Here are a few specific starting points, then I’ll get to my main point, which is that we (a technologically-oriented US, at least) are not well set up for the future in terms of how we evolve tech policy. Not a new thought, but I think the SOPA situation may be putting us in a worse spot.

But first 3 starting points and a personal observation:

1. SOPA+PIPA are awful bills. No way around it. They over-reach, they circumscribe civil liberties, and they mostly will not work. They shouldn’t pass, and we should do whatever we can to keep that from happening. They’re the latest in a long line of legislation that looks like this: reducing freedoms in a misguided attempt to protect us from a different big bad. They’re so numerous in US history they hardly need listing here.

2. Existing industries are always oriented towards self-preservation. No exception here. But there’s a funny thing that happens: the most progressive companies of today who become successful and dominant will become reactionary in the future, oriented themselves towards self-preservation. Same as it ever was. And you can see it even in the current situation — the companies who are most outspoken are the modern Internet companies: LinkedIn, Mozilla, Zynga, Google, etc etc. Mostly on the sidelines are the most progressive technology companies of the past decades, even including Apple. So this is not, fundamentally, a techie v content type of issue at all, but more of a progressive v conservative technology issue.

3. We do have existing laws and norms. A number of folks argued that content owners just need to accept that pirated goods are a viable alternative and need to learn how to compete with them. I’m wholly unpersuaded by that point of view. Or, rather, I believe we do have existing laws that govern how we behave. It’s pretty clear (to me at least) that content businesses will need to evolve, and many interesting ones already have. But that’s something for a lawful market to decide, not for anyone to thrust onto content owners & creators.

And then a personal observation: I was actually a little nervous writing about SOPA last week because of the tone of the conversation to date. I felt like it might actually provoke harsh negative reaction and somehow brand me as “SOPA-friendly” or against the web. That’s a weird thing for me to feel, as I think my web & open culture bona fides are pretty well established at this point between my work with Mozilla, PCF, Code for America, and now Tumblr, etc etc. That by itself tells me that there’s something wrong about how things are going.

Okay, so given all that as a context, here’s my main point: no matter what outcome we get to with respect to SOPA+PIPA, we’re in a bad spot going forward. 

I think much of the legitimate frustration on the Silicon Valley side of the fence is that there seems to be no way to have a meaningful conversation about this stuff in ways that we know to be productive. It’s happening at this point with some guy who doesn’t seem to understand technology having his staff & a bunch of lobbyists prepare a non-sensical bill and then try to jam it through Congress, without any real effort to understand what might actually work. (And, worse, it’s being done in a way that seems deliberately designed to misinform.) So it’s a bunch of backroom, captured discussion that has massive impact on how we live our lives — and it’s all completely opaque (at best).

The real thing that I’m worrying more and more about is not SOPA per se, although that’s a very large problem itself. The real problem that I see is that our government just isn’t set up to make meaningful technology policy decisions going forward. I think Larry Lessig would argue that that’s now true about all facets of modern life, but I think that with technology it’s significantly worse. We have massive interconnectedness of systems built on an extremely rapidly changing foundation of technology. But more than that, technology is now transforming our private and public lives so quickly that we can hardly make sense of any of it at a personal level, let alone a public policy level. And there seems to be no way for legislation to keep pace unless we change the discussion there from specific technologies instead to principles of how we want to build and evolve our society.

And I just don’t see how that kind of conversation can happen right now.

I see how to defeat SOPA, more or less. But it’s more lobbying, more rhetoric, more Capitol Hill influence. And I think that all of that stuff ultimately corrupts industries that use it. I know this is not a new objection, and I’m sure that there have been people in every industry forever who have made this point.

So I think most of what I wanted to write on Friday is this: I desperately hope we can (1) defeat SOPA and more importantly (2) figure out a way to have useful technology policy discussions that can inform both our legistatures and law enforcement agencies. This isn’t the last law that will be technically poor and will impinge on civil liberties. There will be more, and they’ll come up more and more frequently as increasing portions of our society get disoriented by and disrupted by new technology.

We shouldn’t rely on symmetric (and corrupting) lobbying efforts to make things better; we’ll just get more of the same crummy situation we’ve got.

What I think we really need to figure out is how to help our leadership in government act and think in a more agile way, informed by more of our citizenry. More like the web, in a lot of ways. (Ed Lee’s announcement of an SF partnership with Code for America is a start.)

Maybe impossible, a pipe dream. But that’s the target I think we should be setting for ourselves, not just defeating a crappy, misinformed bill.

1. it’s not a discussion at all — it’s people calling each other names.
2. it’s highly likely to have a result that is unhelpful at best, and insanely destructive at worst
3. we’re building a completely worthless/bad roadmap for how to deal with technology policy going forward, and it’s going to get worse

Let me be very clear: SOPA is a terrible law that should not be enacted under any circumstances. It’s broken technically and misguided from a policy point of view. It not only won’t accomplish what advocates want it to accomplish, but it also will create backbreaking burdens and barriers to entry for some of our most promising technology companies and cultural movements of the coming decade.

But also: content creators & owners have a legitimate beef with how their content can be appropriated and distributed so easily by rogue actors.

Here’s the conversation we should be having: content & technology should be very aligned. Hollywood and Silicon Valley (broadly speaking — I’m talking metaphorically here) both want the same things ultimately: easier and bigger ways to share and enjoy awesome content from all sources, in a way that’s economic for everyone involved.

What we should be talking about is how to get better alignment, how to build systems and content that is better for, you know, actual human beings to use and enjoy.

But that isn’t the conversation that’s happening (and I use the term “conversation” here very loosely, since it has characteristics more like a bunch of schoolyard name calling). The conversation that’s happening is going more like this:

- content: “you people are stealing our stuff. you’re thieves”

- techies: “we’re not stealing it. we’re just building great apps for users.”

- content: “you’re ignoring the problem and helping the thieves. you’re effectively pirates, so we’re going to shut everyone down.”

- techies: “you’re acting like jackbooted fascists, embracing censorship and your’e going to end everything that’s good about culture today.”

- content: “we’re trying to protect our content — you guys are pretending like there’s no problem, then getting rich off platforms that pillage our content.”

- techies: “you don’t understand how the Internet works — how do you even live life in the 21st century? dinosaurs.”

So that’s awesome. Then you throw Congress into the mix and hilarity ensues. Because if you’re looking for folks who really do not act like they want to understand the Internet, Capitol Hill is a pretty good place to start. And then this is all devolving into a fight of pirates versus creators. Of protectors-of-democracy versus fascists. Or whatever.

What we need to be talking about is where the actual infringement problem is happening (I’ve heard from folks that the vast majority of the problem is on the order of a few dozen syndicates overseas). And how we need to be thinking about copyright law — in an age where copies are the natural order of things, as opposed to previously, when it was harder to make copies. And what sorts of law enforcement resources we need to bring to bear to shut down the activity of these real malicious actors overseas. (At root, I’m persuaded that the current issues are really law enforcement issues – we need to figure out how to enforce the laws that are already on the books to protect IP, not create new ones.)

Acting like there’s no problem isn’t the answer — there is a legitimate IP issue here. But pressuring a behind-the-times and contributions-captive legislative body to enact overly intrusive and abusable laws is even worse, both economically and civically.

