I disagree, hiring a CEO for well below market pay because they believe in the mission is a recipe for disaster. Very likely you’ll end up with someone whose heart is in the right place but can’t execute.
2-3x staff engineer salary is a lot of money. But no matter how much I believed in a mission if I could make 10-20x that and set myself up for life financially I’d have a very hard time turning it down.
There's people in the FOSS realm running VERY competent operations for simple living wage, or less.
Take KDE for example. It's easy to argue they've accomplished MORE than Mozilla has in the last decade.
Their desktop ships with every Steam Deck (along with some niche laptop manufacturers) and they have a vast ecosystem of applications. Albeit some more rapidly developed than others.
Their structure is entirely different than Mozilla so it's hardly a direct comparison. But the main point is that Mozilla's traditional corporate structure seems to be a millstone.
They could have stashed most of their Google funding and kept a solid team of passionate maintainers paid in perpetuity. Goodwill could have volunteers contributing directly to Firefox, instead of forking it.
It's not clear CEO pay is driven my market forces at all. Pay seems almost completely divorced from competency.
> Very likely you’ll end up with someone whose heart is in the right place but can’t execute.
There's no reason to believe that. But it's still better than someone whose heart isn't in the right place and can't execute.
Or, arguably even worse, someone whose heart isn't in the right place and can execute.
As opposed to now, where you've got someone who is willing and able to tank the entire project, but it looks good on paper? Is that the kind of person you want to be competing for?
I get what you're saying, but I really can't agree. The mission is important in a non-profit. It's part of what makes them work.