I agree with everything you said. All I can say in response is that being a great community leader and open web advocate doesn't always square with someone who has to make a profit for hundreds or thousands of employees.
I have no inside information, but here's my guess at what happened. John Lilly was a great CEO. When he left, there was a gigantic void. They hired Gary Kovacs, who started the "squirrel!"-ing. He wasn't well-liked, and used Mozilla as a stepping stone. So going forward they only hired from the Mozilla community, which is a small pool – both of people who could do it and people who wanted to do it. I'm not sure if Mitchell wanted it or not, but I don't think there was a lot of competition.
Being the CEO of Mozilla is not a good job, and I imagine it's really hard to fill. There's a ton of pressure, relatively low salary, no equity, no exit.
But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. If nothing else, you'd get stock, which would correlate with your performance.
This line is trotted out all the time... but her salary also was going up as revenues and earnings kept going up. From 2005 to 2022 revenues grew more than 10 fold, from 52M$ to 593M$.
In recent years, the proportion coming from Google has also been coming down (even if slowly, from 90+% to just above 80%), and considerable cash reserves have been built up.
Her compensation is ahead of the median for companies in the 0.1-1 billion revenue range, but in line with the median CEO compensation for a company with 1-5 billion in revenues:
So if you accept that this is an unusually complex CEO role, then it does not seems disproportionate (when judged relative to the absurd disproportionate growth of CEO compensation overall).
Her salary began increasing in the late 2010s, when the annual revenue was already around 500 million. Her salary did not grow in step with revenue, her salary grew after revenue stopped increasing & market share had long been declining. I'm not sure if you're being disingenuous by citing growth since 2005.
> In recent years, the proportion coming from Google has also been coming down (even if slowly, from 90+% to just above 80%), and considerable cash reserves have been built up.
Instead of building cash reserves and laying off engineers, Mozilla could have invested that money in Firefox. Could it have successfully turned around? Maybe not, but we'll never know.
It's basically a question of whether you believe Mozilla's mission is best served by building Firefox or by continuing to exist once Firefox no longer exists, and whether its appropriate then for the foundation chair & CEO to be pulling a 7 figure compensation out of a declining non profit. It's obvious the leadership believes the Mozilla Foundation needs to outlive Firefox, but from my perspective the Mozilla Foundation's influence and significance will be nil without browser marketshare.
2005 is when the Wikipedia table starts. The premise of your "they should have invested in Firefox" is just flawed. They are spending by far the most money on Firefox, always have. And Firefox has always been a perfectly fine browser. They were behind Chrome on some metrics for some years, but have long since caught up. Quantum launched towards the end of 2017, more than 6 years ago.
The idea that the lack of quality of Firefox is the dominant reason behind the declining marketshare just is not plausible to me, and I have seen no evidence posted for it. It's wishful thinking. Firefox and Internet Explorer both started declining when Chrome started eating the world. The speed of the decline does not in any way seem to relate to the gap in tech between the browsers.
They laid off hundreds of staff while they were massively in the black. If your thesis is that Firefox was doomed whatever Mozilla did, and so it's fine to lay off staff and build a warchest to support a post-browser advocacy foundation which pays its leadership 7 figure salaries, that's certainly a position - indeed, it seems to be the position of Mozilla leadership. But to me it is at odds with the thesis of change in which Mozilla keeps the web open by having enough market share to matter in the standards decision making. What is the point of Mozilla without Firefox except to pay the leadership massive salaries?
That’s irrelevant. People were starting to see alarm bells ringing when her salary had quadrupled to $2.5m (this is in 2018 or 2019 I think?) while market share was dropping, it should have stayed basically around there until she turned things around with an increase as an incentive.
Instead it doubled and then increased again (wasn’t it more like $7m by the end?)
And someone said yes to that. Think about that for a second.
The product's global importance is now a tiny fraction of what it was 15 years ago, and the person during whose tenure this happened was recently making 10x as much as back then. TEN TIMES.
And whoever approved that obscene compensation thought this was a good idea.
Mozilla is also making 10x as much revenue as 15 years ago, has massively increased cash reserves, and is finally starting to diversify its income streams.
