Brendan Eich

Part Artist, Part Hacker & Full-Time Programmer

• 1961

  Birth

  July 4th, 1961 (age 57) - Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. Brendan Eich grew up in Palo Alto.

• 1979

  Early Education

  He attended Ellwood P. Cubberley High School, graduating in the class of 1979. Eich received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science at Santa Clara University.

• 1985

  Master's Degree

  He received his master's degree in 1985 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

• 1985

  Career start

  Eich started his career at Silicon Graphics, working for 7 years on operating system and network code. He then worked for 3 years at MicroUnity Systems Engineering writing microkernel and DSP code, and doing the first MIPS R4000 port of GCC.

• 1995

  Netscape && JavaScript

  He started work at Netscape Communications Corporation in April 1995. Eich originally joined intending to put Scheme "in the browser"^[4], 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^[5], and was called Mocha, but renamed LiveScript in September 1995 and later JavaScript in the same month^[6]. Eich continued to oversee the development of SpiderMonkey, the specific implementation of JavaScript in Navigator^[7].

• 1998

  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^[8].

• 1999

  Mozilla

  AOL bought Netscape in 1999.

• 2003

  Mozilla

  After AOL shut down the Netscape browser unit in July 2003, Eich helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation^[9].

• 2005

  Mozilla

  In August 2005, after serving as Lead Technologist and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Mozilla Foundation, Eich became CTO of the newly founded Mozilla Corporation, meant to be the Mozilla Foundation's for-profit arm.

• 2011

  Mozilla

  Eich continued to "own" the Mozilla SpiderMonkey module, its JavaScript engine, until he passed on the ownership of it in 2011.

• 2014

  Mozilla

  On March 24, 2014, Eich was promoted to CEO of Mozilla Corporation^[10]. Gary Kovacs, John Lilly and Ellen Siminoff resigned from the Mozilla board prior to the appointment^[11], some anonymously expressing disagreements with Eich's strategy and their desire for a CEO with experience in the mobile industry^[12][13][14]. 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^[15][16].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^[17]. 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 (though giving them a link to continue with Firefox)^[18][19][20]. Others at the Mozilla Corporation spoke out on their blogs in his favor^[21][22]. Board members wanted him to stay in the company in a different role^[23]. On April 3, 2014, Eich stepped down as CEO and resigned from working at Mozilla; in his personal blog, Eich posted that "under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader"^[24][25].

• 2016

  Brave Software

  Eich is the CEO of Brave Software, an Internet security company which has 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^[26], 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^[27].

• 2017

  Brave Software

  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^[28]

If the web can be evolved to include the missing APIs and have better performance, [developers] won't need to go beyond the web.

Brendan Eich