MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers

From Idea to Impact: Raj Singh on Building for Solopreneurs with Mozilla

• Hosted by Joseph Itaya & Anika Jackson • Episode 80

Share episode

Stop waiting for the “right time.” Raj Singh—longtime builder, repeat founder, and now VP of Product at Mozilla—joins us to unpack how real momentum starts when you ship something imperfect and let the market reshape it. We dig into his path from early consumer apps to an acquisition by Mozilla and the creation of Solo, an AI-powered website builder designed specifically for service providers like tutors, therapists, coaches, and contractors.

Raj explains his “jello in motion” approach to product discovery, why you learn small things from small audiences and big things from big ones, and how AI turns non-technical founders into effective prototypers. Instead of chasing precision use cases on day one, he targets 95% problems where AI can draft, humans can edit, and outcomes improve fast. That’s the backbone of Solo: generate a credible first version of a site in seconds, then refine the copy, layout, and local signals to start winning leads.

We also explore the strategy behind making websites free, the legacy pricing that no longer fits modern cost structures, and how business model innovation can drive adoption when ad spend doesn’t. Raj shares practical growth tactics—programmatic SEO, AEO on trusted UGC platforms, product-led collaboration loops—and previews adjacent tools on the roadmap: automated bookkeeping, simple newsletters, and AI reception for missed calls. Finally, we zoom out to the browser’s comeback as AI-native search, agentic workflows, and synthetic content reshape how people use the web—and why Mozilla’s mission matters more than ever in that future.

If you’re a solopreneur or small business owner looking for leverage, or a builder stuck in “AI tourism,” this conversation will help you choose a current, prototype your vision, and start shipping. Subscribe, share with a friend who’s been sitting on an idea, and leave a review to tell us what you’re building next.

This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.

SPEAKER_02:

If you start anything, you're already in the top 1%. Because 99% of people don't get past an idea, right? And the most common feedback I hear when people have an idea and they have it now, like, oh, how's it going? Like, oh, I haven't made any progress or I haven't done anything, is don't have time. It's not the right time. I don't really want to do it until I'm at this phase in my life or this net worth or this many kids or whatever, right? And I always tell everyone, it's never a good time. Like, it's always the right time.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Media Escape Insights from Digital Changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world.

SPEAKER_00:

We're recording this on a Friday afternoon. So I think that Raj Singh and I are both, you know, a little, it's the end of the day, goodness the weekend, maybe a little frazzled from all the other meetings we've had. But I'm really excited to end the week for me on a high note and speaking to somebody who's a true innovator, experimenter, disruptor in the world of tech and uh this digital ecosystem that we live in. So thank you for joining me on Media Escape, Raj.

SPEAKER_02:

Thanks, Sadika. I'm looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So I I of course do want to share a little bit about your background, how you got started in the world, and then now how that took you to being VP of Product at Mozilla and some of the great things that you're doing for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

SPEAKER_02:

Sure. Yeah. No, I so I've been, I guess the doing term is builder, used to be founder most of my career. Actually, while in my master's, started my first little tech company. It didn't make it, but this was it during the dot com crash. And I never really looked back. You know, I built a dating site, college dating before Friendster sort of era, had a ringtone company that did really well that you could buy at Walmart and Best Buy, live video calendaring recipes. I've had a mix of different startups over the career, over my career. Some have been venture backed, some have been bootstrapped, which is now in vogue, sort of uh primitives and roots. I will say thematically, I generally just pursued my passion. So there have always been personal pain points that I wanted to solve. Almost everything is for the consumer, which ironically is probably not the best path for making a lot of money, but it's a lot of fun because you know you're kind of building to solve your own pain points and going from there. And kind of, you know, finishing that sort of arc. My last company, which is doing uh meeting summarization, which is now kind of de facto in any Zoom call or Google Meets call, but this is sort of ahead of the curve, uh, was actually acquired by Mozilla about three years ago. And so I'm now at Mozilla. I am BP of product responsible for new products focused on small business. So that encompasses a range of things. We have a website builder called Solo. We have other things that we're building as well. And the reason we're really passionate about this segment is sort of post-COVID, we could see the macro trends around this ownership economy, be your own boss. People want to have control over their time, work from home, et cetera, et cetera. And so this sort of freelancer is the fastest growing business in the US and very much aligned with sort of Mozilla's mission, which is really about democratizing access and enabling the underdogs. We really wanted to build a suite of tools that could really help the solo paneers so they could focus on their passion and not all of the grant work that's involved behind the scenes.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. All of the grant work that you did to build up each of your companies, probably.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, it's a grind.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yeah. So I love the fact that you talk about you built each of these consumer facing, which yes, B2B can be much more lucrative, but uh B2C can be very lucrative as well. But you built these for different pain points that you had and things that you were trying to solve for you and your family and your friends, right? And in these builds, you learned a lot of lessons along the way. I'm sure. Some you said were bootstrapped, some were venture-backed. What was the difference maker between the whether one was one or the other?

SPEAKER_02:

You know, it's hard to there's a desire within the tech community to look at success and then break it down into a series of repeatable steps that resulted in that success. But very much like chaos theory, it's often not repeatable. There is so much randomness and timing and market and luck and other factors involved that you know many times I tried to look back and say, okay, I could do better this time or I know what to do this time. But I will often find myself sometimes making the same mistakes. Sometimes, you know, you realize pretty quickly that what worked yesterday doesn't work today. Certainly in B2B, we see repeat entrepreneurs within the same domain just do it over and over again. But in some ways, they're not repeating the product, they're not necessarily even repeating the market, but they have all of the contacts, which sort of acceler accelerates the sales motion. But in consumer, you're pretty much building new audience every time, right? And so instead of leaning on a Rolodeck, you're leaning on growth hacking. And each time it's different, and each time the approach is different. So full circle, coming back to your original question, you know, early on, building Bootstrap was more out of necessity. I didn't have the network or reach. There was a time I was offered VC money and I didn't take it for my ringtone company. I was offered an acquisition for both my dating site and my ringtone company. I also didn't take it, right? Maybe I should have. I don't know. These were seven digit kind of uh numbers and I was 23 years old, right? But at that time that was a lot of money, right? Today it's different. Or it's relative. Sorry. I should probably be a little bit more uh interested, uh inclusive and comment.

SPEAKER_00:

But let's let's also mention you do live in, you know, the Silicon Valley area. So you you're in an area that is very expensive compared to most of the country and certainly most of the world.

SPEAKER_02:

Sure. Yeah, and then you know, later I raised venture money. And then, you know, it's funny, for a long time within the tech community, raising venture money was associated with some sort of validation. It was like getting that badge on your you know, Boy Scouts uniform or, you know, what whatever you want to call it. And it's kind of wild, right? And so you sort of like, oh, I'm gonna raise venture money because I'm supposed to raise venture money when you don't even necessarily need venture money. And you know, and there does become a little bit of a trap. If you're a successful entrepreneur, people want to invest in you again, which means you're not being held to the same bar or level of traction that you need to achieve to sort of cross that milestone. My perspective on all this has completely changed. I think there was a phase where I realized I was raising venture money because people expected me to raise venture money, not because I necessarily needed venture money, which is a little bit counterintuitive. But my perspective now is sort of going back and recognizing that you need to have fun. And I have a lot more fun when I control my journey. That doesn't mean I won't or will not raise venture money again in the future, but I'll certainly be a lot more intentional about it. And if I choose to raise money, it's because I want to raise money, not because people expect me to raise money or because I think I need to build the next billion dollar thing. You know, that's a very common second-time founder trap. You want to exceed your previous achievement. And so therefore, you enter analysis paralysis, and sometimes you do worse, right? And so you want to get back to sort of like, okay, am I having fun? Am I building something that solves a pain point for me? And then I'll figure out if this gets there or not. But if it doesn't, that's okay too.

