> How about this for a funding model: tie executive compensation to revenue growth.
I'm not sure this would go quite the way you think. The quick numbers I could find are $104 million in revenue for 2009 [1], $828 million in revenue for 2019 [2]. Your market share percentages sound about right, though (and is more relevant to the success of the mission.)
> Being a browser company and seeing declining revenue during a period when damn near every tech company was printing money because everyone hopped online...that's a real special kind of incompetence.
I would agree, if I were to completely ignore the existence of competition and all other forms of external reality. I mean, look at the size of the computer market these days. What were Cray, SGI, DEC, Commodore, etc thinking? They must have all been unbelievably incompetent!
Sure, the results are not good. It is perhaps true that you personally could have done far better. Maybe you should give it a try, in some other market where a little company called Google decides to move in on your territory.
> Mitchell Baker made $2.5M in 2018 and now in 2021 she's making over $3M.
She's CEO of a company with a revenue of $800M USD. What should the CEO's compensation be? Is $3M too high or too low? Personally, I honestly don't know. My perception is that CEOs are generally paid large sums of money until they're fired. Perhaps that's not the way it should be in an ideal world.
> Mozilla laid of nearly 300 employees post pandemic because of declining revenue.
Yeah, that sucks. It really sucks. (I work at Mozilla.) Though for the record, we're not post pandemic.
Still, when your burn rate is too high for your income, you have to do something. In some markets, it might make sense to go for broke: borrow to fund scaling, and pray a lot. In the browser market, that would be incredibly stupid. You can't crush your competitors with a $0 product and a compatibility moat that it is your mission to minimize, especially when your main competitor is many times your size.
> ...office rant...
Thanks to COVID, the offices are indeed getting pruned down. But you seem to place a lot of faith in your ability to armchair quarterback. Those offices provided value (partly as a result of their locations), they incurred costs, and people did the math on them. You can assume rank incompetence, but why?
> You can't crush your competitors with a $0 product and a compatibility moat that it is your mission to minimize, especially when your main competitor is many times your size.
By definition, Firefox is not a $0 product - it is a $500M product, the product name is called primary search engine placement and it has exactly one customer, that also happens to be its main competitor and archrival.
The very fact that user != customer is where most of Firefox problems stem from (IMO). Turning users into customers is a correct (and only) way for Firefox to become independent and achieve a position from which it can really deliver on its mission.
I think "post pandemic" there means "after the pandemic drove everyone to WFH anyway", not "especially after the pandemic is over" (which would be an argument for more local offices, not less).
Ah, your interpretation makes much more sense, and upon rereading I believe that you're right.
I may have been confused because I know some surprising things about how search ad revenue did at different points in the pandemic, so I overthought things. (I don't know if those numbers are public or not, so I won't be more specific.)
I'm not sure this would go quite the way you think. The quick numbers I could find are $104 million in revenue for 2009 [1], $828 million in revenue for 2019 [2]. Your market share percentages sound about right, though (and is more relevant to the success of the mission.)
> Being a browser company and seeing declining revenue during a period when damn near every tech company was printing money because everyone hopped online...that's a real special kind of incompetence.
I would agree, if I were to completely ignore the existence of competition and all other forms of external reality. I mean, look at the size of the computer market these days. What were Cray, SGI, DEC, Commodore, etc thinking? They must have all been unbelievably incompetent!
Sure, the results are not good. It is perhaps true that you personally could have done far better. Maybe you should give it a try, in some other market where a little company called Google decides to move in on your territory.
> Mitchell Baker made $2.5M in 2018 and now in 2021 she's making over $3M.
She's CEO of a company with a revenue of $800M USD. What should the CEO's compensation be? Is $3M too high or too low? Personally, I honestly don't know. My perception is that CEOs are generally paid large sums of money until they're fired. Perhaps that's not the way it should be in an ideal world.
> Mozilla laid of nearly 300 employees post pandemic because of declining revenue.
Yeah, that sucks. It really sucks. (I work at Mozilla.) Though for the record, we're not post pandemic.
Still, when your burn rate is too high for your income, you have to do something. In some markets, it might make sense to go for broke: borrow to fund scaling, and pray a lot. In the browser market, that would be incredibly stupid. You can't crush your competitors with a $0 product and a compatibility moat that it is your mission to minimize, especially when your main competitor is many times your size.
> ...office rant...
Thanks to COVID, the offices are indeed getting pruned down. But you seem to place a lot of faith in your ability to armchair quarterback. Those offices provided value (partly as a result of their locations), they incurred costs, and people did the math on them. You can assume rank incompetence, but why?
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2009/f... [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2019/