Blake Ross is the co-creator of Mozilla Firefox. When Blake Ross was only 15 years old, he moved to California for an internship with Netscape, a web browser. This company was an open source for Blake, providing a community that encouraged the creation of software. However, Blake disliked the unfriendliness of the Netscape Browser. Only a few years later, Blake and some of his colleagues started working on a new and improved version of Netscape. They strived for simplicity, stability, and speed. This version, “Phoenix”, was launched in November of 2004, and then they soon partnered up with Dave Hyatt who had his own program. The named changed to “Mozilla Firefox.” Firefox was soon downloaded by millions of users. This was partially due to the fall of Netscape and the lack of innovation from Microsoft.
Blake is a great role model for fellow millennial entrepreneurs because his life demonstrates that one does not become an entrepreneur overnight with an instantly famous innovation. After Netscape and the model of Phoenix hadn’t worked out, Blake had to pivot his idea several times until he finally came up with Firefox, and even then he continued to pivot. Blake also shows that children are capable of a lot. At 10 years old, he programmed web pages. At 15, he had an internship with a web browser. At 17, he co-created Firefox. No one should underestimate youth. Mozilla Firefox is certainly not as popular as Google Chrome, but Blake was still able to become a millionaire, with the net worth of about $150 million as of 2016. Clearly some people still prefer Firefox over other browsers.
That’s crazy that the creator of Firefox started so young!! This is something he was passionate about and was able to use that passion to create something that people use everyday. Maybe someday someone can do that with raw milk. One can only hope.