And it's absurd to put the fault for the declining market share purely at the feet of Mozillas leadership. Not to say they were blameless, but when Google threw its weight behind Chrome, including massive ad campaigns on billboards, pushing it on its web properties, and regularly breaking Firefox on their own websites for no technical reasons, you can't reasonably expect Firefox to just magically maintain their market share. That said, at the upper end you could look at Germany, where Firefox is still between 10-20% (depending on the estimate you look at), as what could have been achievable more broadly.
It's basically based on what other similarly-sized tech start-ups pay. Which is ridiculous to me as Mozilla is basically a Google-funded open source project.
Also, who was on the nominating committee when Laura Chambers was nominated to the Mozilla Corporation in the first place? Baker. With one other member of the compensation committee, and another person.
This seems also to be a conflict of interest to me.
It’s almost parasitic, suck the host of it’s resources and dump it when it’s near death for the next host...
I used to be a big Firefox fan, but the last 10 years made me abandon it, I don’t even check if my sites work on it anymore because the market share it has is so tiny. My time is better spent making sure it works with Safari...
If Firefox is destined for a market share of 2%, may as well get there quickly. A few years of decline vs a few months makes little difference in the long term.
To be honest, market share shouldn't ever have been Baker's goal and losing it isn't necessarily a black mark against her. Firefox should have a vision of what it wants a browser and the internet to look like and be working to make software that supports that. Firefox seems to just be following along as Chrome with some minor tweaks [0] and that is the real problem. Google's vision of the internet is not what Firefox should be working to implement. There are deep strategic issues here that go far beyond market share. I'm personally happy to use niche software, I don't care what other people are using (Linux reached my desktop a long time ago). But it is hard to see what even Mozilla thinks the point of Firefox is.
One of the things that makes Brave interesting to me is that it sees a web where middle men get cut out through the use of cryptocurrency. Is that going to work? Probably not. But it is a different take on what the internet could be. We need competitors like that. Even for privacy; it is hard to tell who Mozilla thinks the internet should look like. I'd hazard little change from now except without 3rd party cookies. That isn't a very impressive vision.
Mozilla positioned Firefox in part as a reference for how web standards should behave (*), particularly for ones where Chrome/IE/Safari diverged with competing non-standard implementations.
But for that to work in the real world, not just at W3C debates, you need major websites to care if they function correctly on your browser. And for them to care, enough people have to be using your browser that these companies see a business case for spending money to add your browser to project plans and QA test matrixes as a compatibility target.
That decision is heavily informed by market share, whether global or as a percentage of the site’s own access records. In particular, double digits is a rough threshold for that, and that was pretty much Mozilla’s target. 50% would be wonderful but 10%+ let them assert standards in the ecosystem via the implicit threat of users leaving a site if Firefox didn’t work.
As a test professional at the time, one of the most discouraging things I saw after leaving Mozilla was Firefox dropping off all the test plans I knew about when they hit single digits. I’d poke at that decision where I had influence, and would basically get back a response that “Firefox is dead, just look at the numbers.”
(*) I’m pointedly ignoring some of the more aggressive introductions of things like device-interface APIs crucial to making a browser engine act like a phone OS, etc. Ultimately, someone has to build a working implementation before it’ll become a standard, anyway. There’s a race aspect for new ground and Mozilla was part of that.
But generally speaking, where there was an actual recognized standard, Firefox used it and not some homegrown alternative. So websites also had to develop to that standard to function correctly for a significant percentage of users.
> If Firefox is destined for a market share of 2%, may as well get there quickly. A few years of decline vs a few months makes little difference in the long term.
How does that play into your decision to use Firefox or any other browser? I'm a Firefox user and I care nothing about market share. I get annoyed if I stumble upon a page managed by incompetent devteams and thus only runs on Chrome, but that's a quick in-and-out.
Why do you care about share? Why do you feel it's relevant, specially if people are pushed to use Chrome or Edge through unethical means?
> I get annoyed if I stumble upon a page managed by incompetent devteams and thus only runs on Chrome, but that's a quick in-and-out.
I read this kind of comment all the time, and it's something I almost never experience.
The only feature that I want in Firefox that I need to use Chromium for is Web Bluetooth, and that's because I use a Bangle.js smartwatch, which is even more niche than using Firefox is.
It's very hard for me to understand why so many people think they routinely encounter websites that don't work in Firefox.
> I read this kind of comment all the time, and it's something I almost never experience.
