Mitchell Baker (Mozilla Corporation) - Community-Based Organizations

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Journey, Startups, Education, Stanford, Culture, Strategy, Stanford University, Entrepreneurship, Business, Life Lessons, Thought Leadership, Creativity, Etl, Challenges, Leadership, Innovation, Founders

4.4 • 739 Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2007

⏱️ 56 minutes

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Summary

Mitchell Baker, "Chief Lizard Wrangler" at Mozilla, discusses the organization's unique, community-based culture and how it has contributed to their success. She explains how freedom, openness, and dedication to improving Internet usability fosters extraordinary contributions from Mozilla's employees and volunteers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series, brought to you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.
0:10.0	You can find podcasts and video clips of these lectures online at edcorner.standford.edu.
0:19.3	It is a sincere pleasure to introduce you to Mitchell Baker, who is the CEO of Mozilla Corporation.
0:25.7	But I really love her informal title, which is Chief Lizard Wrangler.
0:30.4	Before she was at Mozilla, Mitchell Baker was an attorney at Netscape, and prior to that, General Counsel at Sun Microsystems. But to make her story
0:38.8	even more interesting, her background is not in technology. She has a degree in Asian studies
0:43.9	from UC Berkeley, and then went to Bolt Law School. Without feather ado, Mitchell Baker.
0:49.9	To start off, really, on the Mozilla side, what is Mozilla? Well, the quick answer is Mozilla is Firefox, but that's a very limited answer.
0:59.9	What Mozilla really is, it's the driving force or a driving force for the human experience on the Internet.
1:06.2	Like, how does each one of us actually interact with the Internet?
1:10.1	Now, that's pretty abstract, but we do that
1:13.3	through very concrete means. We build software, and we build communities of people who build and
1:20.4	distribute software. So we're best known for Firefox, but Firefox is just a portion of the technology and the software that we build.
1:31.2	It's a narrow piece of that. And it's also our community and our goals that make up Mozilla are much broader and deeper than Firefox.
1:40.5	So, you know, Firefox is a great application, and we're very proud of it. But any application, any piece of software, no matter how great, doesn't achieve the leverage that Firefox has.
1:52.0	We're approaching 100 million users around the world, somewhere between 50 and 100 actual languages,
1:59.0	40 or so of which are tier one languages that rate with English,
2:03.6	which is unprecedented. We've got 15%, maybe worldwide market share, 25% across Europe,
2:11.6	thousands of people literally who are involved in building Firefox and tens to hundreds
2:16.6	and thousands of people who are involved in making it successful.
2:20.3	So that is more than a piece of software.
2:22.3	Firefox represents a community of people who have a vision for the Internet.
	...

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