Brendan Eich

Brendan Eich (born July 4, 1961) is an American computer programmer and technology executive. He invented the JavaScript programming language and helped launch the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. After serving as the Mozilla Corporation’s chief technical officer, he became its CEO but resigned soon afterward following backlash over his opposition to same-sex marriage. He later co-founded Brave browser and serves as its CEO.

Eich grew up in Pittsburgh, Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Palo Alto, graduating from Ellwood P. Cubberley High School in 1979. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science from Santa Clara University and a master’s degree in 1985 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is Roman Catholic with Irish-German ancestry. His career began at Silicon Graphics, where he spent seven years working on operating system and network code.

In April 1995, Eich joined Netscape Communications Corporation. He originally planned to put Scheme in the browser, but his managers required the language’s syntax to resemble Java. He created a language combining Scheme’s functionality, Self’s object-orientation, and Java’s syntax, completing the first version in ten days to meet the Navigator 2.0 Beta release schedule. Initially called Mocha, it was renamed LiveScript in September 1995 and finally JavaScript in December, after a joint announcement with Sun Microsystems. He also designed the first SpiderMonkey engine to run the language in Navigator. When Mozilla inherited Netscape’s base code in 1998, the engine—written in C—was included. It was later updated in JavaScript 1.5 to meet the ECMA-262 standard. Eich continued overseeing SpiderMonkey’s development.

In early 1998, Eich co-founded the free and open-source Mozilla project with Jamie Zawinski and others, creating mozilla.org to manage open-source contributions to Netscape’s code. He served as Mozilla’s chief architect. After AOL bought Netscape in 1999 and shut down its browser unit in July 2003, Eich helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation. In August 2005, he became CTO of the newly formed Mozilla Corporation, the foundation’s for-profit arm. He retained ownership of the SpiderMonkey module until passing it to Dave Mandelin in 2011.

On March 24, 2014, Mozilla appointed Eich as CEO. The appointment drew widespread criticism over his past political donations: $1,000 in 2008 to California Proposition 8, which sought to ban same-sex marriage, and $2,100 to Proposition 8 supporter Tom McClintock between 2008 and 2010. The Wall Street Journal initially reported that half of Mozilla’s board—Gary Kovacs, John Lilly, and Ellen Siminoff—resigned in protest, leaving Mitchell Baker, Reid Hoffman, and Katharina Borchert. CNET later reported that only Lilly left due to Eich’s appointment. Lilly told The New York Times, “I left rather than appoint him,” declining to elaborate. On March 26, Eich expressed “sorrow for causing pain” and pledged to work with LGBT communities and allies at Mozilla. An online campaign followed: OkCupid automatically displayed a message to Firefox users about Eich’s donation, suggesting they switch browsers, and CREDO Mobile collected over 50,000 signatures demanding his resignation. After 11 days as CEO, Eich resigned on April 3, 2014, and left Mozilla. In his blog, he wrote, “under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader.” Mozilla’s press release said board members tried to keep him in a different role, but he chose to sever ties.

Eich is co-founder and CEO of Brave Software, a web browser platform company that raised $2.5 million from angel investors including Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, and Digital Currency Group. In January 2016, the company released developer versions of its open-source, Chromium-based Brave browser, which blocks ads and trackers. At Brave, Eich co-created the Basic Attention Token (BAT), a cryptocurrency for use in the browser. BAT launched its initial coin offering on May 31, 2017, raising $35 million. In 2020, The New York Times reported that Eich’s comments on Twitter about coronavirus policy and science caused backlash among Brave users, echoing the criticism that led to his Mozilla resignation.