Today in CS183C: Mozilla, Mostly

It’s been a fun 2 weeks to start CS183C?—?along with Reid, Chris & Allen, we’ve been talking about the very early stages of starting up. And we’ve been lucky to have Sam Altman, Michael Dearing & Ann Miura-Ko as guests. They’ve each been fantastic to listen to, and given talks that only they could really give, but with interesting common themes (mostly: be decisive, go quickly) and a few differences.

Now we’re starting to speed up, and we’re moving from the raw startup phase to what we call Organizational Scale 2: ~10–100 people or so. You’ve often found good product market fit, and things start moving much more quickly; everything starts to feel a little bit out of control.

Today’s class is mostly about Mozilla from 2005–2008?—?when we went from 15 people (right when I arrived) to about 150 people; from ~5% global browser market share to something more like 20%.

I’m not sure I’ve ever gone through this period of Mozilla in detail with folks, and it’s been an interesting experience to go through putting the deck together. It’s emotional, for sure?—?this was maybe the most developmental period of my career, and a group of close friends and coworkers and I navigated mostly uncharted waters.

It’s surprising to me how vivid and alive it all is in my head as I look back. I remember when the pictures were taken; what was happening; the board decks we sweated over; the anomalies in the data dashboards that we puzzled through. It’s all very very present to me, even today, 10 years later.

But it’s essentially prehistory to everyone in class, of course. Pre iPhone mobile (Nokia!). A web with Internet Explorer in an unassailable 90%+ market share position. Questions about whether Google would come to dominate search (really). No AWS. An independent Sun Micrososytems. But you could put a bunch of songs on your iPod Mini’s hard drive, so that was cool, I guess.

So it’s been fun to think back to that time, and how to talk about some of the things that seemed so murky at the time, and how we found our way.

I’m looking forward to it. It’ll be a very personal class, and we’ll see if going through some of the detail can help today’s students and entrepreneurs.

Prehistory for sure, but the kind that echoes even today.