Mozilla in China

Tomorrow, Monday, July 2nd, will be the first day when our new office in Beijing opens its door for business. Our address is:

Mozilla Online Ltd.
SP Tower C-1701, Tsinghua Science Park, 1 Zhongguancun Road East
Haidian District, Beijing 100084, P.R. China

We grabbed the last piece of suitably-sized space in Tsinghua Science Park and we are sandwiched, fittingly in some sense, between Google (we can see their 7-storey building directly down from our office on the 17th floor) and MSN (behind our backs in the next building). Also fittingly perhaps, our neighbors on the 17th floor are two Nasdaq-listed Chinese internet and new media stars — Focus Media (the wildly successful advertising company that has grabbed a lot of display space in office building lobbys and everywhere else there is white space), and a new gaming unit of Kong Zhong, the value-added mobile service provider.

But hold off on your visit for another week — the office is still somewhat of a construction site and we are putting on the finishing touches and putting up some furniture in the coming days. Alfred Peng at Sun has been tracking our office development with his camera and I hope he can post some of his photos online soon.

Apart from the office buildout, we also just finished our registration process. The last hurdle we crossed this past week was to obtain a foreign exchange license so we could set up our bank accounts. This also means we can start paying our bills and meeting our payroll.

Talking about payroll, we need to get some folks onto it. Right now we are searching primarily for people in the following areas:

1. Strategy, planning, marketing, and PR. We are looking for a couple of individuals who have expertise and experience in market analysis, customer research, product positioning, brand management, and communications. Political correctness aside, the best candidates should understand the China market natively and can operate on their own effectively locally.

2. Technology. We are also looking for a couple of people who are passionate about and experts in the latest Internet technologies. Experiences building/running websites and working with browsers are obviously a plus. Must be hands-on.

Apart from competivie pay and benefits, what we really offer uniquely is a chance to join us at the very beginning and have a real impact on how the Internet scene might evolve in China in the coming months/years. Unlike at many large multinationals in China where you are pigeon-holed into a narrow spot and then spend all your time planning and proposing and socializing your brilliant ideas but never actually getting the chance to do anything, at Mozilla Online you will have an opportunity to participate in all aspects of our operations and contribute and affect directly how millions of users might spend their time online. You will see your ideas turn into action in hours rather than days/months/years/never.

We are also interested in having student interns work with us. We are especially interested in those from the Computer Science and related departments, as well as those in the business and management schools.

You know how to find me via email.

Cheers,

Li Gong