It's hard to know what would have happened had I stayed. Mozilla had a number of late layoffs, some cut good people, none helped. Cutting earlier could have helped more.

The "NGO" die was cast in 2003 when we spun out of AOL as a 501c3. I didn't get a say in that decision. It went poorly after the big Google default search revenue share turned on and the IRS reneged on their promise that we could take the $$$ tax-free as "sponsorship income".

This led to a battle where we ended up paying some back taxes, but contrary to the San Jose IRS agent's position, we did not have to go "be like Opera" and drop the 501c3. We rather used the typical (hospitals, universities, sports teams do it) non-profit parent of taxable for-profit subsidiary structure, with a trademark license fee kicked up to the parent.

The IRS rules governing nonprofits still required the Mozilla Foundation to beg big to go big: the parent had to go find big grants from Soros, Ford, Knight, MacArthur, and give smaller grants to many. This put it in the lefties-only-no-righty-Irish-need-apply revolving-door personnel sector of NGOs and nonprofits (too many glowies there for me, too). Which meant I had a hostile MoFo over my head the minute I got CEO appointment from the MoCo board.

I think looking back that the nonprofit spinout from AOL was a mistake. It didn't focus on either technical excellence or pure do-gooding. It was an uneasy mix of both, neither fish nor fowl.

Of course I can't comment on anything about my exit, for reasons that only the most loopy HN h8ers still can't figure out.