A CEO, board director, and strategic advisor, Nabiha Syed is a globally recognized leader in navigating technological disruption and high-stakes media matters. She currently leads the Mozilla Foundation, where her $40M portfolio supports the development of trustworthy, open source AI around the world. She is an expert in agentic tech, data privacy, and the future of online speech.
Prior to Mozilla, as CEO, Nabiha launched and built a data journalism start-up that was recognized by FastCompany as “Most Innovative” and was successfully acquired in 2024. During her leadership, The Markup was cited by Congress 21 times, including in its antitrust inquiries into Amazon and Google; built a real-time privacy inspector with 13M users; and raised $32M from the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Craig Newmark, and others. Nabiha’s work was recognized by Crain’s 40 Under 40 in Business and she received the NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights prize.
As a public speaker on issues relating to privacy, technology, and free speech, Nabiha is equally comfortable advocating at the World Economic Forum in Davos as she is traveling to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba on behalf of the American Bar Association (though one of them boasts far better cuisine). She has addressed diverse audiences spanning annual investor meetings, lobbying groups, corporations, cultural institutions, and philanthropies including Standard & Poor, the Association of Clinical Research Organizations, Draper Richards Kaplan, Heising-Simons Foundation, Wharton, the Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and she is an adjunct lecturer on media and First Amendment at Columbia.
Nabiha is on the board of the Scott Trust, the $1B+ British company that owns The Guardian newspaper, which has a global reach of 81M monthly visitors; an advisor to the Schmidt Futures-incubated Ex/Ante, the first fund focused on “agentic tech” including privacy, cybersecurity, and blockchain; and served on the executive committee of the New York Civil Liberties Union. She also sits on the advisory board of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School and the executive committee of Yale Law School.
Nabiha’s work takes a global perspective: She has advised two sitting presidents on issues of free speech, including providing expertise to President Emmanuel Macron of France, and was nominated to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations in 2019.
Nabiha began her career at The New York Times and served as the first newsroom counsel at BuzzFeed, with media law expertise in emerging technologies, privacy, security, and data ethics. Well-versed in crisis communications, Nabiha also led the successful litigation strategy for several high-profile libel litigations. For her work, Nabiha was recognized by the Reporter’s Committee for the Freedom of the Press with an inaugural award. Ever an entrepreneur, she also co-founded the nation’s first media law clinic, now in its fifteenth year of operation.
Nabiha is a first-generation Pakistani-American born and raised in Orange County, California. She received a B.A. from Johns Hopkins, M.St in media law which she attended as a Marshall Scholar, and a J.D. from Yale Law School.