SPEAKER_00:

How much research went into finding the right audience after you've solved the pain point for yourself? Because I have spoken to people in marketing who say you only need to talk to five to seven of your best customers. And I other people say, no, you have to have enough scale so that you're really making sure that you are talking to the right people and that you're solving the right problem.

SPEAKER_02:

So I like to say, you know, when you have small users, you learn small things. And when you have big users, you learn big things. And I'm probably probably should use large and I'm probably using the wrong word, but but uh in any case, the point is you're gonna learn interesting things with 10 people, but it's gonna look dramatically different at a million. And I've been on both sides of that spectrum. The way I typically approach when I build a new idea, I see a pain point. In some ways, I would say that is probably some one of the things I'm good at. Like I just haven't I look at things and things bother me. Like I'm like, why was it designed like that? I can make this better, right? That you know, just to be clear, you might be good at one thing and I'm not good at a whole bunch of other things, right? So, and so I'll go out and say, you know what, can I can I solve this? Can I can I build something better for myself? Right. And then the question is, uh yes, I have a network, you know, five, ten people I trust. Like, what do you think about this? That journey, I pretty much assume that it's not gonna look the same, right? Like you start at point A, it always ends up at point C. I've never had the luck or success to say that it was point A and ended at point A. It's gonna look completely different as you start building. And I actually call this process uh jello in motion. So your jello is flying through the air and little bits are falling off, but it's taking shape. And you're leaning on your own product intuition to you're trusting your intuition. You're basically you're you're trusting your gut that you will figure this out. But the key thing is you want to make sure at least you're swimming along or with a macro trend. Like if the industry is moving a certain direction, you know, let's say vibe as a modality in the whole Gen AI era, you know, whatever, like, and you're coming back and saying, I'm gonna do long-form writing or whatever, right? Like that's completely human-authored. That's very counter-trend, right? And so that doesn't mean counter trend can't succeed, but I tend to like to swim downstream, not upstream. So my sort of approach is I, you know, I want to solve this sort of thing. I'm swimming in the right direction. Maybe it's leveraging, you know, some macrocultural trend or whatever it is, like creator economy, who knows, a small business owner. And then I bank that my own intuition will guide me to success, meaning it may not look entirely like where I started. It may look completely different. I might land somewhere else. So, yes, I go test with five, 10 people. I'm getting different kinds of feedback that steers me in another direction. I like to talk to former employees of companies that I think are competitors, right? I like to talk to just generally smart people that just love to do uh two by two diagrams and map every company in the universe, right? Like those are more of the analyst types. I like to talk to growth marketers, think about how you would drive growth in this category. So I talk to a range of folks. Interestingly, I'm not generally so worried about the technical side of things because I pretty much assume I can build it. And in 2025, you can build anything you want, right? So that's sort of my approach. And I always tell people you really you're swimming in the right direction to start swimming, and then you you bank that you'll land in the right place.

SPEAKER_00:

Nice. Yeah. A lot of people are don't have the technical expertise, right? That's something I remember several years ago. We talk about having the technical founder and the non-technical founder, the idea person. You are both of those people.

SPEAKER_02:

