You might have heard the news yesterday - Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript, founding member of Mozilla and Mozilla’s CTO took on a larger role managing the product and platform engineering teams.

Personally I am super-excited about this move. I have the deepest respect for Brendan and believe we will see magic happen at Mozilla under his expanded leadership.

Fun personal story: Brendan is the reason why I am at Mozilla (together with the incredible Chris Beard). When we lived in London my wife Jane used to head up European Marketing for Mozilla. A couple of years ago Brendan emailed her and mentioned that he will be in town and asked if she wanted to have dinner & drinks with him. Jane, not a techie at all, was terrified: A whole night with Brendan Eich, the inventor of JavaScript, talking about technology. ;)

So she asked me to join the dinner. And guess what my reaction was? “The inventor of JavaScript? The CTO of Mozilla? Hell yeah!”

We had an amazing evening together - and didn’t speak about technology for a minute. We ended up speaking about Mozilla, venture capital (my role at the time) and entrepreneurship. And out of that discussion came an introduction to Chris Beard - who later asked me to consult for Mozilla and eventually hired me to help him run Mozilla Labs.

Which proves two points: Life is a series of serendipitous events. And it’s good.

Godspeed Brendan!

Addendum: Jane wants it to be known she was not terrified of Brendan, but rather JavaScript! And even after more than 5 years of working at Mozilla, she is still terrified! ;)