"Mozilla has assembled an engineering dream team to develop Daala, including Jean-Marc Valin, co-inventor of Opus, the new standard for audio encoding; Theora project lead Tim Terriberry; and recently Xiph co-founders Jack Moffitt, author of Icecast; and Monty Montgomery, the author of Ogg Vorbis."
At least a couple others not employed by Mozilla are also involved. I think they really do have a superb team; look at how passionate these guys are. You can throw a bunch of engineers at a problem with a commercial interest (patents!), but this easily leads to the incremental quantity-over-quality development you have with MPEG. Or you can have a few skilled & passionate fellows with some really new ideas.
They also took some techniques from published papers in the field, and many of the fundamental techniques are old enough to be patent free, so it's not like they're starting entirely from scratch.
"Mozilla has assembled an engineering dream team to develop Daala, including Jean-Marc Valin, co-inventor of Opus, the new standard for audio encoding; Theora project lead Tim Terriberry; and recently Xiph co-founders Jack Moffitt, author of Icecast; and Monty Montgomery, the author of Ogg Vorbis."