I agree, fortunately that's somewhat rare. It still stings if you come across a broken site that you need to use frequently. I'm concerned that Google's "extend" phase is just ramping up, with incompetent devteams confusing "Chrome has a large market share" with "it's ok to publish a broken site if it works with Chrome".
As a developer the lower the market share the less incentive there is to supporting it. I have stopped testing to see if my sites work on firefox and just focus on chromium and safari.
A few years ago Firefox was my main browser and I got sick of the constant changes and just use chrome, brave and safari now. I never missed FF for one moment.
I remember when Firefox was the faster leaner version of the mozilla browser and now they have bloated it up and forgotten its foundational principles.
> As a developer the lower the market share the less incentive there is to supporting it. I have stopped testing to see if my sites work on firefox and just focus on chromium and safari.
It's one thing to claim to not include Firefox in your list of supported browsers.
It's an entirely different thing to claim you only support Chrome and Safari.
If you are a developer and only target browsers from Apple and Google, this is a personal decision you're making to purposely ignore around 25% of your whole market share. This is not Firefox's or Microsoft's Opera's problem. This is your problem.
Do you not see the causal connection between 2% and pages that runs only on Chrome? Those same incompetent devs would make it run on Firefox with a higher % without annoying you
There are also plenty of other direct-to-user benefits
Firefox isn't the default browser on any of the popular consumer operating systems, so people don't need a reason to switch from it, they need a reason to switch to it.
Which Mozilla could provide if they'd spend more resources on Firefox and less on random tangents.
But now Google is doing their work for them by making Chrome worse:
Google ad campaigns, some years where Chrome genuinely felt snappier, Google pushing Chrome everywhere, Google sabotaging Firefox on their own websites.
Generally speaking, we have seen that people are okay with handing over the web and all their data to Google, if a button press registers 20ms faster.
I think this whole discussion of market share smacks a little too much of evaluating a president by the country’s GDP. Useful for a pithy remark, but doing any sort of detailed analysis seems doomed. I think the factors you listed are far more relevant
I know nothing of this person or Mozilla internals, but I could imagine a company heading towards bankruptcy, that was avoided while still losing market-share. In this situation the role of CEO could become more important as market-share decreases and the situation becomes more precarious.
Now if that person caused the downward slide to begin with, that's a different conversation. Again, I don't know the internals of Mozilla well enough to make an educated argument one way or the other.
> For a company that has a declining marketshare like Mozilla it's really way too high IMO.
Everyone talks a lot about market share but I never saw the breakdown of the market in terms of what is actually reporting the user agent. For example, both Chrome and Edge provide embeddable webviews used by applications to put together their GUIs, while Firefox doesn't. Other competitors such as Microsoft also pushes Edge very aggressively in a way that to me seems ethically questionable. Chrome leverages Google's control over some apps and features to be pretty much the only browser that is able to render some pages.
To me, Firefox is undoubtedly the best browser out there, and the only reason I see people use any other browser is inertia and not having control over their OS to change defaults. So what's the argument on market share?
I mean, being a succesful ceo at a declining company is much harder than being one at a growing company. At a growing company you just have to not screw up, and a declining company you have to actually turn things around. It doesn't seem totally unreasonable to get higher pay doing a harder job (presuming she is actually good at her job)
Given that nothing has turned around, it's hard to point to any evidence that she's doing a good job. The best she can claim is that had anyone else been CEO things would have declined even faster, and that's not something anyone can prove.
What more do people want at this time? She’s quitting. Now we can see how the next CEO somehow manages to defeat the multiple massive anti-competitive behemoths Mozilla is up against.
I'd like to see her donate half the salary she took back to Mozilla, since she obviously didn't earn it. She doubled her pay several times. Did the engineers doing the work get their pay doubled? No. The only person who did that was the one who was failing in her role. It's actually quite disgusting, just a blatant money grab because no one would stop her.
I'm no great fan of his (anymore), but Tesla's market share or at least market size did do very well during that period, not to mention the stock price going nuts. And this was all before he took a sharp turn at the corner of alt and right.
The controversy is not over whether or not he performed his duties effectively as CEO, it's over the disguised self-dealing that produced the comp package in the first place.
The milestones were reasonable, the rewards were not.
