My 365 day journey of becoming a Mozillian
My name is Darren Herman and I’m the Vice President of Content Services at Mozilla. I can be found at @dherman76 on Twitter. This is the first time I’m telling this story publicly and the first time my team is seeing it. I am blessed to work with such an amazing group of individuals and hope you can all relate to the below.
Today is just after my one year anniversary at Mozilla, but only now do I feel like I could consider myself a Mozillian. Maybe other Mozillians won’t consider me one yet, but at least I’m on my way. As I fly back from #mozlandia, our official all-Mozilla meeting in Portland, I have begun to reflect on this.
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I remember back to my first day on the job in Mountain View that it felt amazing to be a Mozillian. At that time, I did not realize that I was not a Mozillian but I was just a new employee at Mozilla who was just starting the journey to become a Mozillian.
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My past year has been turbulent, exciting, devastating, inspiring, unbalanced, curious, stressful, and amazing. I never thought you could group those words in the same sentence but those were all emotions I felt over the past year.
The majority of the senior executive team that I interviewed with and which hired me are now gone. The inspiring technologist and inventor of Javascript who many of us came to work for unfortunately left… Scary in my eyes.
One of my most intense moments of emotions was when I felt a sense of inspiration and excitement when I took the stage at the IAB Leadership Summit back in February to talk about Mozilla’s intentions within the advertising ecosystem. The talk at the conference was well received and I was in my glory moment.
Maybe an hour after I walked off stage, the reality of my new role set in to Mozilla. Mozillians, the community, and many users erupted at me, almost like the human immune system reacting with a toxin. My flight back to New York from the IAB Summit was filled with dozens of emails with our communications team to figure out how to calm a storm I created. Mozilla getting into advertising? No fucking way.
In my head I was thinking to myself… I came to Mozilla to evolve the advertising industry and content space but what I’m trying to do is constantly rejected? WTF. Why am I here? And more so, I left one of the best roles on Madison Avenue thanks to the generosity of my former employer for this?
I received threats from our community. I received flaming emails. I received a lot of resistance.
It was time to re-evaluate my time at Mozilla so I did. I went to my coach, my wife, my brother, my father, and my mentors and we chatted. Per their feedback and my decision process, I quietly resigned and I continued an old conversation with a pre-IPO hot company to take a c-level role doing things I had former comfort in and with a leader who I respect more than 99% of people I’ve ever met.
By the end of this December, my plan was to exit Mozilla and start in 2015 at the new opportunity.
But something funny happened to me on the way to Mountain View for the 10th Anniversary of Firefox.
In the weeks leading up to the 10th Anniversary, my work life at Mozilla started to change a bit. My team had grown from back in February and we’d shipped code. We’d launched Tiles with some commercial partners and landed the Interest Dashboard in the AMO. In an engineering culture this is the holy grail, much more than talking about something or even showing mockups. We shipped code. We fucking shipped code.
I’m not going to say that we got all the respect in the world inside of Mozilla, but I started getting less hate mail, the tweets became positive, and the community became super curious.
I also began talking different. It’s weird to say that and it was something I never realized earlier this year. I used words that were second nature to me but not second nature to Mozilla. I used words that scared people. Hint: don’t ever say synergy. I tweaked my vocabulary. Had I done this for my talk at the IAB Leadership Summit, I would have probably had 90% less issues, but hindsight is 20/20.
My team, which is probably the smallest (but growing) inside of Mozilla, started to snowball. We were knocking off bugs. We got momentum in the press. Our talks with commercial partners for selling advertising tiles was beyond well received. There was real hope in all of our eyes that we could begin to change this ecosystem.
At around 6am PST on November 10, I walked into the Mountain View office for the big 10th Anniversary celebration with anticipation that this would be my last time in Mozilla Mountain View but all of the emotions from above started to hit me.
I texted my absolutely amazing wife and said that it was bittersweet that I was leaving Mozilla now as the hard part was probably mostly behind us. I’d resigned a month or so earlier but I actually now might want to stay.
I was given 5–10 minutes during our celebration to talk about what Content Services was doing in front of all Mozillians. Hundreds of Mozilla employees were physically present and others were connected over our Vidyo conference system. I asked my team to join me on “stage” (no real stage) as I went thru a slide deck of some of the products we’d launched and landed and for the first time, we got an applause; what I interpreted to be a real-one. After the talk was over, Mozillians that I had never met before came up to me and said things like: I can’t believe you’re still here but we’re lucky to have you, I now get what you’re trying to do and holy shit it’s cool, and we know this was a hard year for your team and you but hang in there.
It felt good. So good that I went into my transition meeting later in the day and the meeting lasted less than 5 minutes. I decided to stay at Mozilla and Chris Beard, our CEO gave me a second chance and vouched his support.
Fast forward. #mozlandia
I believe it was Chris who had the genius idea to bring 1200–1300 Mozilla employees to Portland this past week. We had a rough year, collectively due to management changes, etc, and thought that bringing us all together would strengthen our bonds and get us aligned for 2015.
A few things clicked for me at #mozlandia that make me feel like a Mozillian.
- I gave a presentation to all of Mozilla on the big stage one morning and there was applause and laughs. I had the most dangerous subject (advertising) and showed a disruptive path forward that was received.
- I met many different teams over the course of the week and proved I was human. So I think. I shared a beer with people who had called me out on Twitter earlier in the year and while we probably aren’t best drinking buddies yet, we didn’t kill each other either. We listened to each other and had constructive conversations.
- I saw the passion in my teams eyes about what we’re aiming to tackle which is monumental and not easy. But the passion is there and we are all aligned.
I feel stronger than ever that Mozilla is an amazing place. We have a real mission that’s not encumbered by another person, investor, shareholder, or partners priority. Our mission is probably as true and noble as one could be.
It took me a year to truly understand this and I’m still learning each day. If you are reading this and witnessed this all happening over the last 365 days, I thank you for your support. Thank you for showing me the Mozilla way. Thank you for continuing to nurture me into the culture.
Showing is worth more than talking. Watch our code. It’s open. And fucking amazing. Get ready. I’m excited for 2015.