What’s extremely discouraging to me right now is that I don’t really see how we can have a nuanced, technically-informed, respectful discussion/debate/conversation/working relationship. I’m not convinced that Congress is at all the right body to be taking up these issues, and am 100% convinced that they don’t currently have the technical wherewithal to make informed decisions, in any event.

So what we’re left with is one group pushing their captive legislators for new, over-reaching laws and calling technologists names. And a group reacting to that by calling names back.

I think the best that we can hope for in this scenario is that the current bill will grind to a halt and nothing will change. But I think that can’t be where we aim for the future.

Because technology policy issues are going to come up again and again and again as time goes on. (Next up, undoubtedly, is another round of privacy legislation, and I would predict the name calling will be even more intense and even less productive.)

We’re mediating more of our lives than ever through new technologies that we barely understand as technologists, let alone consumers or civic leaders. We need to figure out ways to have meaningful discussions, to try out policies that may or may not work at first and iterate quickly on them, like we do with products themselves.

I don’t have any answers here, but wanted to write down what’s been bugging me, as I think we all need to think more about what we want our lives to look like in the future.

It’s a humbling organization to join, because they’ve already made such amazing progress. They’ve got an amazing group of CfA Fellows working with city governments this year — projects in Boston and Philadelphia and Seattle; and one with the federal government as well. They’ve picked even more cities to work with next year in an expansion of the program. They’ve started the Civic Commons as a way to help governments share and take advantage of code that already exists.

More importantly, they’re showing how to build an organization that’s both civically-oriented and sustainable over the long term. In my view, CfA is helping a new generation of entrepreneurs and builders to figure out how to create products and organizations that can change our relationship with our cities and towns — not every startup has to be about maximizing financial returns.

So I’m really excited to join the organization — because of what it’s done in such a short time, because of what it represents today, and because of the promise it holds in unlocking so, so much positive and needed change in how we relate to our governments and our selves in the future.

I’m finding my feelings to be pretty complex, which I guess isn’t too surprising given who he was. But for a man I’ve never met, I’m a little surprised about how much of my thinking he’s affected, and how many competing feelings I’ve got.

But some of them are pretty simple.

As a designer, I think it’s impossible to feel anything but pure, unadulterated joy that Steve existed at all. And I really mean that: thank god for him, he changed so much. He wasn’t the first to care about design in technology, and he won’t be the last, but he moved things so much.

He made beautiful software and hardware like nobody had ever seen before. Crucially, he built tools that helped — or completely enabled, really — creatives make their own beautiful work that enriched the world. He completely and utterly validated the view that design could be immensely valuable economically, not just culturally.

Mostly he made it acceptable — desirable! — to believe in and practice great, human-centered design in our work and lives. What a gift.

As a people manager and leader, I really struggled with how to think about him. The stories of how brutal he could be on the people around him — employees, competitors, and everyone else — are legion, and they’re not apocryphal. He could be deeply dehumanizing and belittling to the people around him. Like a lot of people of great vision, which he surely was, he did it all in the name of greatness, of perfection — but I have enough close friends who have been in the line of Jobs’ fire to know how personally destructive it could be, and as a manager I have a hard time with it.

On the other hand, he was an unbelievable leader and motivator.

It turns out that I worked at Apple ATG (Advanced Technology Group) in 1994/5 when I was a grad student at Stanford, and then again for all of 1997, when I moved back here from Trilogy.

I remember being at a talk he gave shortly after returning in 1997 as Interim CEO. A bunch of us employees (I was at ATG at the time) were in Town Hall in Building 4 at Infinite Loop to hear him, and he was fired up. Talked a lot about how Apple was going to completely turn things around and become great.

It was a tough time at Apple — we were trading below book value on the market — our enterprise value was actually less than our cash on hand. And the rumors were everywhere that we were going to be acquired by Sun. Someone in the audience asked him about Michael Dell’s suggestion in the press a few days previous that Apple should just shut down and return the cash to shareholders, and as I recall, Steve’s response was: “Fuck Michael Dell.” Good god, what a message from a CEO! He followed it up by admitting that the stock price was terrible (it was under $10, I think — pretty sure it was under $2 split-adjusted), and that what they were going to do was reissue everyone’s options on the low price, but with a new 3 year vest. He said, explicitly: “If you want to make Apple great again, let’s get going. If not, get the hell out.” I think it’s not an overstatement to say that just about everyone in the room loved him at that point, would have followed him off a cliff if that’s where he led.

He was also a gifted, gifted operator. One of the struggles we were going through when he came back was that Apple was about the leakiest organization in history — it had gotten so bad that people were cavalier about it. In the face of all those leaks, I remember the first all company e-mail that Steve sent around after becoming Interim CEO again — he talked in it about how Apple would release a few things in the coming week, and a desire to tighten up communications so that employees would know more about what was going on — and how that required more respect for confidentiality. That mail was sent on a Thursday; I remember all of us getting to work on Monday morning and reading mail from Fred Anderson, our then-CFO, who said basically: “Steve sent mail last week, he told you not to leak, we were tracking everyone’s mail, and 4 people sent the details to outsiders. They’ve all been terminated and are no longer with the company.”

Well. If it wasn’t clear before that the Amelio/Spindler/Sculley days of Apple were over, it was crystal clear then, and good riddance.

As a leader of people, you have to respect how much he (and more importantly, his teams) accomplished. But I struggle with some of the ways that he led, and how they affected good people.

Still.

I’m a little uncomfortable with the outpouring of sentiment about people who want to be like Steve. There’s a sort of beatification going on that I think misses the point. He was never a nostalgic man at all, and I can’t help but feel like he would think this posthumous attention was, in a lot of ways, a waste — seems like he’d have wanted people to get back to inventing.

On Twitter yesterday Naval nailed it, as he often does: “I never met my greatest mentor. I wanted so much to be like him. But, his message was the opposite. Be yourself, with passionate intensity.”

That’s it, I think — that’s the biggest message from Jobs’ life. Don’t try to be like Steve. Don’t try to be like anyone.

Be yourself and work as hard as you can to bring wonderful things into the world. Figure out how you want to contribute and do that, in your own way, on your own terms, as hard as you can, as much as you can, as long as you can.

His most lasting message, I hope, won’t be about technology or management or media or communications or even design. The work he did in those areas certainly matters and will continue to — impossible to ignore it.

Still, I think it’s not the main thing, the essential thing.

I hope the message that people really take, really internalize is that being yourself, as hard as you can, is the way to have important and lasting impact on our world. That might be in the context of technology. It might be in the context of technology, or the arts, or sports, or government, or social justice — or even in the context of your family and close friends.

It almost doesn’t matter. The thing that matters most is to figure out what’s important to you, what’s core to you, and do that. Be that. And do it as well as you possibly can, every single day.

He announced today that he’s leaving Mozilla after working there the past 6 years in a variety of roles (and he’s been involved even longer, since before Mozilla.org even existed). His absence will be felt acutely by everyone, I think, but his fingerprints are all over the place, and all over the project, and they will be forever – the way Mike thinks is pretty well part of the DNA of the company and project.

On a personal level, I really liked working with Mike – he’s smart and humble (sometimes!) and thoughtful – he routinely challenged (and continues to challenge) the way that I thought about problems both on a micro level and more importantly at web scale. He’s been involved in too many technology strategy decisions to count, always working for the betterment of the open web, even when it was inconvenient for him and Mozilla. (or maybe especially then!)