The rewards were reasonable when they were agreed to. I think the shares were only worth $50 million total. The fact it increased in value so much is the result of him meeting those milestones.
Please correct me if my understanding is wrong here, but isn't the current situation after the judge nullified his comp package now that he has done a phenomenal job growing the company, has taken $0 in salary for the last 5 years, and is now receiving no stock compensation either?
Sure $50bn+ is unreasonably large, but isn't $0 unreasonably small?
He negotiated the $0, that sounds like his problem.
If any regular person negotiated an underpaid salary at their job the past 5 years, and then demanded to be paid extra, that would get laughed out of the room.
Yes, but he didn't negotiate $0 in a vacuum, I assume he was factoring in the performance-based stock compensation too, in agreeing to take $0, no?
He agreed to forgo one type of compensation in favor of another type, that was later yanked away from him under the reasoning that his compensation package was deemed retroactively excessive.
I imagine a scenario where I take a slightly lower base pay for a higher number of RSUs, that are only unlocked if I meet my performance goals. I then proceed to meet or exceed these performance goals, as the contractual agreement specified. And then the government, acting on behalf of a shareholder who used to hold 8 shares total, complains that my compensation package was retroactively excessive, even though he hadn't raised this concern earlier.
I'd feel unfairly cheated in that scenario, and I can't help but figure Elon probably feels the same way. I know he isn't going to starve to death or anything, but it seems bizarre and worrying to me that it's just perfectly fine to invalidate what was a perfectly fine and legal contract 5 years after it was signed because a minor stakeholder of one party to the contract didn't like the terms.
Does this undermine the trustworthiness and stability of executive compensation contracts, or really any compensation contract, broadly in the US? Do I ever need to be worried about getting rug-pulled the way Elon was?
I fear this precedent may be abused against "the little guy" / the working class in the future.
Can he? How can he know whether the new one will or will not be retroactively invalidated 5 years from now? Do all executives need to get permission from a sitting judge before signing a contract now to be sure it's not going to be retroactively invalidated in the future?
> Do all executives need to get permission from a sitting judge before signing a contract now to be sure it's not going to be retroactively invalidated in the future?
All public company executives need to get their pay package approved by a real board that can actually tell them no (or at least sound like it in the minutes), not a handful of fawning sycophants. Or, if their board is actually a handful of fawning sycophants, they need to not lie about that when describing the pay deal to shareholders. Or they can take their chances on what a judge may think in the future. Doesn't seem unreasonable.
Up to a point. Tesla has a staggered board, which is well-known as a technique for making it hard for shareholders to control the board, and in general it's very rare for shareholders to vote board members out even in companies with more shareholder-friendly charters. Support for Tesla's directors in their most recent election was well below the median, partly because ISS had recommended voting against them (which is again unusual), but didn't reach the level of removing them.
> How can he know whether the new one will or will not be retroactively invalidated 5 years from now?
Get a real board to negotiate and approve the package. Boards and CEOs are already buddy buddy, but this is so far beyond even that. Heck, one of the members is Musk's brother - not even trying to appear objective. Musk's hubris bites him again.
> But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere.
Why? Why does pointing mozilla in the right direction require such rare skills?
Or is this because we're only looking at existing CEOs for hiring?
If the rareness is about having the right industry knowledge and vision in a CEO, I bet you can get better results by hiring a company aimer and separate managerial co-CEO and using the money you save for 20 more devs and 5 more marketers.
Now imagine your market share is down a ton (and decreasing), and there's no clear way to change that trajectory.
Then imagine that despite being CEO, you're owned by a non-profit. So, you have a boss, and your boss has different goals than you do.
Then imagine attracting and retaining top talent, while not being able to give out equity.
Then imagine that your product is free. You can't charge more for it; you give (almost) everything away for free and there's no clear path to monetization.
And then imagine that almost all of your money comes from your biggest competitor, and your only lever is to negotiate (from a position of weakness, because they're much bigger) a deal every 3 years in order to keep paying your employees.
I think that the "it's paid a lot because it's super hard" is generally a bad excuse. Many things are super hard, many people make a lot of sacrifices to be among the bests at what they do. Yet they don't earn that much.
When the thing you are good at is being a CEO (as opposed to, say, being a teacher), then you are very lucky. Because other CEOs before you managed to make it acceptable to earn an indecent salary for just doing a job. Ok, let's say they don't sleep at all, so they can work 2-3x as much as the average people. Are they paid 2-3x more? No! They're paid orders of magnitudes more. That's indecent.