You know, I don't write as much code as I probably used to. And so to call me at this point, to call me like your full stack developer would be very misleading. I wish I had more time because I do enjoy it, but it's very difficult. And one of the things is you need a lot of flow time when you're writing a document or you're writing code, and when you're doing like product management or startup founder kind of things, you're doing a lot of high interruption tasks, and that can become challenging to kind of stay focused and then jump in and out. All that said, you know, I think Gen AI, and I may have talked about this previously, has really unlocked like I call it human potential or human creativity. And what I mean by that is all of these different people have great ideas. Like they want to build this new plumbing contraption, they want to build this kind of business, they want to build an application that solves this, they want to design this new form of medicine. I mean, who knows? And they couldn't do it because they would have to go and find fractional experts across a range of domains, but now they can't because these LLMs are effectively a pocket of PhDs. And so they can now vibe you know through chat and get to some semblance of what they want or what they want to build or what it might look like. It may not be the production thing, but it's a prototype. And if you think about that, if you reframe it and say the objective is not to build the final product, but the objective is to build something that I could show people, a means of communication, right? Because telling people is sometimes hard. They don't understand what you're saying. Slides maybe slightly better, but they might still not understand what you're saying. A document, hard to read, whatever, right? But if you actually show them an experience and they actually can go through the experience, it's not fully working, but they can see the vision and where it's going. Now they have this new form communication medium, right? They have a prototype as a form of communication. It's a new form of a new artifact that they can create on their own using LLMs or you know, using Gen AI. Now it'll be a lot easier to go in for them to sell their vision, to go convince some of those fractional experts, convince those with money, investors, whatnot, convince various stakeholders that, hey, maybe you want to get involved and help me build this. You can see the vision and you can see how great this could be, right? Because a lot of them struggle with the storytelling. And so much of fundraising is about the narrative and telling the story.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yeah. This is so true. Your company, Pulse, was acquired by Mozilla.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

Um, you've been VP of product, but it does also from other conversations we've had, and what I'd like to talk about on this one is it's also very entrepreneurial because you've been able to figure out what to solve and how to solve it for people. And a lot of those things that as you were starting your various companies, you may not have been the expert at building a website, the expert at this part of the business, that part of the business. So now you're creating this ecosystem to make it more democratic and easier for the small business and creator who has that vision, but doesn't have the budget, doesn't have the tools, maybe knows how to use AI, but doesn't want to have to go to five different things. So, can you talk a little bit about the, you know, acquisition in terms of how did you decide with Mozilla that what your role would be, VP of product? And then how did you design that role to still have fun and levity and get to be that creator that you are while bringing things that were really useful to consumers?

SPEAKER_02:

You know, some of this is a little bit of luck. You don't plan for these things necessarily. And I do have this perspective, which is quite different to where I was maybe 10 years ago, where you have a set of people and you figure out their superpowers. And now the trick is can you position everyone in the right spot? Well, whereas my previous mentality was this is what I need, and I don't have it, so I need to replace this person or I need to go up-level this person and get someone else, or what whatever it might be, right? And you can imagine how that perspective is much more demand side versus supply side thinking, right? So at Mozilla, interestingly, I think, you know, with the acquisition, we were doing meeting summarization, as I may have mentioned earlier. They had a product called Pocket, which was within the browser, and they wanted to do article summarization. So we had a, you know, my team was very sort of AI-centric, built their own models, knew how to summarize content. So that was kind of slotted in. Now, within months, ChatGPT was released, just goes to show how important timing is. And we knew this stuff was coming. And everyone's looking around the table and are kind of like, this is better. Yeah, we're like, yeah, this is better, right? And so you can imagine all of that sort of uh newfound expertise, knowledge was not necessarily as useful anymore, right? Because they they can now just tap an API. So, you know, my role sort of changed. They kind of moved me into what they call an EIR, uh Entrepreneur in Residence within Mozilla. They hadn't done this before. This was really leaning on the fact that they knew I was a zero-to-one kind of builder. So they wanted to play on my strengths. My manager at the time uh was running a new products uh kind of organization. And I'm now looking at ideas that I think could make sense for Mozilla, right? And so during COVID, uh I was in the Bay Area, schools were closed for a long time, and kids were many kids were stuck at home. And so I wanted to teach kids how to play chess. And so I went to Wixer Squarespace, I don't recall, and I just remember spending 45 minutes and giving up, realizing how difficult it was just to simply build a website. It's not that the tools aren't somewhat intuitive, it's just there's so many options and they're so complicated because they're trying to be everything to everyone, right? And so I here I'm at Mozilla and I'm thinking about that problem. And then I'm looking at Gen AI, and I've been in the AI space for a long time, right? I had a food logging company uh which became a recipe community that was acquired. I had a calendar app that was uh spun out of Stanford Research Institute doing meeting preparation. So I was doing AI stuff. I was the first.ai domain in 2011. So I was I've been doing AI stuff for a long time. And I knew, you know, I could tell immediately. I'm like, AI is a 95% kind of thing, meaning look for experiences where it doesn't have to be precise. Because where it has to be precise, it's much more challenging. It doesn't mean you can't get there, but it's substantially more investment, substantially longer time horizons, would certainly not necessarily work in a large company and may certainly definitely not work as a startup where you don't you may not have the funding cycle or whatnot or time to sort of get there. And so you could see very clearly that LMs are great at writing content, right? People are using it now to improve their writing and write posts and whatnot. And I'm like, huh. And writing doesn't have to be 100% perfect, right? Like you can edit it, right? It generates a first draft and you edit it. So I'm thinking, can we marry this with website creation, right? And that's how sort of the concept of like, okay, now we have an AI website builder. And so then that the next question comes like, who should we go after? So I'm looking, I'm looking at the landscape, and I like to do these two by twos where I'll like plot like uh a particular parameter on an X axis, like AI enabled or like no AI, like you know, uh low-tech engineer mind or whatever. You know, I use lots of different axes, I'll do like dozens of these. Uh ChatGP is great to like suggest ideas of different ways to think about these XY. And I'm looking at the market and I'm like, okay, you have your general purpose website builders, like the Wixes and Squarespaces and whatnot. And then you have these e-commerce focused builders, which is like an emerging, you know, Shopify was obviously the biggest one there, but there's a whole category of other ones too, like WooCommerce, et cetera, et cetera. And there's this bucket here that's like called service provider. And I'm like, wow, this is like not very busy or like relatively nascent. And these are people who bill by the hour, right? Your digital consultants, your therapists, your coaches, your tutors, you know, all of that segment. Your plumbers, et cetera, et cetera. And so uh I'm thinking like, wow, there's a gap here. What if we could do what Shopify did to e-commerce, which was completely written off many years ago, right? And they kind of came from left field because the the the uh incumbent website builders are like, it makes no sense. You would just use Wix for Squarespace, right? But of course, now we see how big the Shopify has become, the behemoth they had they have become, which is amazing. What if we do what Shopify has done within e-commerce, but for the service provider segment? And I'm watching or I'm reading uh Yahoo Finance, and they popped up this bar graph and like a video which showed that the fastest growing business in the US was the freelancer economy, which made perfect sense because people want to own their own business, own their own time. You know, time is of course the greatest real estate. So now I've got a concept, you know, we've got uh Gen AI marrying website building, which creates a very delightful experience, a hook, build a website within seconds. And now I have a segment I want to go after, which is sort of the the a service provider or the small business owner, or what we call the solopreneur. And that's kind of how those came together. And so then the last piece was like, okay, how do I drive growth? Because I'm always thinking about distribution, especially today. It's so easy to create the signal noise ratios just off the chart. So when I think of disruption and insertion points, when I think about like ways to drive growth, I'm looking for angles of attack. And this could be maybe you're focusing on a specific geography, this could be you're focusing on a very specific type of user, this could be, you know, uh something unique with the technology, whatever. In this case, I looked at business model as a means of disruption. And so as I started thinking about it, I was like, it's interesting that every website builder charges$10,$20 a month. And I asked myself, why? Like, why are they all priced the same? Like this can't be price fixed across the entire industry. And I realized, much like Robinhood, when you built a website 20 years ago, you actually had to go get a physical rec, like a server in a building. You actually had to pay for an SSL certificate. You actually bandwidth was actually really expensive. There was a reason it cost, you know, X dollars a month because there was all that physical labor involved, right? Just to make this work, as well as just the cost of the operations of running that whole data center, et cetera. But today, SSL certificates are free and bandwidth costs are negligible, right? Like most websites get almost no traffic, right? The small business restaurant, they maybe get a few hundred visits a month, which you know, if you break down into sort of Amazon egress costs, it might be like a penny a month or less, right? It's nothing because it's just simple pages, right? It's not video and YouTube and stuff like that, right? So I'm like, wow, these companies are just straight arbitraging. Like they're just all of it is just gravy to them. And it makes perfect sense. If you look at Robinhood, they're like, why are you paying a trader or like why are you paying six, seven, eight dollars a trade, which is a legacy model when you used to have to call a physical broker to make a trade, but now everything's online. This is stupid that you're paying for this. This should be made free, right? So here I am. I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna disrupt this whole business. I'm just gonna go after, I'm gonna compete with them in a way they can compete. I'm gonna make it free because we can do it. There's almost no cost, right? We we have 60,000, 70,000 businesses on solo now, and total monthly bandwidth costs is like less than$100 a month, right? Like it's insane. And our total AI costs are less than$10 a month, right? And so it's like, right, like so, you know, this notion your margin's my opportunity. And I'm gonna figure out a way to create a disruptive business model. And so I was looking at, you know, Firefox Mozilla. We have all this real estate. We have the Firefox search bar. Interestingly, people search for things like plumbers in San Jose, you know, dentists in New York. I'm like, well, what if I give my customers what they want, which is growth, right? Because the job to be done here is growth. They're a small business owner, they now want to grow. That's why they're setting up a website. And so this completed the arc of the story, right? So now we have technology plus this like opportunity that created this delightful experience. We have an audience we want to go after, which is the service provider, which is a little bit more nascent. And we have a business model approach that was disruptive that we bank could drive virality. And it's it's you know, I would say it could be working better, like we could be growing faster, but it's doing great.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Wow, that's amazing. I was gonna ask you how many people were on solo, and you answered that. How are you marketing it to people?

