Blake Ross is one fiery topic. From the age of fourteen, he was already making big moves. He joined the likes of Netscape as an apprentice then went onto Stanford. His idea first hit the market in November 2004 when Blake was only nineteen years old. He began his endeavor to help his mother overcome her frustration with Internet Explorer. She was upset with its poor performance and how she could not book mark her favorite sites and it was riddled with pop-up ads. Viruses often plagued Mrs. Blake’s computer as well. Ross then took to learning programming for himself so he could one day fix those problems. At the age of only 10 he made his first website. In 1998, Netscape released its code to open source and allowed anyone to tamper with it. Firefox was then born from the ashes. Less than a year after its initial launch Firefox had been downloaded more than 100 million times and was soon threatening the big fish like Internet Explorer. Because Firefox was open source, thousands of programmers worked together to bring it to life and bring innovation to the website. Although not taking over Internet Explorer, it is still used by a mass audience. StatCounter released data stating that in 2010 32% of internet users around the world used Firefox compared to Internet Explorer’s 49%. Blake Ross has a net worth of 150,000,000 dollars today and is a pristine example of the millennial entrepreneur.
I find interesting that he allowed other programmers to collaborate with themselves and one another in order to help improve his idea.
This is a very fascinating read. This reminds me a lot of what Dr.Sweet was saying the other day about innovation and being willing to share your idea to help it grow. Firefox may have started from just one kid, but with the help of thousands of other programmers around the world it has truly evolved into something greater. Great post!
This is fantastic. I remember when Firefox became more of the rage. My uncle who at the time was in College at Ohio University and worked at Circuit City came over and told my parents all about how wonderful Firefox was and how it was passing Internet Explorer by leaps and bounds. My parent’s too were in love with the changes made in Firefox and it’s logo always brings me back to that conversation had in our foyer.
Blake Ross really accomplished something amazing here; he took the initiative to compete against a tech giant like Microsoft. Not only did he succeed at building his own “internet explorer,” he has surpassed the software Microsoft built themself.
I had no clue the creator of Firefox was so young. He really is the perfect example of a successful millennial entrepreneur.
I find his story very inspirational in that he started so young and worked hard to achieve his goal. While I do not use Firefox myself, the open ended concept is very intriguing to me because it feels like he is constantly looking for improvements.