To the problem of human beings receiving way too much money for the time they spend doing their job?
Easy: crazy taxes. If the company really wants to increase the salary up to some limit, knowing that 95% of that increase will go into taxes, then good for them. Otherwise they can do something else, like increasing other salaries or hiring people.
Also if you ask me, there should be laws for the difference between the lowest and the highest salary in a company. I.e. "the highest salary cannot be more than X times the lowest salary". Which means that if the CEO wants to earn more, they need to raise the lowest salaries.
> I'm not sure how increasing CEO taxes helps Mozilla's position at all.
Who said it would? Though I may argue that it is not clear at all if you really get the best person for the job when you make them rich just by getting the job. Not saying that all the CEOs are here "just for the money", but... well if they are not here for the money, why do they get that kind of salaries?
> I feel like something has taken a left turn in this thread.
I feel like when people are talking about the salary of a CEO and whether they "earned it" or not, I am entitled to say that no human being can ever deserve that kind of salary. Just like a liberal could say "they don't deserve it because they did not please the shareholders that much".
You’re entitled to free speech in the U.S. (if that’s where you reside) of course, however that doesn’t mean you’re right. To the contrary, the market, represented by millions of individuals’ actions, disagrees with you about who “deserves” what compensation.
Are you implying that because "the market" (with the laws that govern it) ends up in a situation where some people get that kind of salary, then I must be wrong in thinking that no human being deserves that kind of compensation?
Because if that's the case, I think it is completely stupid. You don't get to make up rules and then say that I am objectively wrong because your made-up rules disagree with me.
To a first order approximation you’re advocating for communism over capitalism in that you believe the will of the State (funded by “crazy taxes”) takes precedence over the will of the People, represented by local decisions made in a free market.
Consider that you could attempt to solve your perceived problem in multiple ways within the existing structure. 1) Garner public support and lead a campaign to change our laws to be more inline with the thoughts you have around increasing taxes; 2) Exploit the market opportunity you’ve identified (of paying CEO’s less to pay others more) by starting companies that follow this ethos, attract talent, and deliver value to consumers; 3) Attain a leadership position as CEO or in the Board of Directors for a company where you can take responsibility and change these perceived compensation problems; so on and so forth.
The responsibility lies with you to bring the change you seek.
> there should be laws for the difference between the lowest and the highest salary in a company
I'd imagine that at a place like Mozilla (effectively a high-tech nonprofit primarily staffed by white-collar workers), this difference in compensation is actually not that big, compared to, say, a business that hires hourly workers.
> your only lever is to negotiate (from a position of weakness, because they're much bigger) a deal every 3 years in order to keep paying your employees.
It's entirely possible that Mitchell Baker was responsible for getting hundreds of millions of dollars extra for Firefox when they switched search provider and then back, invoking a clause in their agreement with Yahoo.
Which seems like some pretty skilful playing of a bad hand.
Imagine being both the CEO of the corp and the chairwoman of the non profit. Damn!
Remember Mitchell killed FirefoxOS (I know you were likely happy about that @gkoberger), and now Mozilla is complaining about not getting level playing access to other OSes. Guess what, when you have no platform, you'll be forever a second class citizen.
Baker is a good motivational speaker, but should never have been allowed to made any operational decision.
Technically FirefoxOS is still around: https://www.kaiostech.com/ . It's now an OS for feature phones. It's no longer owned by Mozilla but they did have a lasting impact, that's what I mean. And many of their throwaway projects have gone that way. For example Firefox VR browser is now Wolvic. https://wolvic.com/en/ . It's the great thing about open source, the work is not lost.
But Mozilla had no chance in the real smartphone market. If Microsoft couldn't manage to attract developers with their billions and dedicated hardware, Firefox supplying only the OS and no hardware just had zero chance to make it mainstream. It would have been relegated to the same position as Sailfish: A cool curiosity but not interesting enough for anyone but some hobbyists to develop for.
I don't think it was a bad idea trying: At that time the duopoly in the smartphone market was not as firmly established and there were other open projects like Ubuntu as well. They might have attracted a huge party like Samsung (after all, they did go for Tizen in the end!) and things might have worked out differently. But the choice to drop it was inevitable at that point.