SPEAKER_02:

It's completely organic. So there's no performance marketing, right? And a lot of it's word of mouth. We did try some PLG, so that we have some loops in the product where you can invite other people to edit your website, so it's collaborative. We do a lot of SEO hacking. We have a programmatic blog, which I'm not particularly proud of, you know, because it's programmatic, but it's really designed for Google. It's not designed for end readers, right? We do a lot of stuff for AEO or GEO optimization. So this is like AI chat, for example. They tend to overweight uh high authority UGC domains. So that means commenting on Reddit, commenting on LinkedIn, commenting on Quora, Wikipedia, basically sources where they're most likely to think it's actually authored by a human versus AI slop. So, you know, currently we're playing with end-to-end programmatic short form TikTok video creation. So, you know, for social, trying to grow grow through that channel. So we're trying different tactics like any you know, growth hacker, growth marketer would. And we'll see what sticks, what doesn't. But you know, there's also natural inflection points as you grow, your mailing list gets bigger. There's more word of mouth, right? And you kind of hit this sort of point where you start seeing some takeaway velocity. And we're starting to see some real step functions just in the last three to six months with our domain authority, which is great, which is overall improving our search ranks.

SPEAKER_00:

These are all tips that everybody should be really listening to very close to. So what is the next step after creating your website? And and I have tested and played with this a little bit. I'm gonna be definitely playing with it some more, but you can, you know, you have fonts, you have colors, you have all kinds of different layouts people can use, and it's really beautiful.

SPEAKER_02:

You know, a very common thing to do, rebuilding anything is a day in the life sort of exercise or like a lifecycle kind of you know plot or whatnot. And so we've interviewed at this point, we are connected with hundreds, thousands of business owners. We know their pain points. They might be paying an accountant way too much money, but they can't gather all their receipts together, they can't gather gather all their income because some's coming through Venmo, some is coming through Stripe, right? And then end of year taxes come and they spend a whole Saturday trying to pull it together. Like, can we automate that for them? Can we automatically read your email? Can we automatically pull it all and use Gen AI to help annotate it, right? So that's a that's an area we're you know building a product in. A lot of these small business owners feel it's important to re-engage their audience through newsletters and social media. Can we build something there to help them with that? Right. Some of these sort of physical blue collar workers can't really pick up the phone half the time. They get so many inbound leads through Yelp or whatnot, they need somebody else to pick up their phone. Right now, they go and pay very expensive, you know, three, four, five dollar a minute AI receptionist services, or not AI, but just human receptionist services. Can we enable that through AI? Right. So these are all different parts of the arc. And there's a lot more. And we're building in each of these different buckets, and we have a bunch of things coming out soon, but that's the insight.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And that's brilliant. I mean, one common thing I've been talking to people about, whether it's with podcasts or just other conversations, is that as small businesses and entrepreneurs, it's very tiring to have to go to multiple sites to get everything done that you want to get done. So consolidation seems to be one of the names of the game, particularly with all of the generative AI tools that are out there. How do you know which tech stack? I was even using an example of I do have I have a Delphi. I also use Hajen. I also use synthesia because each one of them can't do exactly what the other ones can do for the use cases I need them for.

SPEAKER_02:

You know, the tooling is like a whole nother universe. I simply can't keep up. I will see something, I'll play with it, try to figure out what might work for what I need. I have limited time in terms of like how much of the time I'm doing the IC work versus delegating. So it depends. It's case by case, but I do try to get my hands dirty at least once a day or twice a day. You know, so it depends. The key thing is there is a stack you need to ask people like what's the best stack to use right now, and then kind of roll with it because there is a little bit of a analysis paralysis when it comes to the stack itself, where you're just keep trying new tools and you don't get anything done. And it's uh it's a lot of what I call AI tourism where you're spending a lot of a lot of money trying all these different things or a lot of trials uh to the point where I think even Stripe is releasing a new product because they have so many people figuring out or gaming the free trials and preloading on the credits that it's causing, you know. Many of these companies aren't making money as it is, but it's you know, it's creating more pressure. So, but yeah, you know, internally at Mozilla, you know, within new products, it's not necessarily this way across all of the org. We give a lot of freedom for people to try different things. We don't necessarily run them through a lot of our normal security reviews and whatnot. There is some obviously Pontius best practices, and we do collect the name, we audit the names of the tools and then determine, oh, should we get a bigger license for this or not? But part of that is just the experimentation that's required to figure out what's going to work best to you know hook uh an AI avatar to a screen share, to uh, you know, an outro to then stitch stitch together into a TikTok video.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, but it's uh it does sound like you're creating more and products to help solve some of these issues as an ecosystem. So I do have to ask, you're giving a lot of and you're giving this away for free. What's the monetization model?

SPEAKER_02:

Oh no, we're gonna introduce subscription for sure. It's not it's not a absolutely, and you know, we may even allow a way for you to set budgets if you want ads each month against the Mozilla Ad Network, right? Within Firefox, you can promote your business that way through through local search, which is like effectively the highest intent way. But no, this, you know, in the end, you know, we are a company. We have to, we have to, we have to make money. We can't we can't keep it free forever.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, but you can offer a service, you can get a lot of data. Now you have what 60,000, 70,000 businesses you said, yeah. Using this tool, and they're the perfect, that's a perfect ecosystem to try and test the copy right.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, we have an ecosystem we can sell to, right? Because in some ways, the greatest growth hack in 2025 is building the mailing list. So if you can build a a high, highly qualified mailing list, that's an immense amount of value. And in many ways, that's exactly why repeat B2B entrepreneurs or enterprise entrepreneurs build in the same category over and over again, because they already know all the buyers.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yeah, fantastic. Sounds like you have a lot of exciting things that you're working on. What continues to excite you about the team, the work that you do at Mozilla? Because you did mention some, you know, I mean, it's as an ethical company, there are certain guardrails and things that you try to put intentionally into the way that you're designing. So what continues to excite you? And what do you see in the future with AI and this whole tech journey that we're on?

