other folks. What were the kind of components of actually making Mozilla successful in terms of adding the people you actually need? I'll come back to that in a second.

Very distributed.

So very distributed. So the idea is you can get lots of. Basically you go where the talent actually is. What else? So go ahead.

They were mission oriented.

They were mission oriented. So they attracted the right kind of people, but they also found themselves. Go ahead.

You guys talk about us being vague. So we had a very, very specific set of metrics. One was are we for each marginal hire, do we get more community leverage or less community leverage? So for each hire, is it an internal hire or is it a community leveraged hire? So we get more community members on the outside are fewer. And so we talked about that a lot, which is if we were to hire an admin, we had to understand where we were going to make that up in community. And so as a result, a lot of jobs are about community, even admins.

I think it's a great point. So if you break your hiring and your resource down into these two groups, like hiring people who can directly drive scaling, then picking people who basically be able to extend the community and be able to take on more resources is a key component of diversity in that. But you also had to pull on a few people who were basically about scaling people internally, which is basically about protecting that group of people. I'm not going to go through the rest of these things just in time, because we do.

We'll share the other slides. You want to show what the headlines are.

Oh yeah. So development technology, learning systems and then just basically a pattern of recruiting. OS2 is basically the very first time when you actually have to put recruiting functions in place because you need to be able to build outside your network.

Network.

Yeah. A lot of this stuff comes from. Is related to the book that Reid and Chris are writing, which we'll share out in the Dropbox. So we'll share out a draft of that. Please keep it to yourselves. Don't spread it around. It's very, very early copy. But you'll get a sense of this framework from the book.

All right, this is what's next?

Right, so the next two weeks, we're talking about OS2. So on Thursday, a very special person is coming named Jennifer Palka, who's started to think, I'll code for America. And you'll see a bunch of. It's another nonprofit. It's the only nonprofit of the course other than Mozilla. I'm on her board. Tim O'Reilly's on her board. I'm leaving to have dinner with them right now. And it's about how do you start movements and how do you get projection of outcomes that's bigger than just the people inside. So there are about maybe 60 or 70 people now. So she's going through this phase after that. Miriam Nafisi from Minted, which is much, much bigger than you would think. And then Shashir Marotra, who's working on a new project that is super secret. We'll see what he says about it. And then he formerly ran product at YouTube. I think he will probably talk mostly about people and recruiting and how you build a really robust culture. Oh, I had a slide about Jen. Yeah, that's what Jen looks like. Yeah, she was also deputy CTO for the White House recently, too. But she's. She's a killer. So three minutes left. Any questions or comments?

So it changed. So the question is, like, after we got to the early adopters, how did LinkedIn continue to grow? So the idea is that because viral spread is built into LinkedIn, basically everybody who comes in who wants to find value of it ends up bringing additional folks in. A lot of those people are well outside the early adopting class. So for the longest time, we basically had the very beginning. We had people joining cold and inviting their networks. Then we had everybody inviting each other. And then as people, we actually distributed our value more. And now we have more cold people coming and joining because they're coming for a very specific value. So in the early days, it was, I want to network. Then it was, oh, this is pretty cool. I can use it to recruit. Awesome. I want to do that or I want to get a job. Then the third part was, I'm beginning to find this on Google. I'm beginning to hear about in the press. I'm actually going to get a job through it. So I'm going to sign up cold today.

Do it.

The only part we planned on from the beginning was the viral spread, which came from that early group. The part we didn't plan on was the amazing product market fit with that set of early adopters, which was a Surprise. A good one too, and a necessary one.

I believe you said you focused on the NICE users at one point, then use that leverage. What did you see from the NICE that told you you could do something with them rather than just focus on the whys and people who loved it?

So what do we see from the NICE users? So we had a very specific theory around the NICE users, which is that even if they were joining and inviting today, actually being a LinkedIn user was a low impact sport. Basically, what you would do is you would be on LinkedIn, you would use it very, very, very, very regularly. You would respond to things when people came to you. So basically, there was very little risk in being part of LinkedIn. But then value started coming to you down the line and every time you received value from the system, you woke up and became part of the active network.

Thus the emails. Thus the emails. All right, we should finish up.

Yeah, we should finish up. I'll be around for a few minutes to answer further questions.

All right? All right, thanks for class. See you Thursday.