Chris Beard is a

Canadian Canadians () are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being ''C ...

business leader, and former CEO of the

Mozilla Corporation The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open-source developers, s ...

. In January 1998, he co-founded The Puffin Group in Ottawa, Canada, which was acquired by Linuxcare less than two years later. Since then, Beard has mostly worked in senior product and marketing roles in a range of companies, including HP, Cluster File Systems, Inc. (acquired by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

) and

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

. He joined Mozilla in 2004, specifically to launch the

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

browser but also having responsibilities for other areas of the organisation, including product, marketing, innovation, communications, community and user engagement at different times during his nine years there. Prior to his appointment as CEO he most recently served as

Chief Marketing Officer A chief marketing officer (CMO), also called a chief brand officer (CBO), is a C-suite corporate executive responsible for managing marketing activities in an organization. The CMO leads brand management, marketing communications (including adver ...

. In July 2013 he joined Greylock Partners as an executive in residence, though remaining an advisor to Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's Chair. Beard was appointed in April 2014 as the interim CEO at

. On July 28, Beard was confirmed in the position. He is a runner, his first half-marathon being the 2010 Walt Disney World Half Marathon and his first full marathon being the 2013 Rock 'n' Roll San Diego Marathon. In 2014, he was appointed to the national board of the Make-a-Wish Foundation. He has an

MBA A Master of Business Administration (MBA) is a professional degree focused on business administration. The core courses in an MBA program cover various areas of business administration; elective courses may allow further study in a particular a ...

in International Business from the University of Edinburgh Business School (2002–04), where he was also awarded the John McFarlane Prize for Leadership. He previously read economics and biochemistry at the

University of Ottawa The University of Ottawa (), often referred to as uOttawa or U of O, is a Official bilingualism in Canada, bilingual public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on directly to the northeast of Downtown Ot ...

(1994–96). On August 29, 2019, Mozilla and Beard jointly announced that 2019 will be his last year as CEO of Mozilla.

References

External links

Entry at Greylock Partners
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Beard, Chris Mozilla people Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Business School Open source people Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) Canadian businesspeople Biography with signature