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John Lilly is an American venture capitalist, entrepreneur, teacher, and computer scientist. Lilly co-founded Reactivity in 1998 (which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007), served as CEO of Mozilla from 2008-2010, and was a partner in the venture capital firm Greylock from 2011-2019. He remains a venture partner with Greylock and is an independent investor as well. Lilly teaches at Stanford University as a lecturer in management in the Stanford Graduate School of Businessand is a co-inventor on seven US patents.
In 1998, Lilly co-founded Reactivity, which started as a technology incubator specializing in building products and teams for hi-tech companies. For the first three years, Lilly served as CEO and on the board of directors. He was instrumental in the spinout of two incubated companies: Zaplet Inc. (backed by KPCB) and CenterRun Inc. (backed by Sequoia Capital and acquired by Sun Microsystems). He also led Reactivity's Series A fundraise for $23M from Accel, Austin Ventures and Maveron.
In 2001, Lilly transitioned from CEO to CTO and VP of products, where he drove product strategy and technical sales, created the company's services organization, and wrote the majority of the company's white papers and technical collateral. He also played a major role in the next fundraising rounds of $6 million and $10 million.
On March 21, 2007, Reactivity was acquired by Cisco Systemsfor approximately $135 million.
Lilly served as CEO of Mozilla from 2008-2010 and on the board from 2006-2014. Prior to becoming CEO, Lilly was the COO of Mozilla from 2005 to the end of 2007. Mozilla is the company behind the Firefox browser. Lilly helped grow the Firefox user volume from 7 million to 400 million.
Lilly was a partner in the venture capital firm Greylock from 2011 to 2019 and remains a venture partner. He led investments in Dropbox, Tumblr, (acquired by Yahoo) and in Instagram (acquired by Facebook in 2012). During his time with Greylock, he has participated in twenty-six investments.
Lilly has made ten independent investments between 2021 and February 2022 in Aside, HUBUC, Marley Medical, Felt, Rootly, Iron Fish, Census, Descript, Gowalla, and CoScreen, where he made his first exit.
Lilly serves on multiple boards, including Code for America as Chair, and as member of Figma, VotingWorks, Nuro, Caffeine, Clockwise,Daffy and Duolingo. Past board service includes Mozilla, TripIt, Open Source Applications Foundation, CenterRun and the Sunnyvale Public Library.
Lilly began his career in 1995 at Trilogy Software as the Director of Design after completing his MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. He then spent a year as a Senior Scientist at Apple Computer in 1997.
Lilly earned a BS in Computer Systems Engineering in 1993 and a MS in Computer Science in 1995 from Stanford University.
