Building a team to
fix the internet
Much of the content of this report is focused on a singular idea – renewing our investment in Mozilla’s innovation engine. We need to do this because the single most effective way to shape a better internet is by leading through the example of our products and using that to accelerate our policy and advocacy efforts. We are uniquely equipped to meet this moment because of how we are structured — we are at once a global community and two organizations — a non-profit working to ensure the internet remains a public resource that is open and accessible to all and a mission-driven business that creates and supports consumer products in line with our mission.
We can best push against the idea that a better way is “impossible” by building things that prove it is absolutely possible, but only if you put the users of the internet first. Building a team with the skills, experience, vision, and grit to do the “impossible” while competing with the biggest, most well-capitalized companies in the world requires that we attract and retain the best minds from many backgrounds: leading tech companies, activist organizations, and government. We need a global team made of engineers, policy experts, activists, data scientists, marketers, artists, and startup founders.
Our mission-driven focus provides us a critical advantage in that competition, as we offer a natural haven and attraction for people hungry for the opportunity to do their best work on behalf of online citizens, rather than just for shareholders or other special interests. We do, however, need to satisfy the mission orientation of our people with the realities of an extremely competitive labor market in which high salaries and equity-based stock compensation are expected and considered the norm.
In order to compete for the talent necessary for us to achieve these ambitious goals, Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation have each developed a compensation strategy that enables us to attract and retain passionate and mission-driven individuals who can bring this vision to life. Reflecting Mozilla’s unique hybrid nature, both organizations draw on third-party compensation data from both the for-profit and nonprofit sector in order to create compensation models that work for the talent markets they are recruiting from.
For example, Foundation executive pay is benchmarked primarily against the non-profit and philanthropic sector (70% weight) with a smaller weighting for data from similarly sized technology companies (30% weight). In Executive compensation at the Corporation we benchmark primarily against mid-sized, for-profit technology companies (70% weight) blended with data from the non-profit and philanthropic sector (30% weight). Both organizations target executive pay at the 75 percentile against their blended data sets. For the Corporation, this results in executive comp that is at approximately the 60th percentile of tech industry benchmarks. As a non-profit-owned company, Mozilla Corporation is limited to using cash for performance-based pay.
We apply a slightly different philosophy and benchmarking against the market when it comes to compensating the board members of each entity. Foundation Board members are paid $25k per year for their time, and a small additional amount if they serve on committees. This reflects typical compensation amongst non-profits that compensate Board members for their time. Corporation Board members are paid $200k per year, which is benchmarked wholly against mid-sized, for-profit technology companies.
We are always assessing our compensation philosophy to ensure it aligns with our mission and the markets in which we operate – today we have talented folks advancing our mission across the Foundation and Corporation in 31 countries. We expect we will further refine our efforts as we look to expand our ability to better capture opportunities around the world, particularly in Europe and Africa in the coming years.
Mozilla has accomplished a lot of amazing things in the last 25 years, and during our time on the board, we have been able to witness many advancements working to make the internet a healthier and better place. But, we know there is a lot more work to do, and we feel confident this is the team ready to take on the next chapter — and the ones after that.
We aren’t investing in the next quarter, we are investing in the next quarter century — and the next 25 years promise to continue to bring a lot to celebrate online, often thanks to Mozilla.