And he affected my framing of the problem deeply – I remember one day a couple of years back when we were talking about some market share point, thinking about how incredibly, insanely competitive the browser technology landscape was – and he said to me: “Look, this is the world we wanted. And this is the world we made.” Wow. Exactly right. He taught me so much about how enormous an impact a group of dedicated people can make.

I quote him a lot when I talk with entrepreneurs of all stripes. I say this: “Figure out the world you want, and go make it that way.” That’s the essence of entrepreneurship, and I think it’s the essence of Mike.

For my money, that’s the best advice anyone can give anyone else, and the best lesson I really, deeply learned from Mike.

Mozilla has been incredibly lucky to have amazing engineering management leadership over the past few years, from Schrep to Shaver and now Damon – just incredible leaders, and the loss of Mike will be obvious, although he’ll undoubtedly stay involved in the larger project.

But for myself, I just wanted to give Mike a very public thank you, and to say that I can’t wait to see what you do next.

First thing worth pointing out, though, is this: we don’t actually know the shape of the whole deal at this point. Will Google keep the MOTO hardware business? Keep the patents and sell the hardware side? Keep both? It’s hard to know how their internal evaluation went, and what they’ll do from here, so a lot of this is really hard to speculate about.

Having said that, a few thoughts:

- it’s another instance in a long history of software (and now Internet) business devouring the previous generation’s hardware businesses. Internet business are inherently more leveraged: distribution power trumps almost everything else, especially in a phase where the technology portion is maturing.

- along those lines, it’s interesting to think about what happens next for Samsung, RIM, HTC, Nokia, but I’m way more interested in what the software players do. All eyes in that regard are on Microsoft, but I think the more interesting long term questions are for Facebook and Amazon.

- 2 things it’s clear that Google didn’t buy MOTO for: its margins or its ~20k employees.

- seems like Google definitely wanted the IP portfolio.

- and it seems to me that, assuming they keep the hardware business, that they want Motorola because it gives Google full control over the hardware and software stack, which is the only way that they’ll ever be able to even approach the excellent UX fit & finish of the Apple offerings. I feel like that’s one of the top drivers, and maybe the most important one over the long term.

- One other thing that this merger is decidedly not about is distribution — if anything, Google’s distribution power with respect to Android is somewhat weakened, at least in the short-to-medium term, as they’re undoubtedly going to cause some grief with partners Samsung and HTC. Feels like Google has calculated that control over getting the experience right trumps any distribution help they might get from their handset partners.

All of this lines up pretty well with my post about Screens, Storage & Networks last week — the last 60 days have seen Google push hard to get in the top tier on Screens (MOTO) and Networks (Google+).

My most esoteric point I’ve left for last, though: one of the unfortunate consequences of this development is that I think it will move perceptions of big corporations building open software (and in this particular instance, I’m specifically talking about open source software) at least a few more notches towards the cynical. The question that everyone will ask anytime a company tries an open experiment like Android in the future, the inevitable line of questioning will be: “Sure it’s open now, but for how long?” Whether premeditated or not, the path of Android has been from wide open to asserting more and more control — and this is another data point on that path. I’m not criticizing or indicting anyone for this — I think it’s essentially just a natural evolution and response to market conditions that require tighter integration. I think in a lot of ways it’s inevitable in technology networks for this to happen. (And I’ve written about it a bit before.) My only real sadness here is that it’ll move cynicism on corporate open source efforts up one more notch, and that’s not good.

Overall, though, fascinating day, fascinating time. Big moves!

Today at Greylock we announced that DJ Patil is joining us as Data Scientist in Residence, as far as I know the first time any VC has had a position quite like that. It’s a huge addition for us, and the expression of a bunch of deeply held beliefs about the state of the art in designing great products.

But as I talk about using data for design, I find that there’s a lot of misunderstanding about it — some people have the sense that it somehow makes designers less powerful, that you’re basing decisions based purely on mechanical measures rather than designer intuition and genius.

In my view, however, data is what makes designers not only strong, but primary. It’s what turns designers from artists into the most important decision makers in a company, because it’s understanding the data that lets you understand what your users are doing, how they’re using (or not using) your products, and what you can be doing better.

It made me think back a bit to my own training as a UX designer (we called it HCI then) at Stanford in the mid-nineties, when the field was just starting to develop. We would spent a lot of time on ethnography, need finding, doing paper prototypes and then doing basic mockups and user testing. And we’d get 80% of the way there then go and build it.

Nowadays, the state of the art is to still do need finding and some mockups early, but to get to a working prototype as quickly as you can, that’s instrumented so that you can tell what’s happening and figure out whether you’re on the right track or not.

I think that’s generally the right approach, but it’s worth noting: instrumented prototypes can really only get you to local maxima — they can help you find ways to tweak and optimize the basic design you’ve got, but they can never help you find a radically different and better solution.

So when I talk about using data — and I talk about it a LOT — what I’m talking about is a mixture of the artisan/designer-led designs along with using data to figure out what’s best.

Thinking about it the other day, I was reminded of one of my favorite sayings that I learned from Bob Sutton: “Fight like you’re right, listen like you’re wrong.” Bob’s an organizational theorist, and what he means is really a paraphrase of something that I think Andy Grove said, which is that he wanted all his people to have strong beliefs, loosely held. In other words, he always wanted people to come in with a point of view — a design, as it were — but to be willing to moved off of that point of view in the face of data.

So the modern, design oriented framing is this:

“Design like you’re right. Read the data like you’re wrong.”

In other words, you should always design the product you think/believe/know is what people want — there’s a genius in that activity that no instrumentation, no data report, no analysis will ever replace.  But at the same time you should be relentless in looking at the data on how people actually use what you’ve built, and you should be looking for things that show which assumptions you’ve made are wrong, because those are the clues to what can be made better. We all like to see all the up-and-to-the-right happy MBA charts, and those are important. But they don’t help you get any better than you already are.

I wish we taught more of this blend, because all of the products we use would get better.

So: design like you’re right; listen like you’re wrong.

But more and more, that’s not the way I’m thinking about my own systems; as devices proliferate at my own home, and as I tend to use tiny connected computers in more numerous and varied contexts.

I’ve been interested in what I call “4 screen & a cloud” products for a while: products that help us unify and take advantage of our laptop + phone + tablet + tv — but it all became a little clearer to me a few weeks when a wave of devices entered the house all at the same time. In the space of a few weeks, I upgraded to an iPad2, got a Samsung Tab to experiment with Android Tablets, got an Android phone in addition to my iPhone, and got a WebOS phone from the D9 conference. So we had all those devices in the house, plus our iMac, Kathy’s set of devices, and my mom’s as well, since she was visiting. Oh, and 3 Kindles between the three of us. Screens were everywhere.

Now, I’m the first to recognize that we’re somewhat atypical in our technology consumption in normal times; add to that the devices that I’ve picked up lately because of work and my house is a jumble of operating systems, devices and power adapters. Exciting!

When you get that many screens and devices, what happens is interesting: when you want to do something, communicate with someone, remember something, schedule an appointment, read a book, or whatever, you just pick up whatever screen is nearest to you and work from that.

