Biography | Ryan Merkley — The Castro Street Canopy Where Mozilla Put Him on Programs

People treat Mozilla as a browser and a San Francisco office.

In 2010 the Foundation's listed address was still this canopy at 650 Castro Street, Suite 300, in downtown Mountain View.

Ryan Merkley arrived that year as director of programs and strategy.

He later became chief operating officer and chief strategy officer of the Foundation, the nonprofit parent of the Mozilla Corporation.

Creative Commons, announcing him as CEO on 14 May 2014, said he had just left the operating job.

The same release credited him with helping stand up Webmaker, Lightbeam, and Popcorn, and with kicking off an online fundraising drive that raised more than 1.8 million dollars from more than 44,000 new donors.

Those product names are Foundation work, not Firefox release notes.

Webmaker taught people to write the web.

Lightbeam showed third-party trackers.

Popcorn built web-native video.

The public record does not give a start month.

This memory is dated 2010 because that is the year both his Wikipedia biography and later employer biographies use for the move from city hall to Castro Street.

Mozilla later occupied 331 East Evelyn Avenue and then folded the Mountain View space.

The 2009 photograph of this entrance still shows the number 650 and the words Mountain View City Center.

A visitor will not find a Mozilla sign now. The lot is ordinary downtown office space.

The point of the pin is the job change.

A political staffer who had opened a city data catalogue walked under this canopy and spent four years inside an open-source nonprofit that still treated the web as a public resource.

That is the formation that made the Creative Commons board look at him in 2014.

The suite number in 2010 was 300. The canopy in the 2009 photograph is the public face of that address.

Photos: 650 Castro Street canopy, Lukasblakk, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (16 June 2009). Portrait: Rannie Turingan, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (9 May 2014).