Founders at Work.pdf

Blake Ross 401
Livingston: You were pretty young when you worked on Firefox. Was there
anything you found you were better at than you thought?
Ross: I thought marketing was something that required a degree and formal
experience. It turns out that marketing is just making the product good enough
that people spread it on their own, and giving them ways to do that. It’s a lot
easier and more natural than I thought it would be. Now I can’t stand meeting
with professional marketers who try to “craft” the “message” and all that junk.
Livingston: What surprised you most?
Ross: How easy it was to get Firefox to take off, at least in light of the death
knell people had been sounding for years. We’d been hearing forever that
nobody downloads a client anymore, and browsers are dead, and Mozilla can’t
make it. It’s never going to go anywhere; the market has been monopolized. We
just ignored all that and did it anyway, and it worked.
It’s a bit harder to take analysts and other “industry insiders” seriously now,
because Firefox proved them wrong. There are a lot of people in the industry
who aren’t actually the ones writing the code or contributing to the project, but
they want to feel like they are relevant somehow, so they make sweeping predictions
that draw attention. I think you have to be in the project and be the one
moving it forward to truly understand whether you have a shot at success. One
analyst has already announced he’s “skeptical” about Parakey and he barely
even knows what it is, let alone tried it out. Smells like Firefox all over again.
Those kinds of comments are so motivating. I love the challenge.
We talked to plenty of people at the very beginning of Firefox. It was obvious
that people were not happy with their browser, and it was very clear that, if
we could do something better, we might be able to get them to use it.
Livingston: Do you remember people’s reactions when you gave an early demo
of it?
Ross: People loved the simplicity and went crazy over tabbed browsing. What’s
weird is that I didn’t really talk to anyone I knew personally throughout the
course of Firefox development. My parents and my friends—most of them
didn’t really know I was working on Firefox until it came out and there was the
Business 2.0 article. That’s when everyone was like, “Wait, you work on
Firefox?” They knew I “did something” with computers, but . . .
Livingston: Your parents didn’t know?
Ross: Kind of. I think they knew I worked on Mozilla. They knew I worked at
Netscape, so they knew I worked in browsers, but they didn’t really know my
involvement in Firefox until they read about it in a magazine. Which is kind of
how I prefer it, because it’s much easier to spend a couple months on something,
fail silently, and just go back to school, than it is to tell everyone that
everyone is going to use our product. It’s easier if people aren’t bugging you
until you have something to put in their hands, and then they can tell you if it’s
good or not.