Well, you do that if you can. Because in our current platform chaos, not all devices are fungible, not all activities are available from all platforms.

So that got me thinking some about what I need, and where, and in what contexts and on what devices, and now I think about platforms this way: I have a set of screens, a set of stuff, and a set of people that I want to do things with — and I want those sets available to me wherever & whenever I am.

By screens, I mean something more than just pixels: I really mean input & output systems, of which screens are the most visible parts; really it should probably be screens, sensors & speakers. In other words, it’s the displays of each system, the audio systems, and the ways that we indicate intent, be it typing, swiping, speaking, remote-button-puching, smiling, waving, running, or just being.

By storage, I mean something more than just bits: while Dropbox and iCloud and Clouddrive are important, I want to do more than just store and share my files with others. It’s about more than having a place to put my music. It’s about having the context of my life: my apps, my reading material, my history of shopping & interest intent. It’s really the things I’m creating, consuming, sharing, saving, working on and just thinking about. One of the things that’s probably non-obvious about this formulation is that for this to work, the storage is going to be pretty keyed to my identity. Without knowing something about who I am, it won’t work.

And by network, I mean something more than just my Facebook graph: what’s becoming clear is that we’ve all got many and diverse groupings in our lives, ranging from the very intimate groups of a nuclear family to the wide-ranging groupings of Twitter followers. The short version, though, is that it’s becoming increasingly clear that, just like in the offline world, people online want to do things with each other. Shocking, I know.

That’s the definition of platform that’s relevant to me: a combination of screens, storage and networks that help me do my work and live my life. The companies that see that true platforms transcend any one particular technology stack will be the ones that prosper — you can already see some interesting ones emerge.

As a side note, I think screens, storage & networks is one way to look at the landscape of the giants competing: it’s where Apple, Google, Facebook & Amazon are slugging it out (and to some extent it’s the evolution now of my old stomping ground, Mozilla). I would argue that each of the giants has a super strong position in 1 or 2 of the three areas, but none has a lock on all three, and most of the interesting initiatives of each are about strengthening the places where they’re historically weak.

Apple is obviously terrific at screens, okay at storage, and not very good at networks.

Google’s now strong at screens (although probably not as strong as Apple) and could be great at storage, and finally has a credible start on networks.

Facebook is incredibly strong at networks, has some weakness in screens, and is pretty good with storage (at least for things like photos).

And Amazon is very strong on storage, weak at networks, and weak (at the moment) on screens.

I’d argue that their relative strengths and weaknesses are  important for startups to understand as well, as that gives you a bit of a map of one set of opportunities.

Anyway, that’s how I’m thinking about things lately. What do you think?

Off the top, let me say this: I really love Twitter. A lot. I use it every day — I don’t always post things (although most times I do), but I always read and discover new things — it’s become integral to me in a bunch of ways. I share interesting articles about technology and startups and politics and literature that I find. I link to my blog posts like this one. I ask questions, mostly about travel and technology. I vent about things (I’m looking at you @unitedairlines). I talk about TV and music that I like. I track a bunch of my friends and coworkers and how they’re doing. And I make a lot of dumb jokes.

What’s clear at this point is that I’m not a particularly typical Twitter user. As services evolve, they find their main use cases, their reasons for existing. You’ve got Facebook for interacting with friends in symmetric ways; you’ve got Quora for getting high quality answers to questions; you’ve got Tumblr for expressing a synthesis of media that in aggregate represents you.

Twitter has evolved, I think, into essentially a celebrity broadcast medium. Now, I’m using the term ‘celebrity’ a little broadly — there are the Biebers and Gagas, of course, but there are also the CNNs and NPRs of news, and the Saccas of the tech world, and the long middle part of the curve of bands and critics and pundits that have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. It seems obvious to me at this point that this is really what Twitter is for: tracking our mega and mini broadcasters, being able to follow along in real time to see what they’re doing, writing and what they’re amplifying from others.

That’s part of how I use it, but I think that my use case is somewhat more complicated, which makes my tweets pretty atypical. My tweet stream is more like a mix of broadcasting, retweets, active conversations with friends, debates with other techies, and a bunch of snarky jokes.

I think there are a few reasons for this.

First, because I’m more of a “Twitter native” — that is, someone who’s been active on the system since the first million users, I’ve been part of the ‘figuring out’ conversations that have happened, mostly as a user. So I’ve gone through several generations of the product before it landed on celebrity broadcast as the center, and some of those generations of use case have really stuck with me.

Second, I developed a bunch of my patterns while I worked at Mozilla, a uniquely open organization where Twitter really fit. Because we don’t have a ton of internal systems for closed communications by design, we like to have conversations in the open, on public wikis, on open IRC channels, and on Twitter. And because I had management responsibility of a distributed, global organization, it helped me to kind of keep track of folks I wasn’t able to see every day. Beyond that, it let me have some interactions in a public way with people that I could model so that others would see them and (maybe) learn from them. In a lot of ways, I think of it as the modern equivalent of Managing by Walking Around, popularized by Hewlett-Packard long ago. It’s easy to brush off this use case as not real, but I really did use it a lot for helping to manage at Mozilla.

And while Mozilla is obviously unique in its openness, in a lot of ways the Silicon Valley ecosystem shares some of the characteristics, with lots of actors who are decentralized and distributed, working in different ways but able to share public communication channels like this.

The third reason I’m quirky in my use, I think, is that I make so many jokes on it. I’ve always been a guy that’s most comfortable at the back of the classroom making jokes. It’s not necessarily the part of my personality I’m most proud of, but it’s what I do. I’m happiest in the back, scribbling semi-related ideas to what’s going on, making jokes to myself or friends. Twitter gives me a pretty good way to do that sort of thing without being disruptive, and it’s fun for me.

I guess last is the fact that a lot of close friends also spend a fair amount of time on it, so keeping up with them and interacting with them there is fun and rewarding.

As I’ve moved up to 50k followers and past, I think it’s going to start changing how I use it a bit, for better or worse. It’s becoming somewhat more of a broadcast/audience thing and less of a group-of-friends thing. It remains extremely useful and integral to me, but probably will be so in different ways.

Anyway, enough for now — just thought I’d capture a few thoughts here that wouldn’t fit in 140 characters.

—

Adventures of the Mind 2011 Talk

A couple of years ago when I gave a talk for Adventures of the Mind 2009 in Princeton, I talked about how important the people around you are to success. Because you never know what the big decision points in your life are, it’s really hard to intentionally design your life. But you CAN design who you spend time with, and being around amazing people — always trying to put yourself into rooms with people who are smarter than you, even if it makes you feel bad — that that strategy will tend to mean that great opportunities will find you.

So that was a “HOW” talk. How to make sure to be around great choices in your life.

Today I want to give more of a WHAT & WHY talk. I always like starting with the punchline, so here’s the punchline for my talk: everyone in this room is amazing potential. But we need to move potential into action, into change, into improvement. Everyone in this room needs to think about how you want the world to be, AND THEN YOU NEED TO GO MAKE THE WORLD YOU WANT.

Make the world you want to live in. That’s the only way you get it.