I use Kaios every day and I'm happy it exists but I'd have been even happier if it had just been stock Ubuntu with some phone specific bits thrown in. I actually bought a phone like that but it eventually stopped being serviced. But that was the best phone I ever had, this one is a distant 3rd after all my previous Nokias.
FxOS failed commercially because it tried to be a "me too" product, with the same distribution strategy as Android that relies a lot on carriers. For that to work you need to get support from key apps in the carriers markets, and FxOS never managed to get Whatsapp on board.
KaiOS got Whatsapp support thanks to shipping in India with a single carrier (Jio) that has a very large user base. Deployment in the rest of the world has been a struggle and the company is not in great shape.
All that to say that Mozilla could have kept the lights on for a couple more years and get access to large markets. Hard to predict what would have happened but we certainly would have more diversity in the OS space.
The only path to FirefoxOS success would have been if someone like Samsung hitched their wagon to it.
Which would have been because they thought they could make more money using it than Android.
Which probably wouldn't have bode well for user-friendly changes to the base image.
Android's value prop to manufacturers was "Was to sell a lot of mobile phones, but not have to pay for most of the development? And get a working Maps solution? Here you go." Which Google could afford to torch money on.
I think you're wrong but we'll never know :) What is true is that some of the interest from carriers for alternative OSes was indeed that they didn't like to be handcuffed to Android and iOS.
Are we using carrier and manufacturer differently?
And I'd imagine carriers don't, as they'd no doubt love to go back to the feature-phone days, but they're all (individually) too weak to do anything about it.
Only aggregated can they offer the resources to support an alternative.
No, I'm not happy. I was gobsmacked by how smart the people working on it were (you included), and was so proud to work a few desks away from such amazing engineers.
My thoughts that FirefoxOS was mismanaged from an executive level are in no way a reflection of the work I saw coming out of your team, and I took no pleasure in it shutting down. I felt the executive team got caught up too much with things like presenting at Mobile World Congress, at the cost of a ton of focus.
FirefoxOS was a moon shot. The sort of project a profit making company burns a few 10s of million on in the hope it somehow works out.
Mozilla should have been focusing on the one thing anyone cared about, the browser. Rust and Servo were the correct risks to take. But I know, hindsight is 20/20.
Even if Mozilla reallocated all their resources and dedicated themselves 100% to building a mobile OS, I’d personally be surprised if they were able to secure any meaningful market share. Talk about playing against a stacked deck.
The necessary skills are not rare, but the roles are rare so people start to think the skills are rare. I get a lot of grief for this opinion but I think most HN'ers could do the job of "CEO of whatever company they currently work for". It's not rocket science. We have this mythology around CEOs that they are such outlier smart, special, hardworking people, but really it's just that the top of the pyramids contain few people.
> I wouldn't want that job, and I'm not sure I could do it.
There are many jobs that I wouldn't want and that are not paid 6M a year. There are some things that I can do that not everybody can do, and still I am not paid 6M.
You can try reverting it: a CEO earning 6M a year could not necessarily be a firefighter. Yet firefighters are not paid 6M a year. And they actually risk their life.
IMHO, the stronger argument against CEO compensation is that the delta (in company performance) between a great CEO and a midling CEO isn't equal to their compensation.
If a firefighter sucks at their job... someone dies. But (unfortunately, if we're being honest) that's worth less than +/-1% of large company performance.
(Personally, I think public safety, medical non-doctors, and teachers should all be paid a lot better)
Definitely wanting the job is separate from can do the job, although to be honest, I would be happy to get paid $6+ million for the job "Fail to turn around Mozilla". Heck, I'd be willing to do it for 10% of that compensation.
> I wouldn't want that job. However, with the right team I AM sure I could do it.
Remember as a tech lead, if you are heroically writing a lot of code burning the midnight oil, banging out tickets and completing sprints by yourself, you are failing. As a CEO, the more you are doing the more you are failing. This is probably why it is so hard for people like us to he leaders. It is very difficult to delegate and not meddle with things. It is easy to say let go but very hard to actually do so.
Remember that even Steve Jobs delegated all operations and supply chain stuff to tim cook. And that's Steve Jobs! We are not Steve Jobs.
There is no reason why my manager should make more money than me.
