alt Hacker NewsThis has nothing to do with the founder status.
Founders don’t face any competition when they get the job at their own companies, and they often have ownership to force it as an outcome if there’s ever a debate.
Baker, to her credit, probably faced brutal competition to get to the top job. It’s not out there to wonder why she was picked, and the answer cannot be because « she was there from the beginning ».
HN tends to like people who have a certain understanding of product and technology. Baker’s legal background probably didn’t help put forward her other skills, hence the questions.
If the argument is based on trends your personally noticed on HN, then I’m afraid there’s not much to discuss.
Replies
> Baker, to her credit, probably faced brutal competition to get to the top job. It’s not out there to wonder why she was picked, and the answer cannot be because « she was there from the beginning ».
You are completely discounting her founder status. She wasn't "there from the beginning", she /created/ the Mozilla Foundation and led it from inception to 2025 and later orchestrated the Mozilla Foundation / Mozilla Corporation split structure (which was the first of its kind and has later been used by other institutions). She was the primary author of the Mozilla Public License. She was the Legal mind behind rescuing the codebase from Netscape by going open source.
In one breath you say this has nothing to do with founder status, because founders are founders, and then completely discount that Mitchell is a founder.
There are MANY valid reasons to criticize Mitchell's tenure at Mozilla, and I haven't seen anyone in this larger thread bring up anything of substance when there are several such things available and well known. Instead this is just a "just asking questions" style of shade-throwing that is unequally applied, and can only be presumed to be because Mitchell is a woman.
It turns out the person I originally replied to didn't even get their women in open source correct, because they were talking about GNOME Foundation and not Mozilla, but I can be forgiven for the mistake as I thought them calling Mitchell a "witch" was a joke about her legal first name Winifred, that she has avoided going by in part due to people taking her more seriously because Mitchell is a gender-ambiguous name. Clearly they have no rational and real basis for criticism if they can't even accurately identify which woman they want to make sexist comments about.
I would encourage you and the person I originally wrote my reply to to both pause and do better.
> Baker, to her credit, probably faced brutal competition to get to the top job. It’s not out there to wonder why she was picked, and the answer cannot be because « she was there from the beginning ».
Baker was Mozilla Foundation's president from founding to 2025. She was Mozilla Corporation's CEO from founding to 2008, interim CEO from 2019 to 2020, and CEO from 2020 to 2024.
You think there was brutal competition for Mozilla Corporation CEO in 2020?