Mitchell Baker Becomes Mozilla’s CEO

Long-time chairwoman Mitchell Baker has officially taken the reigns as Mozilla’s next CEO.

The organization’s previous CEO, Chris Beard, resigned at the end of 2019, leaving a vacancy in Mozilla’s leadership. Now, more than three months after Beard left, Baker is taking over the position.

“I’m honored to become Mozilla’s CEO at this time. It’s a time of challenge on many levels, there’s no question about that,” Baker writes in a blog post. “Mozilla’s flagship product remains excellent, but the competition is stiff. The increasing vertical integration of internet experience remains a deep challenge. It’s also a time of need, and of opportunity. Increasingly, numbers of people recognize that the internet needs attention. Mozilla has a special, if not unique role to play here. It’s time to tune our existing assets to meet the challenge. It’s time to make use of Mozilla’s ingenuity and unbelievable technical depth and understanding of the ‘web’ platform to make new products and experiences. It’s time to gather with others who want these things and work together to make them real.”

Baker has deep roots with both Mozilla and its predecessor, Netscape. She first joined Netscape in November 1994, as one of the company’s first employees in the legal department, and became general manager of the mozilla.org project within Netscape five years later. In 2001, she was let go by America Online, who had acquired Netscape in 1999. In 2003, she helped launch the Mozilla Foundation, and became the first CEO of its subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation, when it was launched in 2005.

Given Baker’s long history with Mozilla, not to mention Netscape, she represents a solid choice to lead the organization amid tech’s changing landscape.