Mozilla CEO says it’s too soon for the next Google
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Business, Futures, Microsoft on
No-one has made a business out of Web 2.0 - not in the traditional sense of business success, the IPO. Nearly $30 billion has gone into Web 2.0 startups since 2001; why haven’t we seen a business success there? Mozilla CEO John Lilly thinks we’re looking for the wrong things and asking the wrong questions about what it means for a business to succeed today.
“I would say this is one of the questions of our time,” he told us; “like what does it mean to have a career, what does it mean to do meaningful work?” He’d count Mozilla as a success; they might be fish out of water” at big-name events like Google IO and All Things Digital (where he says “we were the only non profit that went up on stage”) but that’s not the important thing. “For Mozilla, we made the decisions be a public benefit because we thought the Web was too important to leave just to purely commercial interests. We created what’s effectively a hybrid company; we compete in the market but we have this non profit mission and I think we’re pretty successful by any measure other than our revenues. ”
Mozilla Labs is probably unique; Lilly doesn’t expect exactly the same model to work for any other company, but there are plenty of opportunities, even in this financial climate. “I believe there will be more companies that start on less money and require less cash flow to be successful. I believe you’ll see those. Craigslist is one of them.” Anyone else? Yes, he says. “OpenTable went up and did IPO. Craigslist is a going concern; they’re dominant and being incredibly influential. Facebook is minting money. In China you’ve got Tencent QQ. You’ve got any number of companies that have changed the world and are making reasonable cash flow.”
But what about the big success that all the venture capitalists were hoping for, with those $30 billion. That’s a coded question, he says, and what thinks it really means is “Will we see another Google or Microsoft? Well, we hadn’t seen another Microsoft till we saw Google. Microsoft emerged and got giant in the mid 80s; Google emerged and got giant in the mid 2000s. Before that, I’m not sure what you look at before Microsoft, maybe Data General or maybe DEC but it’s probably in the 60s or the 50s. These are once-a-generation companies. Asking ‘where the hell is the next Google, why hasn’t it shown up yet?’, I think, is premature.”
-Mary
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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