But let me start by giving you a little background about me. When I was graduating high school 20 years ago and getting ready to go to Stanford, I figured I would be a physicist. That was the plan until about the 3rd problem set of my Stanford career, which was approximately the hardest thing I’d ever seen. It was immediately obvious to me that I could never be world class as a physicist, so I went looking for things I could be world class at. And my next stop for several years was computer science and user interface design, which I was pretty good at. But again, as I got out into the working world, it became clear again that while I could be really good at interaction design, there was no way I could be one of the best in the world at it. So, again, I went looking for what I was good at, and what I found was that I was really good at thinking about how to organize people, how to lead them, how to manage them. That I felt I could be world class at, and that’s been what I’ve done, working at startups in Silicon Valley for the 20 years since then.

I’ve meandered around doing interesting things with awesome people since then, but am best known at this point for the job before the one that I have now, as the CEO of Mozilla, who makes Firefox.

So how many of you have used Firefox?

And how many of you knew that it’s made be a tiny 300 person company that’s a non-profit?

I want to show you a short video about Mozilla, Firefox, and what a unique organization it is.

(video)

That’s what I’ve done over the last 5 or 6 years, and it’s been amazing. Just trying to make the web better, getting to about 450 million users in the world, breaking the Microsoft monopoly on browsers and operating systems. Making the world a little more like we wanted it.

It was sort of an accident that I ended up at Mozilla though — let me tell you that story: after my own startup, I was trying to find my next thing — I actually wanted to be a venture capitalist, which is what I am now, but in 2005 I couldn’t find the right place for me. I ran into Mitchell Baker, who ran the Mozilla project, then about 15 employees total, and told her I really liked what they were doing, and that I’d like to help. She said great! So we had this awesome brainstorming session, felt like we could make things better, I went home and wrote up this really long e-mail about what I thought she should do. And she never responded to me. This happened a couple of times, and I eventually said, “Shit. If I want to help, I probably need to go actually work there.”

But still I was on the fence.

Then something lucky happened: Mitchell invited me to go to a meeting with her and the other leaders at Yahoo (this was back when Yahoo was still marginally cool), where we would meet with Jerry Yang. So I tagged along, excited to meet Jerry. Well, he showed up 45 minutes late for an hour long meeting, and he started yelling at us right away. Long story about exactly why he yelled at us, but roughly it’s because people were adopting Firefox so quickly that it was causing Yahoo real market share problems. He yelled at us for a while, but I really wasn’t listening that closely, because it was then and there that I decided I had to join Mozilla full time.

I figured if we could get a billionaire to get so angry that he yelled at us, we were probably doing a bunch of things really, really right.

Since then I’ve discovered that it’s actually a lot easier than you might think to get billionaires to yell at you, but those are stories for another time, maybe once you’re all over 21.

Here’s my point: everyone expected me to go be a venture capitalist or start my next for profit company — but I accidentally found an opportunity at this weird, funky non-profit that gave me a massive chance to make the world a little closer to the way I wanted. So I couldn’t escape the gravitational pull, and signed up. Best decision of my career.

Let me shift gears – today I’m a partner at Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. We find interesting, early startups to invest in and help them grow into great companies that change the world. We’ve been very fortunate to find and work with some of the most successful companies in history, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Pandora.

(And I have to tell you quickly about one of the incredible companies we’re involved with that just announced – it’s a company called Lytro, and I figure they’re about to change photography forever, by introducing what’s called a ‘light field camera’ – a camera that doesn’t just take a picture of one plane of focus, but rather captures all the light rays in a scene at once, which means you can do things like focus the picture after the fact. Incredible.)

And these are incredible times in Silicon Valley and around the world, with technology having such a huge impact — more things are changing, for more people, more quickly than in any time in history. We’re going through a massive, and fast, revolution. Apple and Facebook and Google and Mozilla and others are changing the way we work, the way we communicate, the way we live.

There are 3 massive shifts happening all at one time:

1. The rise of ubiquitous and mobile computing: phones and tablets are going to be 10 or 100 times bigger than anything we’ve ever seen. Soon we’ll have 2 billion smart phones on the planet.

2. Social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn have connected everyone together, which means collaboration happens at a wicked fast pace. And it’s speeding up. You can get your products to hundreds of millions of people in a matter of days now. Think about that.

3. And we’ve figured out how to make the “cloud” work. So anytime you’re anywhere, from any device, you can get to your pictures, your data, your life.

Nothing like this has ever happened before. I can’t overstate how massive this is.

But we still have many choices to make. Do you want to live in an Apple defined world? Or a Google one? Or a Facebook and Twitter world? The point I’m trying to make is that technology choices have implications. Technology platforms have points of view. The choices that you make matter. And an Apple-y world is very very different than a Googley world. So which one of those do you want?

I suspect you all know that the answer is “none of the above” — as you all go become scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs and citizens, I hope you think hard not about whose technology world view you want to adopt, but rather what the world you want to live in looks like, and that you think hard about how to make that world happen.

For me, that’s the definition of creativity and entrepreneurship. Finding the things in our world that are broken, and then going and fixing the ones you care about.

So I hope all of you head into your next phase of life with the mindset of an entrepreneur, looking for things to fix, wondering why things aren’t the way they should be. And then going and making the world the way you want it to be by starting the next Facebook or LinkedIn or Kiva or Mozilla.

On Scaling: spent some time talking with a professor friend of mine over the past few weeks about how organizations scale to have massive impact; realized that there are fundamental differences in approach. On one side, you assume that the core that you have — yourself, a small org, whatever — is the essence and you want to extend that to the rest of the world — but in some way, the new converts will always be pale reflections of the core. On the other side, you assume that you’ve figured out how to do something interesting, and want to enable lots of other people to do it as well as unexpected and new things — so the assumption here is that by scaling you increase diversity, increase quality, and you get better overall as you get bigger, not weaker & thinner.

Not Understanding Modern Technology & Products: In an NYT article a month or so back, HBS professor David Yoffee said this: ‘“The problem for both Firefox and Chrome is how are they going to convince customers that they have a significantly better product, worth the hassle of actually going and downloading something that’s new and different.”’ This was very surprising to me — it’s such old thinking, not really in line with the way technology products (Internet products in particular) spread in today’s world. I don’t know Prof Yoffee, but in my view, technology products spread today much more like political campaigns and memes, not as careful, considered evaluations of whether other alternatives are better than what someone has today. I’m not putting a value judgement on that phenomenon at all, just noting it, and think that it’s worth exploring a bit.

Living Inside Everyone Else’s Greatest Hits Albums: just some thoughts about how status feeds are changing the way we think about other peoples’ lives, and our own. Maybe a profound observation, maybe a banal one, who can tell?

My First 4 Months in VC: I’ve been at Greylock full time now for about 4 months, have some initial observations and things to write about. Steep learning curve, very busy time (and also busy personally), but want to take some time to deconstruct the experience so far and share what I can. (I also have a post on why I joined Greylock in particular to write. Quick hint: it’s the same reason that Soylent Green tastes so delicious.)

Alone Together, by Sherry Turkle: Interesting book, finished it a while back but haven’t had time to write about it yet. Lots in there.

And then a few other odds & ends, including a great book I’m reading about the history of the Eastern Roman Empire from about 300 AD until 1500 AD. I get that this will be of incredibly limited and esoteric interest to even my nerdiest friends, but I’m loving it. Fish gotta swim.

