John Lilly is a

venture capitalist Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

and former CEO of Mozilla. He currently serves on the board of directors of the

Open Source Applications Foundation The Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) was a non-profit organization founded in 2002 by Mitch Kapor whose purpose was to effect widespread adoption of free software/open-source software. History Founded in 2002 by Mitch Kapor to effect ...

and

Code for America Code for America is a non-partisan, non-political 501(c)(3) organization founded in 2009 to address the widening gap between the public and private sectors in their effective use of technology and design. According to its website, the organizat ...

. He earned his B.S. in computer systems engineering and M.S. in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

from Stanford University.

Career

Reactivity

Lilly co-founded and served the CTO for Reactivity, a start-up focused on consulting on technically difficult websites and incubating new companies. Cisco Systems bought Reactivity in 2007 for $135 million.

Mozilla

Lilly was the

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especial ...

of the

Mozilla Corporation The Mozilla Corporation (stylized as moz://a) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of op ...

from 2008 to 2010. The corporation, a subsidiary of the

Mozilla Foundation The Mozilla Foundation (stylized as moz://a) is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, ...

, coordinates development of

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

applications, including the

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

. Lilly, previously Mozilla's

Chief Operating Officer A chief operating officer or chief operations officer, also called a COO, is one of the highest-ranking executive positions in an organization, composing part of the " C-suite". The COO is usually the second-in-command at the firm, especially if t ...

, succeeded

Mitchell Baker Winifred Mitchell Baker (born 1957) is the Executive Chairwoman and CEO of the Mozilla Foundation and of Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet applications ...

as CEO in January 2008. In May 2010, Lilly announced he would step down as CEO. Lilly was succeeded by

Gary Kovacs Gary Kovacs (born 1963 or 1964) is a San Francisco Bay Area technologist. He was the chief executive officer of AVG Technologies. Kovacs has worked for Mozilla Corporation, Adobe, SAP, and IBM, and led Zi Corporation, a mobile text messag ...

on November 8, 2010. Lilly left Mozilla's board of directors in March 2014, reportedly over the appointment of

Brendan Eich Brendan Eich (; born July 4, 1961) is an American computer programmer and technology executive. He created the JavaScript programming language and co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. He served ...

as CEO.

Venture capital

Lilly joined the venture capital firm

Greylock Partners Greylock Partners is one of the oldest venture capital firms, founded in 1965, with committed capital of over $3.5 billion under management. The firm focuses on early-stage companies in the consumer, enterprise software and infrastructure as wel ...

as a partner in 2011. His investments include

Instagram Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can ...

Dropbox Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2 ...

Tumblr Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a ...

, Quip, and MessageMe. Lilly left the firm in January 2019 to dedicate himself more to activism, explaining "it’s crystal clear that 2019 & 2020 are crucially important years — certainly the most important time in a generation, but maybe much longer than that."

References

External links