Bottoms Up!

I’m Dave Bottoms (aka “db”), one of the newest — yet oldest — fans and supporters of Mozilla. I officially joined the MoCo marketing team in mid-June, the day after the Firefox 3 launch and all the buzz around Download Day. What an amazing time to start! And while i’ve been super-busy meeting new people, getting up to speed and planning for the coming quarters, I can’t help but dwell a bit on some past experiences.

I got hooked on how cool and utterly essential the browser is back in ‘95 (note: i’m at the non-technical end of the spectrum, having studied English Lit vs. Engineering). I’d been toying with the Web and hosted the occasional forum discussion on (a-hem) Compuserve. The first couple dozen issues of Wired were probably the most influential reading of my post-collegiate years. Then on August 9, 1995 a few seemingly unrelated things happened: Jerry Garcia died, Netscape had a groundbreaking IPO, and i turned 25. For a young journalist based in Cleveland, the allure of the Bay Area was like a gravitational force. Not only did i want to hang with the Deadhead faithful in Golden Gate Park, but with SF quickly becoming the hub for budding webheads, i wanted in on the action.

By October, i was driving down highway 101 to Mountain View to visit Netscape. It was my first official day as the Silicon Valley bureau correspondent for IndustryWeek and i’d scored a plum assignment: write a cover story featuring Jim Clark as the magazine’s “Technology Leader of the Year.” Not only was i just plain glad to be *in* Silicon Valley, but got to spend a couple hours listening to Clark wax poetically about how Netscape had come to be, where the Internet was going and how the browser was truly transformational software.

Fast forward a dozen years and pretty much no one i know remembers IndustryWeek. More to the point, it wasn’t Dr. Clark who had the biggest influence my personal trajectory; it was actually Chris Holten, one of the workhorses of Netscape’s PR corp. She essentially told me: ‘you can either write about the Internet from the sidelines, or dive in and get involved.’ A few months later, I joined Netscape’s PR team.

Sure, i learned a few things about PR. But more broadly, Netscape taught me about the process of software development, the importance of open standards, security, and user privacy, as well as the critical role of public policy in the Internet era. I eventually moved into product marketing for Communicator and was lucky enough to have a front row seat for the creation of mozilla.org and the release of the source code in ‘98. (I still have “Code Rush” in my video library).

The Silicon Valley phase of my career began at a time when the browser was the great enabler of people (both developers and users) and emerging business models; it was (and still is) an incredibly strategic piece of software in an increasingly web-centric world. But like many friends and former colleagues, i left Netscape after the AOL acquisition in ‘99 to try the the start-up thing for a few years at Tellme Networks.

Then i spent 6 years at Yahoo!, driving marketing programs for a number of products including Y! Toolbar (then called “Companion”), the My Yahoo! redesign (complete with RSS), the front page redesign, the launch of the Ajax-powered Y! Mail and a stint with the Advanced Products team in the SF Brickhouse (i do miss south park). Yahoo! was a really great place to develop as an Internet marketer because the company is generally data-driven and values consumer insights. I went a lot broader and deeper in understanding the many dimensions of marketing thanks in large part to some really smart folks there.

So it was somewhat ironic that i “rediscovered” Mozilla. I’ve been a Firefox user / fan / advocate since 1.0, and have nursed a mild aversion to IE for at least a decade. The more i thought about it, i relize just how dramatically the browser landscape has changed in recent years. A decade ago we simply couldn’t imagine a world with north of 1.4 BILLION Internet users — that’s what makes NOW a really exciting time to join Mozilla. We can only begin to wonder what the landscape will look like in another 10 years.

…Hopefully by now the “what’s old is new” cliche makes sense. While the game may have changed since my Netscape days, i’ll (probably) try to to run some of the best marketing plays i’ve picked up along the way. A lot of my near-term focus will be on better understanding untapped market segments (your thoughts & opinions welcome), how to raise awareness and drive downloads, and identifying new growth opportunities in the US as well as emerging markets.

One month in and it feels like a sort-of homecoming — i “sort of” know what’s going on (bear with me) but still have a lot to learn. What I love about Mozilla is the smallness of the physical space but the largeness of the virtual space it occupies. I am truly excited about the mission, the open source development philosophy and believe it is the vibrant, participatory community that really differentiates Firefox (the product) and is embodied by thousands of contributors and millions of users (the people) around the world.  Look forward to working with you all to spread Firefox.

BOTTOMS UP!