Hopefully more soon. What else should I write about?

This is a fantastic book about how information empires rise and fall — everyone in technology industries should read it. Tim is a professor at Columbia Law School, and one of the most advanced thinkers about a number of technology network effects, but especially Net Neutrality.

It’s a history of various information technology waves, from the telephone to movies to television to the Internet, some analysis of what’s happening in today’s landscape with Google and Apple and others, and some of Wu’s suggestions for how to create more effective public policy in the future. I loved the first part (although I’m a technology history nerd of first order), and found the part about the current landscape interesting but already a bit out of date, and probably not as deep an analysis as I was hoping for. The prescriptions he outlines I thought weren’t quite right. I had a hard time really understanding how to think about the remedies he was suggesting, and how they could really work.

But overall, fantastic book, and has changed the way I think about technology waves.

While I was at Mozilla day-to-day, when I talked about open and closed systems, I would say something like this: new technologies (e.g. the PC, the smart phone, the tablet, etc etc) nearly always start closed and proprietary — it’s easier to create something completely new that’s innovative and disruptive if you control all the pieces, aren’t trying overmuch to play nicely with others. But then over time, technology tends to open up, as the techniques become more widely undertsood, horizontal layers come in to drive costs down and increase variety of solutions, etc. The interesting variable in every technology wave, I said, was how long and messy the “middle” between open and closed is — and of course, Mozilla’s mission with respect to the Web was to make the proprietary phase as short as possible, and get to open as quickly as we could.

After reading Wu’s book, I still think that’s essentially true, but not really the whole story. I now think technology waves tend to go from closed/proprietary to open and then back to closed, based around the strength of network distribution. In other words, and especially with communications and information technology, you tend to go from proprietary invention to open innovation and then things settle down as a small number of players control the distribution of content on their own networks based on the open technologies. These networks then tend to be few in number, and overwhelmingly dominant in their control over how people experience the technology and content.

The only thing that really unseats these networks is the rise of the next technology wave — that’s possible because successive technology waves tend to be much larger than what came before. That’s what’s happening now, with mobile completely overwhelming the previous waves of computing, being available to more people, more of the time, with more touch points in their lives.

And that’s why the fight between Apple, Google and Facebook is so, so fierce. Everyone is trying to move from the current wave of IT into the mobile one. Everyone is trying to become dominant, in order to take the wins from the network effects from the PC/Web battles and use them to win the next Mobile/Networked battle.

[As an aside, it's tough to imagine what technology wave will displace billions of people carrying smart phones (little network connected computers) around with them all the time, but what we do know is this: it will happen. Some giant new information tech wave will eventually make this mobile technology boom, which looks absolutely massive to us now, look small in retrospect. It's the nature of communications technology.]

Another thing that’s clear as you look at historical technology waves is that they’re getting shorter. Disruption is coming faster and faster. This, too, is an intuitive result. Each technology wave means that we’re able to communicate and collaborate more effectively and more quickly.

Companies that are dominant in one wave do not tend to be dominant in those following. They can be relevant, and even extremely relevant, but they don’t tend to dominate in the same way. Lots of reasons for that. They’ve got existing businesses to protect. They’re built on previous models of efficiency optimized for previous waves. They get big and complex and tired. I’m beginning to think that companies don’t dominate like this because not only are their innovators dilemma issues inherent in moving from one wave to the next, but also because you’ve got to not just jump waves, but also go through the closed-open-closed cycles of the new technology, and that’s an unnatural set of transitions to go through.

What I find so interesting about our current context — everyone who was dominant in the PC/Web era moving to the mobile era — is that they’re trying to jump directly to the closed network phase. Mobile systems right now look extremely vertically integrated, from services to servers to devices to content. I can’t yet discern the really open phase of mobile. I believe it will come, but it’s hard to see quite how right now, and I think this “open” battle between Apple and Google is really just prelude.

But who knows. It’s an exciting time to be alive and working. Every day I wake up and meet people who are building technologies and products that promise to completely rework the way we interact with our world and with each other. It feels like so much open water here; everything seems up for grabs.

I can’t recommend reading Tim Wu’s book highly enough. Whether you agree or disagree with any particular bit of it isn’t that important. Thinking about the technology waves that have come before help us think about what might come next, and how they might feel.

I talked with Mickey (the author) while I was taking time off between Mozilla and Greylock, right after I had written this blog post on disconnecting. I got connected to her via Bob Sutton, who’s in the article as well, and who’s always thoughtful and very quotable. Before I took off for vacation, my partner David Sze suggested to me that I totally disconnect from everything, saying that I would find the silence precious. He was right, for sure — but I just couldn’t really figure out how to do it. Too much of my life now is tangled up in e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, others. I think of myself as essentially an introvert, but I get a lot out of having the social connectivity that I do online. It’s all just become a part of my life that is very, very hard to turn off — it’s a little bit like turning off “talking to the neighbors,” at least for me.

I can’t really tell you if this is good, bad or indifferent — it is what it is. It does feel different than even a couple of years ago. As I mentioned in the article, it’s become a sort of “peripheral vision” — I can generally keep track of how people I care about and work with are feeling by reading what they tweet about and share on Facebook. How much they’re sharing is pertinent, too — you can sort of see some of the ebbs and flows of peoples’ lives.

One of the things that didn’t make it into the article is that I found engaging on Twitter indispensable for managing effectively at Mozilla. Hewlett & Packard used to talk about “managing by walking around” — the idea that the best way to understand what’s happening in an organization is just to walk around and observe it yourself. To meet people where they work, to talk with them about whatever is on their mind, to ask lots of questions. I really, really believe in doing that — more than being useful, I just really enjoyed doing it.

With so many Mozillians distributed around the world, living in Twitter became a modern sort of walking around for me. I followed and interacted with dozens of folks this way over the last couple of years. Clearly, not everyone was there — and we have a couple of other online forums that are probably even more important (IRC & Bugzilla) — but many were. And it was a great way to understand what was top of mind for folks, to understand who was feeling discouraged, who was feeling ready for new things. And just to commune with each other, really. I learned a lot by thinking about it that way.

Mozilla is unusual in its openness, so it’s hard for me to completely generalize from that experience — because of the open product roadmap and the open community involvement, doing all this stuff on the public internet was pretty natural. Obviously many (most?) companies won’t be able to do it quite like this. Conversely, I don’t think the closed, enterprise-only systems like Jive, Yammer & others are as diverse and rich in information (although they’re very clearly useful and will be successful). But as organizations become more agile, more distributed, more mixed in with other organizations in their processes and workforces, I think we’ll start to see tools that enable this peripheral vision or managing by walking around across boundaries that used to be more distinct.

Anyway, as to the main point of the article, I obviously haven’t really done much disconnecting at all. It was nice to try for a few days, but also felt like a lot of life was missing. For good or bad, for better or worse — this is life and work in modern times. We’re all learning together how to make sense of ubiquitous connectivity, of persistent projections of ourselves online, and the tensions between our physical world and our increasingly meaningful virtual one.

