> It's got to be enough to attract someone with extensive management experience at a high-functioning tech company so to me the absolute floor would be like $500k unless the person is retired and doing it for fun/charity.
> Or do people not think they need a particularly qualified CEO and would be fine with a more democratic governance model?
This line of logic is so prevalent in the world, and isn't evidence-based. The idea that a desire to be compensated a specific amount always correlates with competence & that advertising a position with a higher salary will tend to attract people with a higher competency.
This thinking is likely to have some truth below a certain threshold, at which point people don't have sufficient income to live comfortably and as such have a need-based approach to raising their own salary. This rarely applies at CEO-level.
It sounds like you're arguing that Mozilla could attract a more competent CEO while paying them much less.
How?
Who?
Would you find someone who hasn't previously run a large, innovative tech org? How would you determine that they'd be good at this job? (Remember, switching costs for CEOs is high).
> It sounds like you're arguing that Mozilla could attract a more competent CEO while paying them much less.
The current CEO is well remunerated and seems by many popular accounts to lack competence, so this seems like a relatively low bar as bars go.
> How?
Hiring competent staff at any level is a challenge and depends on many things; there's no magic bullet. I at no point argued that hiring a competent CEO was easy, just that linking salary to competence as part of that hiring process is a faulty metric.
I'd say refining any hiring process by removing faulty metrics would be a good thing. Wouldn't you agree?
I've seen companies overpay for mediocre talent and assume that'll get them good work. Obviously doesn't work – you're right that high salary does not _cause_ high competence.
But if someone truly competent has an offer from the Google Chrome team and an offer from Mozilla, and Chrome can offer 10x more, well, you want to do the best you can.
"well" is not relative to average, it's relative to requirement.
> But if someone truly competent has an offer from the Google Chrome team and an offer from Mozilla, and Chrome can offer 10x more, well, you want to do the best you can.
"Competency" is a complex (& somewhat subjective) thing when it comes to leadership, but if that's your candidate's sole criteria for seeking the role, I wonder if that's who you want running Mozilla. You forget that this swings both directions: motivators are extremely important in leadership of any company, not least one with Mozilla's rights-based values.
Someone with a deep passion for building an amazing browser could reasonably be assumed to also be head-hunted by the Chrome team (and Edge, and Brave, etc...) as well as probably other, non-browser companies that just want their competence. They may also have a passion for supporting the open web, being nice to humans, etc, but they'll still have to justify to their spouse/family why they're turning down the other offers of much more money.
The perfect person could exist here but it's starting to look like very steep odds.
I'd be more for angling at someone with a deep passion for the differentiating factors between Firefox & Chrome (or more specifically, between Mozilla and Alphabet).
If someone has a deep passion for building an amazing browser but lacks any appreciation for why building Firefox might be more worthwhile than building Chrome, then I'd hope they would go work for the Chrome team, as I would not expect them to prioritise aspects of Mozilla's business strategy that differentiate their products.
Or in other words: is there any point in Mozilla existing if they ape Chrome/Google/Alphabet in their approach?
> Or do people not think they need a particularly qualified CEO and would be fine with a more democratic governance model?
This line of logic is so prevalent in the world, and isn't evidence-based. The idea that a desire to be compensated a specific amount always correlates with competence & that advertising a position with a higher salary will tend to attract people with a higher competency.
This thinking is likely to have some truth below a certain threshold, at which point people don't have sufficient income to live comfortably and as such have a need-based approach to raising their own salary. This rarely applies at CEO-level.