Mozilla moves out of Mountain View

On Friday, Mitchell Baker was in Mozilla’s Mountain View headquarters for the last time, saying goodbye, packing up the dinosaur quilt, the T-shirt collection and other memorabilia.

Baker isn’t going anywhere, nor is Mozilla, the nonprofit browser maker. But the organization is giving up its Mountain View office, whose lease ends in January. The Mozilla CEO (Baker runs both the nonprofit foundation and a for-profit subsidiary) had an appointed time to pick up her things and clear out.

“I haven’t been back” since the beginning of shelter-in-place, Baker told me, “and I won’t ever go back to that office.”

The proximate cause is the pandemic, which has reduced the need for office space. Mozilla will make do with its San Francisco office, which is about three-quarters the size, and other offices around the world, as virtually all of its employees continue to work from home, Baker told me.

It interrupts a very long run of web browser development in the South Bay city. Mozilla’s Firefox traces its roots to Netscape, which was also based in Mountain View. Now there’s just Google, Mozilla’s best frenemy, which pays Mozilla for search traffic but also makes the competing Chrome browser.

Mozilla may well return there, but the office won’t be the same.

“We intend to have space after the pandemic, but we think it will be different from the offices we had before,” Baker said. “That lease was from the time when we figured our Bay Area employees would have their own space and come in every day.” Even before the coronavirus struck, Mozilla employees were grappling with long commutes and expensive Bay Area housing. With employees scattered around the world, Mozilla already did much of its work in a remote-friendly way.

Other organizations are seeing their headquarters not so much move as drift. Expensify still has an office in San Francisco’s Financial District. But CEO David Barrett has moved to Portland, where the expense-management software startup has been growing. Where is headquarters? It depends. Baker points out that a predecessor of hers lived in Oakland and spent more time in Mozilla’s San Francisco office.

This will be a hard question that companies wrestle with as they return from virtual exile. Is there a center of gravity to the organization? Does it need one? How will leaders set the tone and build a culture when most interactions are digital?

I suspect the answers will be found in a web browser.

— Owen Thomas, othomas@sfchronicle.com

Quote of the week

“Everyone should take a breather.” — WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar to CNBC on the heated Hollywood reaction to his decision to stream Warner Bros. movies at the same time they hit theaters in 2021

Coming up

It’s gig-economy IPO week! DoorDash starts trading Wednesday, and Airbnb is expected to price its shares that evening and begin trading the next day.

What I’m reading

Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans on Zappos co-founder Tony Hsieh’s final days. (Forbes)

Carolyn Said on DoorDash’s IPO. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Mark Gurman on the latest shifts in Apple’s self-driving efforts. (CoinDesk)

Tech Chronicle is a weekly newsletter from Owen Thomas, The Chronicle’s business editor, and the rest of the tech team. Follow along on Twitter: @techchronicle and Instagram: @techchronicle