Nabiha Syed leads the Mozilla Foundation, where she backs the technology markets won’t build (yet): open infrastructure, public-interest tools, and ideas whose most important customer isn’t capital. Underneath all of it is one question: Who gets to decide what technology is for?

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She came to that question as a media lawyer, first as The New York Times’ First Amendment Fellow, in private practice grappling with the Snowden disclosures and surveillance issues, and then as BuzzFeed’s first newsroom lawyer, defending journalists at the frontier where new technologies collided with old rules about speech, privacy, and the public’s right to know. She co-built and led The Markup, the investigative newsroom that uses data journalism to show how algorithms quietly govern everyday life; Fast Company named it one of the world’s most innovative companies.

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A decade defending the right to challenge powerful systems taught her something: Challenge alone won't build the alternative. Now she funds the people who do.

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A Marshall Scholar and Yale Law School graduate, where she co-founded the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, Nabiha serves on the boards of the Scott Trust (owner of The Guardian newspaper), Mellon Foundation, and Girl Scouts of the USA, and received the NAACP Digital Civil Rights Award. Her career has taken her from Guantánamo Bay to Davos, from briefing two sitting presidents to meeting the Pope at the Vatican. She remains unpersuaded that the way things are is the way things have to be.