Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

It is a problem that she is both on the board and CEO, which effectively makes her impossible to hold to account unless the board members that want her out would resign if she does not want to make way. That would be a major statement and would put the remaining board members on notice.

The board typically does not get compensated the way the CEO does so they are usually not in a position to 'suck it dry', on top of that they have some responsibilities and if they don't act in the best interest of the company they might be found to be personally liable depending on the jurisdiction and the details regarding their responsibilities.

I should study that to see if there is any way to solve it but frankly, even though FireFox has been my daily driver since about forever I don't see a happy ending here.

View on HN

> It is a problem that she is both on the board and CEO, which effectively makes her impossible to hold to account

Is this really a problem? The CEO is often a director, and even as chairwoman I doubt anything in the bylaws prevents the board at large from removing her if they wanted to.

Instead, it seems like the board itself is the issue, since they allowed Mozilla to stray so far from its core mission.

stay/stray.

Cheers. MacBook keyboard strikes again.

A bit offtopic, but I really really recommend the 16-inch MBP. That's what I call a keyboard, not the 15-inch crap.

What about the new Macbook pro 13 inch?

Don't have experiences with it, that's too small for me, sorry.

They're all identical keyboards -- AFAIK, literally -- so if you like it on one (or don't like it on one!), it'll apply to the rest. I have a 2020 MacBook Air and think it's one of the best laptop keyboards I've used in a long time. (And it makes me really hate going back to the butterfly keyboard on my work laptop, even though I found it okay to type on previously. I actually never had any dead keys on it, or on a previous work laptop with butterfly keys, or on a personal MBP 13" that the Air replaced.)

This one went nearly 3 years before it had a problem, but as soon as one key started acting up the rest of the row quickly followed. I'll trade up for the latest model (with the touch bar, which I actually like, and physical escape key) the next time I can afford to be unproductive for a couple days.

What year/model is it? You might be eligible for the Keyboard Service Program (https://support.apple.com/en-ca/keyboard-service-program-for...).

I am eligible (and it's still under AppleCare) but I want to swap anyway for the updated touch bar layout.

Is that common in the US? Because here in Sweden it is regarded as bad practice for medium sized companies and up. The CEO is almost never part of the board here except for in tiny companies.

Extremely common, not frowned upon at all here

Definitely the normal thing in the UK for companies of all sizes for the CEO to be an executive director and therefore to sit on the board of directors.

I served on the board of the Apache Software Foundation for a year and everything about the experience convinced me that it is desirable for the board to be completely separate from the corporate officers.

In fact, I have seen this very debate play out in real life. We appointed a new President of the ASF during my term. That person had been a Director, but when they became President they stepped down from the Board.

For a non-profit charity that relies on volunteers, perfect separation is not always feasible, and especially in the early years when the ASF was smaller the President was often a Board member. But although I can't speak for anybody but myself, I believe that the ASF is likely to continue with an informal tradition of separating Board from Officers for the indefinite future.

A similar cultural change ought to be possible at Mozilla — and perhaps elsewhere.

Indian here. Extremely common for the CEO to be part of the board. In fact the CEO equivalent "Executive head of company" designation in India before globalization made use of CEO fashionable was 'Managing Director'.

Yeah I remember that. While growing up in 90's and even early 2000's, I always heard praises of someone reaching post of MD. The term CEO became common later.

That terminology is still used in the United States for certain classes of corporations, but they're pretty rare these days.

The legal world has "managing partner" as the equivalent for LLPs.

There are still plenty of MDs in the world, but these days it's mostly used in finance and consulting to represent the first layer of leadership below the c-suite.

It can vary, though; e.g. Kevin Sneader is the de facto CEO of McKinsey, but his official title is Global Managing Partner and his predecessor used Managing Director.

Yes, having one or more executive directors is standard operating procedure for public companies in the US. Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, et al sit on their respective boards.

It's so common here that I never even considered the possibility of having a CEO who wasn't also a member of the board. It's pretty common for them to also be chairman of the board. Especially for founder CEOs.

If the CEO is a majority or major shareholder, they will be on the board, point blank.

If they are not, the roles should be separate.

Their patron should rectify this, but it's possible they don't care.

The 'plan' may be to kill Firefox.

Well, concerning the sucking dry: maybe I'm overly cynical but I wonder if being on the mozilla board is not a nice sinecure (so high effective hourly wage, even if the yearly compensation is not egregious) with a massive CV boost: none of the people I can see on the board of either the corp or the foundation, with the exception of Brian Behlendorf (and I had to look him up) seem to have much name recognition and being on the board of Mozilla might well be the most high profile thing they'll ever do.

Given that, as you seem to agree, Mozilla is probably doomed now no matter what, why would they deprive themselves of these benefits (and possible future similar gigs!) sooner rather than later? It seems extremely unlikely to me the mismanagement is rising to the level of personal liability.

> It seems extremely unlikely to me the mismanagement is rising to the level of personal liability.

Agreed. But the CEOs statement here is very peculiar and might actually rise to that level, the board not taking action in turn might just make them culpable.

It is a very dumb statement, especially for a lawyer, to make.

You mean the "competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to"? It's pretty funny, especially the word "competitive"? I assume the bit you could see landing her in hot water are the three words "and their families"?

Yes, because if and when Mozilla goes belly up and the CEO has been found to enrich herself with this as her motivation for continuing to raid the till when it was clear that Mozilla was in trouble then you don't want to have stuff like that on the record.

The Martha Stewart case revolved around a similar minor (for her) issue, $45K loss avoided but it landed her in jail. Rich people make stupid mistakes too, whether this is one of those remains to be seen (I think it will pass) even so, it isn't smart when your company is on a multi-year downslide.

It's not good optics.

The part that Stewart did time for was the lying to federal investigators.

Yes, if not for that she would have likely walked. Even so, it further illustrates that minor tricks can have a big effect in the right context. I'm pretty sure that Stewart didn't think about the possible consequences when she did that. Must be weird to sit that high and fall so low.

One of the best and hardest things to do for anything with a board of directors is to establish that EVERY BOARD MEETING starts with a vote on one simple question: "Shall the CEO/Executive Director be retained?" Every company, not for profit or even tiny club that makes this the big question performs it's mission well. Those that don't, well, you get a lot more politics.

I love that idea, it formalizes the board taking responsibility for the continued performance of the CEO, and it may also warn a CEO that the board that hired them is about to flip before it is too late.

Accountability is underrated, and I've been in more than one meeting where there was a surprise no vote from a couple of board members. The result was that problems got fixed quickly.

Imagine if, every quarter, a committee voted on whether you keep your job.

Does this make you more or less willing to take risks? More or less focused? Does this decrease or increase the amount of attention you give to "optics" and politics?

Perhaps if you can't deal with that small pressure you shouldn't be a CEO. When things get bad it's going to be a lot more pressure than that.

This doesn't bother me in the least. A CEO's boss is the board of directors, period. Every board meeting is a review on the performance of the organization, and therefore the CEO. Most employees do not roll up to a committee, and their review is usually with a supervisor. The board meeting is no different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com