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.
Blake Ross 401
Livingston: So the stakes were lower. Did you ever want to quit?
Ross: Well, I did in a way. I went back to school for 6 months, and I wasn’t
working on the project much during that time. It wasn’t that I walked away—
we knew there were people working on it—but it was leisurely because we
knew that Microsoft wasn’t coming back any time soon.
Livingston: Now you are in a “real” startup. How did you get started?
Ross: In some ways, the media and the venture capital industry made it happen.
From our earliest days at Netscape, Joe and I were always shooting the breeze
about how terrible software was and what we would change if we could. After
some Firefox press hit, we started getting emails from investors saying, “We
want to meet.” And we’d think, “Meet about what? It’s an open source hobby
project.” Then we realized, “They want to meet about funding us, so we should
probably get some kind of company together.” We figured this was the perfect
opportunity to act after years of talk.

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