We’re Mozilla’s New Startup Incubator. AMA

Hi folks, I'm the turbo nerd mentor. :) Systems biology and comp sci was a weird combo in 1992, but it led me to working on cool systems like NFS, FreeBSD, the Human Genome Project, IMAP, Solaris Containers, and eventually browsers (Firefox). It's been fun and super satisfying to occasionally see technology I had a hand in make new things possible for developers. At Joyent I helped create an environment for Ryan and Isaac to build up the nascant node.js community and that experience stuck with me as something to be repeated. New things require space and time and support, and that's why I'm here doing this new Mozilla incubator. Maybe we already have the next node.js - hi deno! - but what about zero knowledge proofs deployed against the 1000 different places in the Internet where the landlords tax us today? Can't wait to see what you all want to build. I'm around all day, ama!

Hi all! Kathy Pham here, another mentor and founder of Mozilla Builders. Looking forward to answering questions and sharing ideas. I've built/worked at products, organizations, companies, startups across private sector (Google, IBM), government (White House), non-profits, startups, healthcare (Harris Healthcare), AI, etc and Mozilla Builders Fix the Internet is one of the most rewarding, energizing movements I have ever helped build. So thrilled to hang out here with everyone. Currently a fellow at Mozilla, Harvard, teach a class on product management, and spearheading Responsible Computer Science, and Ethical Tech. My favorite Hackathon has been "Make the Breast Pump Not Suck" at the MIT Media Lab! Love tinkering, building, going to the community, designing for equity, and so much more. Ask us all the things, and then apply and come join us!

Hi, I’m Maria, one of the mentors & founders of Mozilla Builders. I co-founded Chartboost, raised $20M, and built a company that is loved by hundreds of thousands of game developers.

Areas I can help with include: prototyping, mvp-ing, recruiting, fundraising, building a culture, scaling, managing your time, communicating, guerrilla marketing, pr, mobile user acquisition and monetization, international expansion, hacking your way into silicon valley networks, building bridges with other parts of the world, keeping mental health during it all and more.

Hi, I'm Neeharika and I've been mentoring Mozilla Builders for the last several months. I'm a former engineer and serial entrepreneur with expertise in product, customer success, and enterprise sales. Early last year my company sold to a larger player and I decided to shift gears to helping other entrepreneurs. It has been so incredible to see what teams around the world are building to make the internet a more open and safer place! Here to answer any questions you might have!

Hiya: I'm Bijan Marashi one of the mentors and founders of Mozilla Builders...I've built and exited search, email, and other deep tech companies as well as coached 8+ M+A's and a dozen+ venture financings. Ask me about creating new products + new startups, funding strategies for startups and working with VC's, shopping for M+A's...

Currently in the Mozilla MVP Spring Lab with our tool Neutral (https://shopneutral.io/) and can personally attest to the incredible mentorship and impact of this program. In just a few weeks, we were able to build, launch, and hit the ground running with Neutral.

Really appreciate the end-to-end support we've received from the mentors and Mozilla community. If anyone wants to learn more about our experience, feel free to reach out!

Hey! I am Gabe and I am currently participating in Mozilla's MVP Lab as part of Ameelio (www.ameelio.org). The mentors and program have been awesome so far. Feel free to ping us if you have any questions.

MOZILLA BUILDERS IS AMAZING. Great mentors and an unbelievable program. Apply guys; they'll help you start off your company! I am part of Mozilla's Spring Innovation Lab and it's been a blast.

Really cool to see this here!

I’m currently a participant in the Mozilla Builders’ Spring MVP program working on our recommendation-as-a-service platform www.chestnutai.com, and so far, the experience has been amazing! Each week, we get half an hour of dedicated mentoring session, and the mentors are super responsive on Slack as well. They give you great, tailored advice on how to validate your idea, gain tractions in the super early stage, and prioritize on what to build. Shout out to our mentors Bart & Patrick for being so helpful!!

Hi! My name is Emma and I am currently participating in Mozilla's Lab as a member of Ameelio. Our mentors have been incredibly helpful and I highly recommend joining this incubator.

Hi, The programs looks great! I couldn't find on your website so I will ask here: can we attend the program (MVP lab) remotely?

Also which channels of communication are used to communicate between the teams and the mentors? Would you accommodate with a team using mostly asynchronous communication (written, non-chat) channels, because according to our experience it's the most effective way to communicate in a small software company?

Hey Sylvian, YES! The entire program is remote.

We communicate both synchronously AND asynchronously, i.e. we set up weekly or biweekly -- depends on your preference -- meetings with teams and also are available via email + slack.