Huggy asked me to do a quick 10 minute introduction to the class. I chose to talk about the differences between then and now — how much has changed in the 5.5 years since Firefox’s initial 1.0, and what the new challenges of scaling are. So, naturally, my first comment to the students was that most of the case was irrelevant to today’s world. That Mozilla was amazing and unique and special — for lots of reasons that include (1) breaking the MS/IE monopoly distribution and usage of the browser, (2) doing it in a way that enabled lots of innovation and competition that we’re seeing now, and (3) finding our own way through the journey — not behaving like anyone else in the market ever really has. So that’s cool. In that battle, though, access to users was probably the biggest challenge — it looked impossible when Mozilla started, and it’s remarkable — incredible, really – that we ultimately have gotten the reach we have.

But fast forward to today’s world, where we have more than 600M users on Facebook, more than 400M users of Firefox, and networks like LinkedIn and Twitter with global reach of a hundred million or more. Combine that with the rise of the Apple App Store and mobile devices — with something approaching 200M user accounts that all have credit cards associated with them. (And if there’s any doubt, these numbers are truly huge. I put in some cultural references in my talk — about 100M people will watch the SuperBowl. And only about 20M watch the nightly news in America; 30M listen to NPR. We think of these institutions as huge, but they’re nowhere near Internet scale at this point. The new networks have left them behind, quite handily.)

So now a huge part of the world is accessible, a huge part of the world is ready and able to download an app or click on a shared link. Which means that access is no longer the chief initial obstacle to scaling. That means you can see companies like Zynga or Groupon rise from nothing to massive practically overnight. Clearly, the initial challenge is about rising above the noise of an increasingly crowded field of ways for people to spend their time and money, but it’s very, very possible to get to tens or hundreds of millions of users quickly. Which means that now you’ve got companies that are dealing with huge, complex, global user bases at an extremely early point in their history. My view is that scaling successfully — which means sustaining that scale over time — will be dependent on figuring out how to make the teams and processes in rocket ship organizations operate effectively.

I know not all the analogies in the slides are apples-to-apples, but what’s clear is that we’re living in an era of hyper-distribution, where things can change very, very quickly. I’m really glad that smart people like Huggy and Bob are thinking about how to help us all learn how to manage these in the future.

Fun conversation, thanks to Huggy for the invitation! My few slides are below — they’re very incomplete and mostly served to provoke some interesting discussion. (PS — the deck is sort of a tweener deck graphically between my Mozilla-style slides and what I’ll use here at Greylock — haven’t been here long enough to monkey with the Greylock slides yet. )

Today’s my last day at Mozilla (as a full time employee — I’ll continue to be on the Board of Directors), so I wanted to write down a bit of what I’m feeling as I get ready to go in to work. I’m writing this partly so that I can remember what it feels like — I’m finding that it’s quite an emotional time for me — and partly because I haven’t seen much like this around the web, on other people’s blogs.

Schrep likes to joke that of all job skills, I’m worst at quitting, and he always feels bad when he makes that joke, but he’s absolutely right, of course. It takes me a long time to transition. At Reactivity, I transitioned out over 4 months at the end of 2004; at Mozilla, it’s been very nearly a year since I first talked with Mitchell about moving on.

There are reasons for that, of course — it took a bit of time to organize our plans and the organization to be able to get through a transition, and we did a retained search in a relatively speedy 5 1/2 months.

But for me it was a basic equation: I really, really care about Mozilla, and, given the context that I was ready to move to my next thing, I wanted to do whatever I could to make sure that we’d get through the transition stronger than ever. I’ve been extremely fortunate to have the support and patience of both Mozilla and Greylock during this period — and it’s let us change in a way that I think has been very stable and should be good for the future.

It’s already obvious that Gary’s going to be an ouststanding CEO and team member for Mozilla — he’s already a great culture fit, asking questions that cut to the heart of things, and providing clear insights. He’s going to be great. Firefox 4, which is right around the corner, is an incredibly terrific product, both on desktop and mobile, that I think it validates our slow transition approach for the year. And we’ve got so many things coming from our product groups and labs that I’m certain next year will be transformative for the project, the organization, and the whole web.

As you might imagine, hiring a replacement for yourself is a particularly self-centered and self-reflective experience. For me, it caused me to spend a lot of time thinking about what I did well, what I screwed up, how the organization had changed over the years, how I’d changed over the years. It’s taught me a bunch about myself and what I care about, and how I want to live my work life in the future.

I wrote about leaving back when we first announced the CEO search, and all of that is even truer now. I’m proud of what we’ve done together at Mozilla, proud of how we’ve changed the world. I’ve got a deep gratitude to the whole community that let me come in and gave me the support to make my own mark on the project. And I’m really, really excited to watch the whole project change the world in new and amazing ways in the years to come.

Yesterday we were invited to the House of Commons here in London, and after a short speech by the Speaker of the House of Commons, 5 of us participated in a panel on the impact of digital technology on the future of democracies. About 100 people attended, including several MPs and members of the House of Lords, plus people involved in running the government and figuring out what to do with technology.

It was moderated by Jon Drori (fantastic job, and fantastic guy), and the Silicon Valley folks who participated were: Reid Hoffman, Megan Smith, Joi Ito, Nancy Lublin and myself. Each of the 5 of us started by giving a 5 minute ‘provocation’ to consider, then we ran it as a more traditional panel.

I’ll write more soon; for now, my provocation follows. Would love to hear what you think.

—

As I started preparing my remarks, I knew that I wanted to talk, in the main, about how technology can make our democracies better. But here, in the heart of British government, it’s impossible for me not to think about a couple of British authors and imaginers of future dystopias: George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.

With these 2 especially, it seems a particular talent of the British to imagine horrible dysfunctional futures. Orwell in his 1984, of course, with nightmares of totalitarian control and surveillance, and oppressive government imposed on unwilling citizens. Huxley, by contrast, in Brave New World, painted a completely different picture: a citizenry of sheep happily gorging themselves on the trivial, on entertainment — with no Orwellian Ministry of Information needed at all.

In a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, an American named Neil Postman figured out nearly 30 years ago that what we were going to get wasn’t Orwell’s world at all, but rather a version of Huxley’s. And while the British seem to be adept at imagining dystopias, I have to say that we Americans seem to be pretty handy at creating them. In the US now, we clearly live in Huxley’s world: news has become entertainment; political discourse, when not an oxymoron, tends to be shallow. So many of the institutions and processes that have served us well for hundreds of years are breaking down.

Much of this is due to the nature of digital technology and the Internet, allowing massive amounts of new conversation, of news without context. The thing that digital technology is best at is closing gaps: in time, in space, in relevance — and that has put real stress on our institutions. Technology is not neutral — it makes many things easier, but also many things more difficult. There are winners and losers.

Clay Shirky, writing on the massive dislocations occurring today in the newspaper industry wrote: “That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in place.”

And things do feel broken today, in many ways — the forces of dystopia seem to be on the rise.
But even so, there is a lot — A LOT — to be optimistic about. The hints of a positive future show all around us. The seeds of utopia are in the ground, so to speak.

• Take FixMyStreet, here in the UK — collective intelligence to help find and fix problems.
• And Ushahidi, which started in Kenya but has become global.
• And CrisisCommons.org to coordinate responses to crises around the globe.
• And the Sunlight Foundation, which resulted in support for OpenCongress.org among many others.
• And even the directive to all US agencies to break down barriers to transparency, participation and collaboration, which President Obama signed on his very first day in office.

