PKB

Hello Internets,

I’ve been away. I missed you. I wish I could tell you I spent the past two months sojourning through the Gobi Desert, mind-melding with Mongolian traders and mining the desert with a pickaxe for rare spices, but the truth is, I’ve just been working.

I know you’re not one for treatises. That you prefer The Stranger to Crime and Punishment.

So here is the Cliff’s Notes edition of my late summer 2006 experience.

• We hired about 150 interns this summer. Space was so tight we had to erect a caravansary in the Mozilla parking lot, and rent it out in the evenings to Le Cirque du Soleil in exchange for modern dance lessons to improve our cultural appeal. The marketing interns built a crop circle, researched our user base and displayed an inhuman resistance to the sauna-like conditions of the green room, although not in this precise order.

• Mary Colvig and David Rolnitzky joined the marketing team full-time. They have tripled our bandwidth, quintupled our ability to complete triathlons in Austria and Canada, and generally made me grateful for the embrace of a sunny couch on a Sunday morning spent drinking coffee and eating warm croissants. With extra butter.

• We were introduced to and quickly co-opted the time and efforts of several brilliant marketects, who are providing us with the wisdom to know when to go fast, and when to go big. At the same time, even. Elliptical, yes, I know. We are happy their brains are here, and helping us.

• Seth Bindernagel started up the Mozilla Corp. community giving program.

• Basil Hashem kicked off Mozilla Labs.

• We hosted lunch for several thousand digerati last month. (Can I still say digerati after 2001?)

So that’s a quick round-up. I’ll be back with more soon.

Yours in the bonds,
Paul

P.S. Cloud Atlas is a real novel, unlike some of this post, and it’s great. Check it out.