Our methodology is to be as non intrusive as possible (it's your project!) but we try to guide you in thinking about problems in the right way, and we've found that a lot of value we add is when people are looking to onboard first users.

We help a lot with messaging, cold email outreach, but much more!

Great, thank you!

Your program looks exactly what my project (https://bloom.sh) need at this time!

You can count on my application :)

Wow, big scope, but cool project. Any sense on what app will have the strongest pull with early users? Seems like a "I came for email but stayed for the notes" situation, but that's only me guessing.

looking forward to seeing your application!

When I launched the project as a webapp in 2019 it was the ability to stream music directly from your Drive (think your private Spotify connected to your Dropbox).

Currently in the Spring Open lab and truly loved it so far, the mentors are great and it has been an awesome way to distract ourselves during COVID and working on something cool. It is really cool that Mozilla is conducting this program again in the summer.

Shameless plug of what we have been working on https://twittersourcebot.tech/

It really has been a great experience, props to the whole team of mentors for creating this program!

hi guys, i’m one of the mentors (and staff) on this program. i worked on the firefox 1.0 launch, other open source projects, built tap tap revenge (one of the first app store hits). I’ll be here all day & more than happy to answer any questions about the program, what we learned from all the projects people kicked off this spring, what kinds of ideas we’re looking for etc.

I have built this in my spare time. https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=2684bc94f9fcb9ffe637ebfbeba2...

I want to build a blogging/writing/learning experience with program-ability, and collaboration (version control).

Is this the kind of idea you are looking for?

The long term goal is defining an interactive file format that is suitable for data exploration and explanation.

hey billconan, cool site!

yes these are definitely the projects we're looking for. one thing to note would be: who is your target audience?

what we would like to see is a well defined target group and a product that meets that groups needs.

apologies for late response (doctor's...).

yes, what patrick said ^^, @billconan

there will be 2 groups of users.

Students can use this for their homework. It will be a better mathematics.

Programmers can use this as a knowledge community. similar to dev.to

Hi! My name is Jatin and I am currently participating in Mozilla's Lab, working on a product to improve the conditions of small businesses in India by adding a source of income for them. Our mentors and folks from other teams have been incredibly helpful and I highly recommend joining this incubator.

yo!

Music has always been the voice of change and with this refreshing breeze of let's fix the internet our team of musicians and devs have been able to set full sail to reach new boarders in global artists collaboration. Creating together, raising their voice with global narratives. ununu is a collaboration tool for bedroom music producers.

Love the community and support we are fortunate to get from being part of the MVP Lab and we'll surely apply for this incubator opportunity and stay active in this ecosystem.

much love, se Germans

>> How would you “fix-the-internet”?

How can we do a better job teaching about the importance of privacy and importance of having competition in the browser space and in the online tools we use?

This is an awesome team of really talented mentors who will help bring your ideas to reality. Being a part of the Spring MVP Lab was one of the best decisions we made.

Hey, I'm Mark Nadal and I was accepted into Mozilla's "Fix the Internet" program - it has been fantastic so far & huge respect to everyone at Mozilla for putting this on.

Note: I doubt anyone will see this comment as HackerNews has shadow banned my account because my Open Source project competes with some of YC's investments (it undermines & destroys the need/market for some of their crypto-coin scams).

I interviewed with YC a few years ago and their entire process was terribly unprofessional - I've gone through 3 accelerator programs now, and interviewed at many more. YC itself seems pretty awesome, but beware of the politics - if a single person (HN mod in my case) feels like you are a threat to their status, that person has enough marketing power to hurt you. Find the GOOD people in YC and work with them, don't leave it to chance or you'll fall out of good graces.

In contrast, look what Mozilla is doing! They're helping move the internet (the world, the community) forward, and are a non-profit foundation. I highly recommend applying to their program. They are GOOD people, doing good work. Please please do everything you can to help them make this a success - the internet depends on it.

The only recent dead post of yours seems to be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761370. Are you sure that you are shadow-banned?

We banned you after many years of you promoting your product aggressively on HN, using shady tactics such as voting rings and links to things that looked unrelated but were in fact stealthy ways of promoting the exact same thing over and over.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756777

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17000657

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8489651

Users complained frequently about you spamming HN over all these years—there are many more comments like these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22730863

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21383815

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22499177

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16893429

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16677493

, but we gave you the benefit of the doubt and cut you slack until finally enough was enough. We've banned countless users for far less.

We moderate HN less when YC or YC startups are involved (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), but I don't see how that relates to this.