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John Lilly Takes Over as Mozilla CEO

I first met John Lilly in late 2005 when I stopped by the Mozilla offices in Mountain View for an informal “getting to know you” meeting. His title at the time was Vice President of Business Development. My next interaction with John was in February 2007, by which time he was Mozilla’s Chief Operating Officer. Yesterday, Mitchell Baker announced that she was officially handing him the keys to the corner office and giving him the CEO title. I think I can sense the way the wind is blowing, so let me be the first to say: John Lilly for President in 2008!

In all seriousness, it’s hard for me to write this without lapsing into a cloying hagiography, but I can’t imagine any better news for Mozilla. For starters, they won’t be losing Mitchell’s valued involvement:

I will remain an active and integral part of MoCo. I’ve been involved in shipping Mozilla products since the dawn of time, and have no intention of distancing myself from our products or MoCo. I’ll remain both as the Chairman of the Board and as an employee. My focus will shift towards the kinds of activities described above, but I’ll remain deeply engaged in MoCo activities. I don’t currently plan to create a new title. I have plenty of Mozilla titles already: Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, Chairman of the Mozilla Corporation, Chief Lizard Wrangler of the project. More importantly, I hope to provide leadership in new initiatives because they are worthwhile, separate from any particular title. We will probably create an Office of the Chairman with a small set of people to work on these initiatives. I intend to remain deeply involved with MoCo precisely because I remain focused on our products and what we can accomplish within the industry.

Furthermore, this move illustrates the maturity of Mozilla as an organization. How many big company CEOs would have decided of their own accord that someone else “will be a better CEO for the MoCo going forward than [they] would be”? Personally I’m just as convinced as Mitchell that John is the right person to lead Mozilla through the multitude of challenges and opportunities it is facing. As he explains on his blog:

It goes without saying that I’m excited by the challenge of my new job. I’ve thought an awful lot about the role of MoCo (our shorthand for the Corporation) in supporting the Mozilla mission and manifesto, as the coordination point for our work on the platform and on Firefox. We’ve got a lot to do in the coming years, starting with getting Firefox 3 out the door, and then swiftly followed up by our work in mobile and services. Mozilla2 will be a major step forward on the platform after that, not to mention our new experiments in Labs and the work that we’re doing to move the whole Web forward with Javascript 2, HTML 5 and other standards work.

More than anyone else, John appears to recognize that Mozilla is innovating on multiple fronts, not just in terms of browser technology but in building the first global brand around a hybrid organization that is (in the words of Mozilla evangelist Christopher Blizzard) “part open source, part business, part non-profit”. Success over the longer term could have a major impact on the way we think about business in general.

Congratulations, John, and good luck!