In this panel, companies from Mozilla Ventures “Healthy Communities” thesis areas reflect on lessons learned in building social tooling around data sovereignty and trust and safety. Mozilla Ventures’ General Partner Mohamed Nanabhay moderates a conversation between Koodos’s Jad Esber, Germ Network’s Tessa Brown, and Filament’s Tony Haile on building consumer-first products that balance data sovereignty, community, and public trust.
Jad is co-founder and CEO of koodos, a Series A company building personal context infrastructure and creators of Shelf — where millions privately track what they’re reading, watching, listening to, buying, and more. Shelf unlocks a kind of sixth sense for taste, revealing hidden patterns in what people will love next.
Jad’s work explores how technology can better reflect who we are. As an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, his research focused on platform incentives, memory, and taste, and the design challenges of personal AI and privacy self-management. His writing has appeared in Harvard Business Review, WIRED, Quartz and more, and he has spoken at the UN, Penn, and Ofcom. He also advises and invests in startups enabling the responsible use of emerging technologies.
Before founding koodos, Jad was at Google and YouTube.
Mohamed sits as Managing Partner for Mozilla Ventures. Previously, Mohamed was the Deputy CEO of the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF). He continues to serve on the Investment Committee of MDIF.
Mohamed spent a decade at Al Jazeera, where he started the New Media department focusing on innovation and product development across internet, mobile, and social technologies. He served as the Head of Online at Al Jazeera English where he led the team that produced the award-winning coverage of the Arab revolutions in 2011.
In 2005 Mohamed founded QatarLiving.com, a listings and community website that grew to be the largest site in Qatar. He co-founded Signalnoi.se, a social analytics platform for newsrooms that won the Knight News Challenge. Mohamed served as a board member of the Mozilla Foundation, Media Development Investment, as the Board Chair of Global Voices Online, and the Advisory Board of Creative Commons.
Tessa Brown is the CEO and Co-Founder of Germ Network—DMs rebuilt to protect you. Germ DM gives you new tools to protect your connections with no phone numbers, multiple identities, and standards-based end-to-end encryption.
Germ emerged from Tessa’s work as a social media scholar at Stanford studying the dark side of virality, alongside her cofounder Mark Xue's work as a privacy engineer at Apple. Tessa is a peer-reviewed researcher in education, literacy history, and popular culture, and lives in San Francisco.