The Agentic Tech Podcast, Ep 3: Unlearning the Defaults w/ Mozilla Foundation ED Nabiha Syed + Ziyaad Bhorat, VP of Imagination & Strategic Growth
Rebuilding agency, de-risking new ideas with philanthropic capital, and why bridging the imagination gap is critical for democracy tech.
Nabiha Syed stepped into her role as Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation with a root question: what are the rules that shape what’s possible in technology development? Trained in law and media and briefly in the orbit of the Snowden disclosures, Nabiha’s career has been a slow burn toward the same problem: who gets to set the boundaries of user agency, and how?
In this episode, Nabiha and Ziyaad Bhorat (Vice President of Imagination and Strategic Growth at the Mozilla Foundation) walk through Mozilla’s “unlearning” agenda: what it means to reopen the design space when people feel resigned to technological inevitability, why digital “choice” is often reduced to procedural consent (accept standardized terms to participate) or overwhelming choice spam, and how rethinking those defaults could better support human agency online. Their answer is a flywheel: listening to communities upstream, translating their needs into legible signals, prototyping quickly, and deploying philanthropic risk capital to legitimize new categories before venture will touch them.
We discuss Mozilla’s incubator work, using the Mozilla Data Collective as an example of how ideas move from conception to implementation and eventual spinout. We also unpack a shift from privacy toward data agency, draw lessons from global innovation trajectories (including how M-Pesa preceded Apple Pay by nine years), and look ahead to Mozilla’s next chapter.