So clearly there are real opportunities here, shaped by the natural affordances of Internet and digital technology.

What we know from the work we’ve done at Mozilla on Firefox and other open source projects, is that the way we organize, the technology we use, and the customs we support — what Tim O’Reilly has called “architectures of participation” — matter greatly. Architectures of participation, like technologies themselves, aren’t neutral. Projects like Wikipedia and Mozilla Firefox have architectures that are designed to bring in collaborators from everywhere, at every level. We have very serious contributors who spend most of their time working on the core. We have nearly 100 teams working on localizing Firefox into their own language. We have entrepreneurs building companies based on extensions to the browser. We have tens of thousands of people who test our browser each night and report issues. And we have hundreds of millions of users. We’ve built architectures of participation to get people engaged in as many ways as we can.

So what’s the future utopia that’s possible with digital technology? Ideally what we get — what we create — is a system where citizens are engaged, where they feel valued and connected with their governments and each other. Where our leaders are accountable — and desire to be accountable. It’s a future where it’s just as easy to help your neighborhood as it is to help your country or your planet.
To get there, we’ll need to architect with a few key principles in mind:

1. Transparency – where most of today’s efforts are, and critical to how we start
2. Clarity – flip side of scale – not the same as transparency — often, transparency of information can overwhelm — without a narrative, without intent, it’s very difficult to understand the implications of the transparency itself
3. Engagement – get everyone more educated and informed and contributing – get subject experts involved
4. Scale – must consider neighborhood government to municipal to national to transnational
5. Heterogeneity – life is increasingly cross-border, in all senses – trans-national – trans-company – mixture of public and private life

So my provocation turns out to be more of an exhortation, a call to action. As technologists and entrepreneurs and leaders of government, it’s our opportunity — and our responsibility — to imagine and articulate good, positive architectures of government, to engage with our colleagues and neighbors and coworkers and constituents to envision robust models for the future, in the context of ubiquitous, cheap, immediate information technology — and then to get on with making the world the way we want it.

This introduction is the culmination of a search process that’s taken us about six months — we were quite broad in our search, as we knew it would be tough to find someone who could blend technology leadership and operational excellence with an ability to understand what’s special about how Mozilla works, and who could really help develop the whole organization.

We’ve talked with many people through this process — most of them were exceptionally talented in many ways. But Gary’s a special person for the CEO role, and here’s why:

• He’s a veteran of the Web and rich media — he’s been at the center of several cycles at Macromedia/Adobe and recently Sybase/SAP
• He’s got a deep background in mobile over the last 5 years or so — that’s an incredibly important area where we’ve got a lot to prove in the coming years
• He’s been involved in changing big organizations, and with those organizations changing the bigger landscape — Macromedia, Adobe & Sybase

So he’s got deep background in the battlefields that will define the future of the Open Web: mobile and rich media, and he’s been involved in building great organizations several times over.

But beyond all that, it’s his personality and humanity that really made us feel like he’d be a great fit for Mozilla. He’s a great communicator and a great listener. He understands that Mozilla is a unique organization, with unusual strengths and weaknesses, and really embraces that difference. But he’s also ready and able to help us do more with what we’ve built, and deliver even more towards Mozilla’s mission of making the Web more participatory and more open.

Please join me in welcoming Gary to the global Mozilla community.

I’ve written about my trip there before on this blog; they’ve also put up a page with a video about our conversation there on Transparency. It was a unique and amazing experience — and an interesting conversation and day took place. As the video makes pretty clear, a lot of people came in with the expectation of talking primarily about physical and architectural transparency, but I’ve been more interested in transparency as a metaphor — as a way to live your life, as a way to manage organizations. A lot of interesting ideas came out of the blending of physical and metaphorical ideas of what transparency is.

Of course, in my time at Mozilla this has been a theme we’ve come back go again and again, as we try to learn and discover how to lead effectively in an organization built on ideals of transparency. (That isn’t the only ideal, and there are many others that it interacts with regularly, but it is an important one for us.)

Leading transparently is often hard – it’s tough to know how to be most effective, how to get things done – and often, being transparent seems to be counterproductive. John Maeda, after spending his first year as President of RISD trying to be as transparent as possible, wrote this piece on transparency versus clarity, and a lot of things clicked for me as I read it – I’ve come back to it often over the past year or so.

And then the Wikileaks/Afghanistan papers situation occurred — and while leaking confidential information is nothing new, I think that the scope of the information leaked, and the way that it was leaked, is something that is quite modern. It raises a serious question: is it even possible to keep secrets in organizations and governments now? Should it be? Is this new transparency good, destructive, a little bit of both, or is it just too early to tell?  Jeff Jarvis posted a nice piece for thinking about this a couple of weeks back.

I’ve got lots of thoughts here, as you might imagine — living and breathing Mozilla over the past 5 years has made some things very clear and others not so much but not that many answers myself, so I’d love to hear (and engage with) a broad range of thoughts on this during the week.

I’m very happy to be moderating this Glass House Conversation online. Please contribute.

I’ll be in my role here at Mozilla until we conclude a successful search for a new CEO, and intend to stay involved and on the Board of Directors.

I’ll have more to say about Mozilla over the next few months as we go through transition — I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve done over the last several years, and very optimistic about what the future holds.

And I’ll have  more to say about Greylock as I move into my new role there. Venture investing is what I’ve wanted to do for quite a long time — I’ve been involved in many startups, even building an incubator a decade ago, and have interests that span enterprise, open source, and the broader web, among others. I’m incredibly excited to join an amazing team there — it’s a firm that I’ve noted to be incredibly strongly oriented towards entrepreneurs — it really matches my sensibilities as an operator extremely well.

Will be blogging and tweeting (@johnolilly) as per normal — more soon. Below is the letter I sent to everyone here at Mozilla, who I am deeply indebted to and proud of.

Everyone,

As my five year anniversary at Mozilla approaches, I’ve decided that it’s time for me to move on to my next role sometime later this year. This won’t happen today or tomorrow — I expect to be here and working for several months yet, and I’m planning to stay on the Board of Directors.

This is a tough note for me to write — I feel so incredibly lucky and humbled to have worked on such an amazing project, with such spectacular people, for the last few years.

But I’ve always been a startup guy at heart — Mozilla was originally going to be a quick volunteer effort for me, but quickly turned into a full time job, and at the beginning of 2008 turned into the CEO job that I have now. I’ve really been missing working with startups, and want to learn how to invest in and build great new startups, so am planning to join Greylock Partners as a Venture Partner once we transition here.

I’m in no rush, and the most important thing to me is to build the strongest Mozilla we can, with the best leadership possible. So my plan is to stay through that transition — we’re starting a CEO search now, and plan to do it in as transparent a way as possible — which means I’ll continue in my CEO role as normal for several more months, at least.

I’ll have more to say on the transition as we figure things out more clearly, but for now, business as usual. We’ve got Firefox 4 to ship, and Firefox on multiple mobile platforms. We’ve got our web services like Weave to stand up and make available to millions of users.

For now, though, I really want to communicate a deep gratitude to each of you — over the past few years we’ve done an amazing amount together, and changed the world in so many meaningful ways. 400 million users are directly touched every day by the work we’ve done so far, and many, many more are using better browsers because of our work. There are many more contributions and victories to come.

John