Brian Behlendorf
Independent Advisor, Consultant, Investor, and Board-Level Director
Brian Behlendorf is an independent advisor, consultant, investor, and board-level director to technology non- and for-profit organizations and governments.
Brian currently sits on the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US-based 501c3 non-profit focused on advancing civil rights and human agency in the digital domain. He also is on the board of directors of Thunderbird, a Mozilla-Foundation-owned for-profit corporation focused on delivering the Thunderbird email client.
Brian is also a venture partner at Sparklabs AI, an emerging investment fund focused on AI infra, dev tools and app. He is also an advisor at HeavyBit Ventures, and a board member of HeavyBit portfolio company Recce.
Brian's most recent full time engagement was as Executive Director of a number of initiatives hosted at the Linux Foundation: Hyperledger (2016-2021), The Open Source Security Foundation (2021-2023), LF Public Health (2020-2022) and the OpenWallet Foundation (2023-2024). In that role, Brian convened stakeholders ranging from the largest tech companies in the world, to startups and government agencies and non-profits, to work together on shared Open Source software, services and infrastructure.
Brian was an early employee at Wired Magazine (where he put up the first ad banner), and co-founded Organic Online (now part of Omnicom), and founded CollabNet, which pioneered the concept of cloud-hosted collaborative developer tools.
Brian co-founded the Apache httpd web server project, and the ensuing non-profit Apache Software Foundation, leading it as President for its first three years. He was also a founding board member of the Open Source Initiative and the Mozilla Foundation, where he remained on its board for 23 years.
Brian has also served as CTO/CIO at the World Economic Forum, where he shifted the organization to a digital-first engagement paradigm and built a social network for world leaders. He also served as an advisor in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Obama Administration, and as a managing director at Mithril, a growth-stage venture capital firm.
Throughout his career Brian has focused on the use of digital tools to enhance human agency, collective intelligence and individual well-being.