John Lilly glimpsed the World Wide Web as a graduate student back in 1992, when he saw a demonstration at Stanford University by Tim Berners-Lee, the English computer scientist who had recently invented it.
"Yeah, yeah, I get it, click, click," he remembers thinking as Berners-Lee showed how he could jump from hyperlink to hyperlink through a series of Web pages that otherwise were blank. Sitting in the back of the room, Lilly fell asleep.
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Now, in a conference room at Mozilla's headquarters, looking over the green hills in Mountain View, he calls the Web "the fundamental innovation of our lives."
As Mozilla's CEO, his livelihood depends on it. To a large extent, the Web's health also depends on the health of Mozilla and its nonprofit parent, the Mozilla Foundation, which was founded in 2003 with a $2 million pledge from AOL to keep the Web open and free for the public's benefit.
Lilly expects Mozilla will feel the effects of the recession. It earns most of its revenue from an agreement with Google, which pays royalties to Mozilla for generating search traffic. And, it will grow more slowly than it would have in a good year.
"We'll probably tend to hire a little later in the year and watch revenue closely," he said.
But it will grow, and free food - "the chief currency of tech projects," according to Lilly - is not being cut.
Last month, according to Net Applications, market share for Mozilla's Firefox browser rose to more than 20 percent, a jump that the ratings service attributed to the U.S. elections, Thanksgiving and November's extra weekend days.
People who use Firefox tend to do so at home, and in November they had more time to surf the Web.
Downloads of Firefox jumped again this month after Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which still dominates the market, suffered one of its worst security flaws ever - a hole that allowed hackers to steal data off users' machines for more than a week before Microsoft issued an emergency patch.
"Mozilla has become an essential part of the ecology of the Internet," said Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford who worked with Lilly on a project to get President-elect Barack Obama's transition team to communicate more openly with the public.
That project, called open-government.us, was Lilly's idea, Lessig said. "Mozilla is a uniquely successful case of a critical bit of Web infrastructure becoming a viable community and a successful nonprofit that was able to fund itself and eventually others."
Mozilla is unusual in the business world, a delicate balance of around 200 employees and tens of thousands of volunteers who work on Mozilla's software all over the world, in more than 60 languages, because they want to.
All code is open source, which means it's free, published and openly debated, with any changes returned to the community. More than 1,000 volunteers contribute code.
Revenue at the end of last year was $75 million, up 12 percent from 2006, and net assets rose to $82 million, up 29 percent. However, expenses were up sharply as well - to $33 million, a 40 percent jump - because Mozilla is hiring.
Lilly expects to add 50 to 100 people next year and about the same number in 2010. Mozilla has increased its recruiting from universities because more students now are looking for socially meaningful work, he said.
Lilly was recruited to Mozilla by his predecessor, Mitchell Baker, who chairs the Mozilla Foundation's board. Baker said she noticed when she and Lilly attended board meetings together at the Open Source Applications Foundation, a nonprofit started by Mitch Kapor, that Lilly knew how to ask probing but graceful questions.
"John knew a lot that I didn't," she said. "He had a sense for what was working, where there were holes and how to think about things. He's a master at running Mozilla."
Lilly took some arrows in the back when he arrived at Mozilla, according to Kapor, a longtime friend of Lilly's who also is on the Mozilla Foundation board. His previous job was at a startup he founded, Reactivity, which was later sold to Cisco, and his background made him suspect, Kapor said - "the stereotype of the clueless suit."
Lilly remembers the uproar he caused when he proposed that Mozilla get its own e-mail server instead of forwarding e-mails to people's homes. "People yelled at me online like crazy - 'We're techies, we can put up our own Web server!' - and I said, 'Yeah, but we haven't,' " he said. "I think of myself as a super-nerd. To be viewed as a suit is a switch for me."
Over time, however, even though he gets impatient, Lilly earned trust at Mozilla, Kapor said, and he's brought to the organization a for-profit discipline that Kapor thinks is another reason for Firefox's market share gains.
"Firefox 3 (released in June) is good, it met its goals and people like it," Kapor said. "(John) is helping Mozilla build an engineering team that can execute faster and still keep faith with the larger global community."
Lilly admits that he faces challenges. Mozilla helped revive fierce competition in the browser market, and Microsoft, Apple and Google are all out to win it.
Despite becoming a competitor recently with its Chrome browser, Google supplied more than 88 percent of Mozilla's revenue last year through an agreement that gives Mozilla royalties for including a Google search box in the Firefox browser. That agreement expires in 2011, and some of those Google funds are being audited by the Internal Revenue Service, which questioned their tax status.
Lilly said Mozilla must find more ways to make money, although he won't say how that's going to happen.
Still, Mozilla is one of the few organizations in Silicon Valley that's adding employees. Lilly said the mobile Web and video will be very important, as will several projects from Mozilla Labs - among them Ubiquity, which is creating new user interfaces, and Weave, which is trying to give people more control over their personal information.
"We need to enable hundreds or thousands of experiments around the world to figure out what works," he said.
Despite the pressure, Lilly has managed to live a balanced life, which Kapor calls a rare accomplishment in the driven world of Silicon Valley CEOs.
Lilly keeps a micro-blog on Twitter and a blog on behalf of his 3-year-old so the boy's grandparents can know how he's doing. At Mozilla, he answers his own phone.
In general, CEOs get too much credit, he said, and too little credit goes to everybody else. He said he finds working at Mozilla humbling - especially when he's traveling and people see the orange Firefox stickers on his luggage and tell him they use the browser - and he feels lucky to have his job.
The series: During the last two weeks of the year, The Chronicle Business staff is running a series of profiles on prominent business leaders in the Bay Area who are managing their way through the severe economic downturn.
John Lilly
Age: 37
Title: CEO of Mozilla Corp.
Most recent book read: "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running," by Haruki Murakami
Favorite quote: "Nobody knows anything" (William Goldman), because it takes a beginner's mind to be successful.
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BY Deborah Gage, Chronicle Staff Writer - dgage@sfchronicle.com
Source：SFGate
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