PKB

beginnings

numen (n(y)oo’-men) n. a spiritual force or influence often identified with a natural object, phenomenon or locality (pl. numina)

So this is the part of the blog where I tell you who I am.

I’m the father of a de-lovely two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and the husband of a gifted artist. I live in Oakland, California, home to (in no particular order) Jack London, Angela Davis, Children’s Fairyland, Ishmael Reed, Lake Merritt, MC Hammer and Del tha Funkee Homosapien.

I’m the new director of product marketing for Mozilla Corporation, and I am damned happy to be here.

It’s a dream job for me, and it’s going to be an adventure spreading the word about who Mozilla is and why what we do matters.

I’ve worked in technology for most of my career. My first job after college was as an interactive scriptwriter and associate product manager at Spectrum HoloByte, where we made computer games based on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I left Spectrum after several years to work for the Milarepa Fund. Milarepa was hosting the first Tibetan Freedom Concert in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. I remember the guys from Sonicnet set up a live webcast from the shows, although how they managed to pull that off in 1996, in the middle of the park, still boggles me. It was a beautiful two days in every sense. Greets to the M. crew if you are reading this now in 2005.

After helping to start up a television advertising company, I worked for two years as an independent web producer. Then it was off to business school, and product marketing at Adobe Systems, where I launched PageMaker, InDesign CS PageMaker Edition and Creative Suite 2.

Which brings us to today.

My intent is to use this blog to promote Mozilla’s mission, and to demystify how we make our marketing decisions. I read a number of marketing blogs, and I’m struck by how much is presumed about the level of inside knowledge a reader already has about the practice of marketing. I’ll try as much as I’m able to share what I’ve learned over the past several years of school and work when I post about things we’re doing.

I’m glad to be here as part of the Mozilla community.

18 Comments so far

  1. seamus October 28th, 2005 5:02 pm

    FIRST!

    Welcome to the blogging world, Paul. Consider yourself linked.

  2. Paul Kim October 28th, 2005 5:53 pm

    Wow that was fast, Seamus. Thanks for the welcome & here we go…

  3. Asa Dotzler - Firefox and more October 28th, 2005 6:59 pm

    welcome aboard, paul

    We’ve got an amazing new person on the team at MoCo. His name is Paul Kim and he started working, part time, a while back and has been fulltime for a couple of weeks now. His last major project was the world-wide launch of Adobe’s Creative Suite 2, o…

  4. beltzner October 28th, 2005 7:50 pm

    Heh, I think I’ve used a good number of the products you’ve worked on in your previous lives. It’s great to have you aboard, Paul, and I’m looking forward to working with you.

    In case nobody’s mentioned it yet, get used to searching out the Starbucks Doubleshots that are in the downstairs fridge. We don’t tend to sleep a lot of the time .. :)

  5. jordan October 28th, 2005 8:38 pm

    Congratulations on the position, and may your career be a happy one.

  6. jon October 28th, 2005 10:34 pm

    congrats, pk. looking forward to seeing the fruit of your labor…and to see you, now that you’re in lovely MtVw

  7. rebron.org » welcome pkim October 28th, 2005 10:49 pm

    [...] Welcome pkim. [...]

  8. Channy October 29th, 2005 9:52 am

    Welcome Paul,
    This is Channy Yun, the mozilla korean community. I hope you help product marketing of mozilla.

  9. Tristan October 29th, 2005 10:45 am

    Welcome to the wonderful world of Mozilla blogguers, Paul!

    It’s great to have you share the marketing vision of Mozilla corp.

    Marketing is not always understood by the Open-Source crowd, and communicating is a must. I’m adding you to my aggregator right now!

  10. Paul Kim October 29th, 2005 11:05 am

    Thanks everyone for the warm welcomes. Also I’m still tweaking my Wordpress settings so bear with me if it takes a little while for your comment to appear here. I will probably remove comment moderation next week and see how much (if any) comment spam shows up. When I make that change there should no longer be a delay for your comments to appear.

  11. Luis October 29th, 2005 12:35 pm

    Contraz on the new pos.
    I wish you the best on Mozilla..
    U are now part of my Bookmarks.

    :D

  12. Ivan Icin October 30th, 2005 12:46 am

    Good luck!

  13. rangelife October 30th, 2005 11:55 am

    Numenity Now!

    New on the link list: Paul Kim of Oakland is the new director of product marketing for Mozilla (the force behind Firefox), and also a hell of a good guy. His new blog, Numenity, is sure to be a treat.

  14. Kris Silver October 31st, 2005 9:06 am

    Good to have you promoting Firefox and more Paul, congrats. I’m part of the 11 or so people on the team with Ian Hayward, working on a new, better, more effective SFx! Look forward to working with you on related things in the future hopefully.

  15. Michael G. October 31st, 2005 5:14 pm

    Hi! Glad to have you on the Moz team!

    Since you are the new director of product marketing, I might have to talk to you soon; but only after the launch of 1.5… I’ll wait until you are less busy.

  16. Marco Casteleijn November 1st, 2005 3:31 am

    Welcome and good luck. Like Kris Silver I am part of that team on SFX (with Ian) also, and marketing is of interest for me.

    I am also looking forward on future co-operations! BTW I just named you our marketing guru ;o)

    Kind regards,

    Marco

  17. KenSaunders November 4th, 2005 6:24 pm

    Welcome Paul!
    I volunteer and contribute wherever and whenever I can to Mozilla. I’ve recently created the Firefox Accessibility Project and I’m a contributing member of SFx and other projects. The greatest thing I’ve learned about Mozilla is how open and welcoming all of the Mozilla communities are. I’m new with limited technical knowledge, but I’ve been welcomed by everyone that I’ve been in contact with, but I’m sure that you already know this. Congratulations on the position.

  18. PKB » Getting to Know Mozilla June 23rd, 2007 7:48 am

    [...] a relative latecomer to Mozilla, I distinctly recall how dense the layers of communication in the Mozilla project felt [...]