> And lots of people do really hard jobs for much much much less money.
I would consider most min wage jobs harder than what i (computer programmer) do. Compensation is often inversely correlated with how shitty the job is.
I don’t either! But apparently they’re rare. One pays dearly when trying to go cheap, or broaden the pool in seemingly innocuous ways, in executive recruiting.
> lots of people do really hard jobs
Fortitude is necessary, but by itself insufficient.
> I don’t either! But apparently they’re rare. One pays dearly when trying to go cheap, or broaden the pool in seemingly innocuous ways, in executive recruiting.
Do we have good evidence for that, or is it just what the people that hire CEOs tend to think?
When I think of disastrous CEOs that I've managed to hear about, they weren't cheap. They got paid huge amounts to cause their disasters.
There is the problem. There is evidence a great CEO can make a difference. And if a great CEO wants millions they are worth it. However nobody knows how to tell a great CEO from bad.
That sounds like the old advertising idiom, “Half of all advertising works, but you will never be certain which half,” or something similar anyway. I think there is a very distinct “lightning in a bottle” component to great and/or successful companies. Combinations of effective teams, aligned motivations, good timing, a leader who can identify and leverage all of those elements to great effect, and some X factors that are simply unknowable. That may be just a slightly more nuanced way of saying they’re lucky, but also good fortune in externally changing scenarios is certainly one of those unknown factors.
I think the ability to recognize, organize, and effectively leverage all of the elements such that a company is well-positioned if/when the external factors line up in their favor is what defines a great CEO. I think that ability is akin to naturally talented musicians. Most people can, with enough time and effort, learn to play a guitar very well. They still won’t be Jimi Hendrix.
The downside is, you can’t force it or fake it (at least not for very long). I think of parallels with the difference between the British and American versions of the TV show “Top Gear” that was being produced in the mid ‘00s. The original British show was the lightning in a bottle, and became one of the most successful TV series on the planet. The lifeless copy they attempted in the US followed the recipe meticulously, and was cringeworthy.
> "I think there is a very distinct “lightning in a bottle” component to great and/or successful companies."
Watching The Grand Tour[1] season 1 it feels stilted, awkward, like they are reciting their lines for some forced humor while Amazon showers cash and flashy cars all around trying too hard. If it was like this with three unknown people I wouldn't bother - I'm only watching on the hope that the lightning in a bottle sparks up again as they settle in, because the highs of Top Gear were good - friends messing about for a laugh, daring bold ideas, beautiful filming and settings.
> Do we have good evidence for that, or is it just what the people that hire CEOs tend to think?
I think so, and it’s largely in the attrition of start-ups due to executive leadership breaking down. Start-up founders are already a rarefied group; that so many break down or flip out or can’t handle all the balls in the air is telling. (There is plenty of academia on the topic. It doesn’t support massive paydays. But certainly single-digit millions, i.e. life-changing money for someone who may already be rich.)
> got paid huge amounts to cause their disasters
Look at the state of the company they took over. Golden parachutes are often required to woo top talent to a trash pile because top talent knows the world is stochastic.
Not really. A Non profit ceo will always take a pay cut. You can't expect big tech salaries in a non profit, and if they can truly get a better salary elsewhere that's probably what they should do if they want that type of revenue. The thing is, they usually can't. A non profit ceo is not typically very well suited to be a big corp executive, and vice versa.
I’ll do it! At this point I’d like to see some actual data to back up this so-often-repeated claim of “being a CEO is super hard, there’s only a few people in the country smart enough to do it well, so they need to be paid millions of dollars a year”
That sounds… plausible, at this point. I wouldn’t say probable. Especially with tech making everything so interconnected. I loved the kind note at the root of this thread, but the idea that the CEO is some market visionary who is carefully keeping the whole company afloat seems rotten.
On the other hand, if you work elsewhere, your not turning around Mozilla.
I worked in academia, now government, in HPC/data-sciency positions, so the overlap/competition with finance and big tech is large (and a lot of people move there and back again). Let's just say, we have far more interesting problems ;)
I suspect a ceo could have asked for a pay package of massive bonuses correlated with marketshare. My understanding is the board has pretty wide discretion to set pay, and following years of steep marketshare losses, who would question such an arrangement?
They've been dropping long enough that a pay package almost entirely based on increasing market share would have gotten a lot less objection from me at least.
