Brendan Eich

Brendan Eich (/ˈaɪk/; born July 4, 1961) is an American technologist and creator of the JavaScript programming language. He co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, and served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer and briefly, as its chief executive officer. He is the CEO of Brave Software.

Early life

Brendan Eich grew up in Pittsburgh; Gaithersburg, Maryland; and Palo Alto, and he attended Ellwood P. Cubberley High School, was graduated in the class of 1979. Eich received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science at Santa Clara University. He received his master's degree in 1985 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Eich started his career at Silicon Graphics, working for seven years on operating system and network code. He then worked for three years at MicroUnity Systems Engineering writing microkernel and DSP code, and doing the first MIPS R4000 port of GCC.

Netscape and JavaScript

He started work at Netscape Communications Corporation in April 1995. Eich originally joined intending to put Scheme "in the browser", but his Netscape superiors insisted that the language’s syntax resemble that of Java. The result was a language that had much of the functionality of Scheme, the object orientation of Self, and the syntax of Java. The first version was completed in ten days in order to accommodate the Navigator 2.0 Beta release schedule, and was called Mocha, but renamed LiveScript in September 1995 and later JavaScript in December. Eich continued to oversee the development of SpiderMonkey, the specific implementation of JavaScript in Navigator.

Mozilla

In early 1998, Eich co-founded the Mozilla project with Jamie Zawinski and others, creating the mozilla.org website, which was meant to manage open-source contributions to the Netscape source code. He served as Mozilla's chief architect. AOL bought Netscape in 1999. After AOL shut down the Netscape browser unit in July 2003, Eich helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation.

In August 2005, after serving as lead technologist and as a member of the board of directors of the Mozilla Foundation, Eich became chief technical officer of the newly founded Mozilla Corporation, meant to be the Mozilla Foundation's for-profit arm. Eich continued to "own" the Mozilla SpiderMonkey module, its JavaScript engine, until he passed on the ownership of it in 2011.

On March 24, 2014, Eich was promoted to CEO of Mozilla Corporation. Gary Kovacs, John Lilly, and Ellen Siminoff resigned from the Mozilla board prior to the appointment, some anonymously expressing disagreements with Eich's strategy and their desire for a CEO with experience in the mobile industry.

Some employees of Mozilla Foundation (a separate organization from Mozilla Corporation) tweeted calls for his resignation, with reference to his donation of $1,000 to California Proposition 8, which called for the banning of same-sex marriage in California. This donation had first made international news in 2012. Eich stood by his decision to fund the campaign, but wrote on his blog that he was sorry for "causing pain" and pledged to promote equality at Mozilla. Some of the activists created an online campaign against Eich, with online dating site OkCupid automatically displaying a message to Firefox users with information about Eich's donation, and suggesting that users switch to a different browser (although giving them a link to continue with Firefox). Others at the Mozilla Corporation spoke out on their blogs in his favor. Board members wanted him to stay in the company in a different role. On April 3, 2014, Eich resigned as CEO and left Mozilla; in his personal blog, he posted, "under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader". The resignation also made international news, and was viewed as due to Eich's opposition to same-sex marriage.

While some media reports have pegged Eich's resignation directly to controversies surrounding his donation to supporters of Proposition 8, others who worked at Mozilla Corporation at the time said there were other factors surrounding Eich's departure. They say Eich faced doubts over his leadership and managerial ability from board members during the CEO selection process, with some saying he is better suited in a science role within the organization. They also asserted that Eich failed to defuse the donation controversy when it surfaced, which further inflamed the situation.

Brave Software

Eich is the CEO of Brave Software, an Internet browser platform company that raised $2.5 million in early funding from angel investors.

On January 20, 2016, the company released developer versions of its open-source Brave web browser, which blocked ads and trackers and included a micropayments system to offer users a choice between viewing selected ads or paying websites not to display them.

At Brave Software, Eich co-created the Basic Attention Token (BAT), a cryptocurrency designed for use in the Brave browser. BAT launched its ICO on May 31, 2017 and raised $35 million.