Blake Ross - About Me

I'm a 21 year-old software engineer and entrepreneur living in Mountain View, CA, which is the Times Square of Silicon Valley except that there are no lights or people and everything closes at 7:30. I¡¯m best known for cofounding Firefox, an open-source and non-profit web browser developed by thousands and downloaded by over 200 million people worldwide. That was a few years ago.

I grew up in Miami, FL and began dabbling in software at age 3, although it wasn¡¯t official until I took a job with Netscape at 15. Since people always complain that high school is too normal and comfortable and non-alienating, I decided to make it interesting by working across the country at a place with people much older than me and being driven there by my mother in her purple PT cruiser. It was very embarrassing¡ªthe product Netscape was shipping, I mean. I spent many summers working on the widely reviled versions 6 and 7 of its namesake browser and some other projects that, for the safety of the general public, were never released.

Books have been written on why Netscape failed: Microsoft, the IPO, the AOL acquisition, the fact that it¡¯s built on a toxic wasteland. My own experience suggests it was a nasty cocktail of hubris, laziness, greed and apathy that much of the software industry seems drunk on. Okay, and maybe the trichloroethene played a role. But some developers were so immersed in their own technology that they couldn¡¯t even imagine it through someone else¡¯s eyes; others were simply too lazy or too arrogant to bother. As the family tech support, I¡¯ve had the chance to see software through the eyes of four generations. It always looks the same: tantalizing potential masked by opaque geekspeak, countless settings and bizarre questions that no sane person should ever have to think about. Or, as my family likes to say: computers suck.

After high school, I moved permanently to California to attend Stanford. As a freshman, I created a new kind of phishing defense codenamed PwdHash in collaboration with Professor Dan Boneh. Our paper on the software was published in the 2005 Usenix Proceedings, and in August 2006, after much help from some friends, the program won ComputerWorld¡¯s Horizon Award.

At Stanford, my penchant for brutally awkward situations kicked in again, so I taught computer science as a freshman to a small room full of large students who were either older than me or much older than me. They really loved that, in a purple PT cruiser kind of way, but I think I eventually won their trust through gritty determination and 742 free slices of pizza. On the first day, I asked if any of them had heard of Firefox (called Firebird at the time). Only one hand went up, and it might have been mine.

Much has changed since then. Last year, Interbrand named Firefox one of the top ten brands in the world alongside Apple and Starbucks; nearly 15% of the world¡¯s Web users are using it. About a tenth of all Firefox downloads come through SpreadFirefox, an initiative I conceived and cofounded in 2003 with Asa Dotzler as a way to launch Firefox on a shoestring budget via word of mouth. The site has since been emulated over a dozen times through efforts like SpreadOpenOffice, SpreadKde and SpreadBread. According to last quarter¡¯s statistics, Firefox still trails bread. We will get there.

Although my work in software is heavily inspired by my friends and family, I try hard to keep them separate. Before people knew I worked on Firefox, I could watch them use it and learn in a kind of impromptu (okay, and creepy) usability study. In 2004, Business 2.0 blew my cover among my family when they turned my bedroom into a set. In 2005, Wired blew my cover among everyone else by plastering my mug on its own cover. The magazine also nominated Ben Goodger and me for its Renegade of the Year award opposite Jon Stewart, Howard Stern and the Google founders. We lost to Howard Stern, and it never gets old saying that. ¡°What a day. We¡¯re out of milk, AND we lost to Howard Stern.¡±

On the day that The National Enquirer profiled me next to a Martian baby who may or may not have been the offspring of Brad Pitt, I officially stopped trying to predict where life would take me next. Last year I became an author with Firefox for Dummies and founded a new company with fellow Firefox engineer Joe Hewitt. I¡¯ve been on leave from Stanford since spring 2005 to build it.

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