I think people are mostly questioning her quite large pay packages when measured against the abject failure on every metric except for the cash-paid-by-google-to-disguise-their-monopoly metric.
At the last company I started, a b2b saas, as of 5 years in, there were under 10 logged-in pageviews from Firefox. Ever. It's dead; the coyote is 50 feet past the cliff; and we're just waiting for gravity to appear.
Mozilla has also clearly given up on Firefox, though people get mad on here when you point that out. I just don't know why they're operating under the delusion that anyone will listen to Mozilla about privacy when everyone realizes they no longer build a browser that matters.
I honestly can't fathom caring about the difference between 6.2m a year and anything higher than that. Once my salary gets that high all I'm caring about is whether or not I'm doing interesting things.
Leaving aside small business, are there (m)any larger organizations where the CEO makes >1% of revenue?
Mitchell making $6.9M in cash compensation of a $600M revenue company is the equivalent of:
- Chuck Robbins of Cisco making $655M/year
- Mark Benioff of Salesforce making $360M/year
Maybe let's look smaller:
- Fidji Simo of Instacart making $29M/year
- Patrick Collison of Stripe making $166M/year
When you look at it like that, Baker's compensation is quite absurd.
(And for more comedic value than anything serious, similar to Tim Apple making $4.4B/year...)
The real question is: will the new CEO start promoting Firefox as it should have been since the beginning, or Google money is too important to piss off them with actual competition?
It’s a lot of money, but it’s not a lot of money for a highly visible tech CEO. It’s a similar problem many non-profits have when hiring tech in general.
Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, since then MSFT share price has 10x'ed, from $300Bn to $3.3Tn, making it the most valuable company in the world. He turned it around from a 30% drop in value under Steve Ballmer. Global cloud marketshare has Amazon AWS at 31% and dropping down from 34%, Microsoft Azure at 24% and climbing and Google GCP at 11%. Microsoft has transformed their business offering from "Office in your datacenter" to cloud-backed Office apps accessible from any device, Office apps in a browser, in Teams. Microsoft took Teams from 20M users in November 2019 to 1.4Bn users in October 2022, used by 91 of the Fortune 100. Microsoft got the jump on Google with OpenAI and integrated it promptly into Bing, Edge and M365 offerings.
If that isn't company leadership worth paying for, nothing is.
> "Hey, at least Firefox stayed in the game"
Not according to other people in this thread:
- "As a test professional at the time, one of the most discouraging things I saw after leaving Mozilla was Firefox dropping off all the test plans I knew about when [FireFox market share] hit single digits. I’d poke at that decision where I had influence, and would basically get back a response that “Firefox is dead, just look at the numbers.”" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39309843
- "At the last company I started, a b2b saas, as of 5 years in, there were under 10 logged-in pageviews from Firefox. Ever. It's dead; the coyote is 50 feet past the cliff; and we're just waiting for gravity to appear." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39309564
(and I'm typing this from FireFox, although on my work machine I'm moving to Edge because it's good. Click a link in Outlook, the link opens with Edge and the sidebar opens with web Outlook open showing the email I clicked on to reference, for one example. Vertical tabs for another, I stopped running TreeStyle Tabs in FireFox years ago, though I no longer remember why).
Maybe relatively low salary for a typical CEO (no comment)...
But doesn't seem like Mozilla is a typical company; not built around selling a product... so maybe that merits a different type of CEO with different skills not normally desired by the companies paying 10s of millions to their CEOs.
I'm no business person, so I could be completely wrong about what's needed at the C-level to keep Mozilla afloat. My view my be warped by assuming the vast majority of companies do not make money the way Mozilla does; but maybe there are more Mozillas than I know about.
I have no inside information, but here's my guess at what happened. John Lilly was a great CEO. When he left, there was a gigantic void. They hired Gary Kovacs, who started the "squirrel!"-ing. He wasn't well-liked, and used Mozilla as a stepping stone. So going forward they only hired from the Mozilla community, which is a small pool – both of people who could do it and people who wanted to do it. I'm not sure if Mitchell wanted it or not, but I don't think there was a lot of competition.
Being the CEO of Mozilla is not a good job, and I imagine it's really hard to fill. There's a ton of pressure, relatively low salary, no equity, no exit.