Speaker Series

Overview

Each month Mozilla will host a speaker (or panel - format may vary slightly from month-to-month) from tech and related industries to address topics tied to our mission and nearer-term business objectives. Ideas for speakers are solicited from Mozillians on an ongoing basis using this speaker submission form.

The speaker(s) will present live from either our San Francisco or Mountain View office and be streamed to the rest of the offices via AirMo and publicly archived for subsequent viewing. Typical time slot is 9am - 10am PT (4pm - 5pm UTC) and in 2H 2015 we're experimenting with a Breakfast + Cantina format, with North American Mozillians having breakfast and lunch while our European counterparts dive into appetizers ("Brantina = Breakfast + Cantina"). We encourage speakers to allot at least 15-20 minutes for Q&A.

Program Goal

The Speaker Series is part of a broader program co-run by Internal Communications and WPR. Our goal is to engineer individual connection points and create compelling opportunities beyond day-to-day work for office-based staff to come together in our spaces (in most cases) to share an experience and interact with the those they may not normally work with. Face-to-face chats among people with different skills might spark new ideas, lead to new solutions or at the least, increase workplace camaraderie. Our ultimate goal is to improve performance, innovation and overall engagement.

2015 Calendar

Thursday, August 13th @ 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 4:00pm UTC

Location: San Francisco + Air Mozilla
Speaker: Hiten Shah is cofounder and president of analytics companies KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg; he also advises startups.
Topic: Hiten will share his ideas and experience with growth hacking, a scrappy marketing technique developed by technology startups. Larger companies that embrace this approach (examples include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Airbnb and Dropbox) use creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to gain product exposure and grow their market share quickly.
Host: Jascha Kaykas-Wolff
Questions: Submit your questions for Hiten in advance here.

Thursday, July 23 @ 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 4:00pm UTC

Location: San Francisco + Air Mozilla
Speaker: Tom Chi has worked in disciplines ranging from astrophysical research to Fortune 500 consulting to developing new hardware and software (web & client) products and services. He’s worked on large projects of global scale (Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo! Search), and scaled new projects from conception to significance (Yahoo! Answers from 0 to 90 million users). He also co-founded GoogleX, the semi-secret group responsible for cutting edge projects including the autonomous driving vehicles, contact lenses that monitor glucose through tears and balloons in the stratosphere that provide Internet access.
Topic: Tom will talk about his approach to rapid prototyping using 'native' materials like paper and foam core to create and test experiences. Using this method, he has led teams to work more effectively and quickly, building state of the art (see above for examples) products as part of an ongoing innovation process.
Host: Josh Carpenter
Questions: Submit your questions for Tom in advance here.

Thursday, May 21 @ 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 4:00pm UTC

Location: Mountain View + Air Mozilla
Speaker: Kate Heddleston, a software engineer in San Francisco, does a lot of speaking on the people-dimensions of software development and engineering management best practices. Her focus is on how software gets made, as well as on what it does.
Topic: Kate shares her thoughts on the topic of onboarding new hires - what it takes to do that well, particularly in an engineering environment - and the 'team debt' that results when we do it poorly. Kate also shared some of the fairly immediate things individual teams can do to reduce the debt.
Questions submitted to Kate in advance are here].