SPEAKER_02:

You know, I think right now I'm just super excited by just the amount of untapped like human creativity that's just getting like unleashed. Like it's just amazing. Like everybody with an idea can now express that idea in some artifact that they couldn't couldn't before. And I think that's all very amazing. I think Mozilla specifically. Very interesting time. You know, browsers has historically, at least the last 10, 15 years, been table stakes. People don't think about it. People don't, we if you took out the brand, they might not even know which browser they're in, right? They're quite similar, all the sort of base use cases are covered. You know, innovation had slowed. And now we're, you know, we're hearing rumors, you know, or perplexity, I think, has publicly released a browser, at least within a private group called Comet. We have Dia from Arc Browser that was recently acquired, I think, by Atlassian. We have OpenAI that's been rumored to be working on a browser, right? So you have like major initiatives from LLM companies doing stuff with browsers. You have a whole nother stack of companies looking at screen scraping and agentic workflows, like book me a flight, book me a trip, right? And that's running browser effectively in a headless manner, like in the cloud and kind of clicking through, right? And then you have the future of search, which you know, are people gonna be consuming the web? You know, Google fine, I think Google has finally come out and said that the web is deteriorating. I at least I read that, so I don't that could be hearsay. But but the notion that there is more AI slop on the web, how people are gonna consume. Are they gonna be consuming just synthetic content? Are they gonna be visiting websites at all or everything's through a chat interface? Right. So you have this culmination or this combination of different mega things going on that's all of a sudden made browser like a really hot category again. And so I think from a Mozilla perspective, it's super interesting.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. I can't wait to see what you're doing in six months or three months or whatever the next big phase comes about. What would you recommend, besides, of course, going and starting a website on cellulist.ai, to anybody who's listening who is looking at taking that leap into entrepreneurship or they've started to create their, you know, craft their business, but they just need that little jolt.

SPEAKER_02:

You know, it used to be I have an idea and then they never start, right? Like I always tell people if you start anything, you're already in the top 1%. Because 99% of people don't get past an idea, right? And the most common feedback I hear when people have an idea and they have it now, like, oh, how's it going? Like, oh, I haven't made any progress or I haven't done anything, is don't have time. It's not the right time. I don't really want to do it until I'm at this phase in my life or this net worth or this many kids or whatever, right? And I always tell everyone, it's never a good time. Like it's always the right time, right? And so I think, you know, I think in that process, in that journey, if there's an itch, we want to tap into that itch. We want to see if it goes somewhere. During that process or that journey, you might realize it's just not really for you. You know, you have an idea, but you know, I'm not really, it's not my thing. Like I don't want to work that hard. I don't want to feel that much stress, you know, whatever it is, who knows? But for many, it'll be the most sort of empowering experience because you're gonna be like, wow, I'm in in control. And all of a sudden you have to answer all kinds of questions you've never had to answer before. Like, like, how should I design this thing? Usually I I may suggest something, but somebody else has to make the answer. Like, you know, there's something very or like there's a lot of freedom when you're in a company, but you don't have to make the final decision, right? Somebody else makes the final decision. It's life's a lot easier that way. But when it's your own thing, you got to make the decisions. You're you own it, right? And so I think my feedback to those listening who are in that state is to go for it. Like, like you're there's not gonna be a better time, like and see where it goes and just make sure you're swimming downstream and at least and then trust your instinct will take you there.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Raj, for coming on Media Escape and giving us some insights and some energy. If you've you know, you have done uh so many different things, you've started so many companies, exited, and you continue to innovate and design and think about what issues need to be solved.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you, Anika. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. Thank you to everybody who is listening to this episode or watching it of Media Escape Insights from Digital Changemakers brought to you by USC's Masters in Digital Media Management Program. I'm one of your hosts, Anika Jackson, and I'll be back again with another amazing guest very shortly.

SPEAKER_01:

To learn more about the Master of Science and Digital Media Management program, visit us on the web at dmm.usc.edu.

Head Shot

Anika Jackson

Host
Head Shot

Joseph Itaya

Host