Blake Ross was raised in Key Biscane, Florida. When he was 10 years old he created his first website through America Online. He then attended  a Miami high school, Gulliver Preparatory School, and while he was in school, he worked for a California based company called Mozilla. While working for Mozilla, Ross co-founded the Mozilla Firefox Project with Dave Hyatt. Ross’s inspiration for creating the Firefox Project was his mother’s frustrated user experience with Internet Explorer. His inspiration also came when he was an intern at Netscape Communications Company at the age of 16. This company recently acquired a different browser after purchasing America Online. He became disenchanted with the browser and the direction that Netscape wanted to take. This fueled Ross to make smaller, easy to use browser. Ross continued to work on Firefox in the fall of of 2003 at Stanford University. In 2004, Firefox began to gain market share and in less than a year of its release, Firefox had over 100 million downloads.

After Firefox’s success, Ross founded a new startup with a different ex-Netscape employee, Joe Hewitt. This startup is called Parakey and it is a new interface that is designed to bridge the gap between the desktop and the web. On July 20, 2007 Ross sold Parakey to Facebook, and in 2013 he left Facebook to pursue his own interests.