Mozilla CEO John Lilly Stepping Down To Join Greylock Partners

Jason Kincaid

Jason Kincaid worked as a writer for TechCrunch from April 2008 through 2012. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaid@gmail.com → Learn More

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

John Lilly, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, will be stepping down from the role to assume a position at VC firm Greylock Partners according to multiple reports. Mozilla is best known for making the Firefox web browser, as well as the Thunderbird Email client and numerous other projects. The news was first reported earlier this afternoon by AllThingsD.

Lilly has been at Mozilla since 2005, when he was VP of Business Development. He later became COO in 2006 and then CEO in 2008, taking the helm of the company from Mitchell Baker. Lilly will remain on Mozilla’s Board of Directors, and won’t be leaving the company until a suitable replacement is found.

John joined Greylock as a partner in 2011. Prior to Greylock, John was CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, an open source Web browser used by more than 450 million people. John also co-founded Reactivity, an enterprise security infrastructure company acquired by Cisco in 2007, where he served as founding CEO and later CTO. Earlier in his career, John held positions on the executive team at Trilogy Software and as a Senior Scientist in Apple’s research labs. John is currently...

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Company: Mozilla
Website: mozilla.org
Launch Date: February 1, 1998
Funding: $2.3M

Born from Netscape’s 1998 open sourcing of the code base behind its Netscape Communicator internet suite, Mozilla Firefox currently holds approximately 22.48% of the world market for internet browsers as of April 2009. Version 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004 after a series of name changes, and within a year close to 100 million downloads of the browser technology had occurred. The following two years saw upgrades to version 1.5 in November 2005 and 2.0 in October 2006....

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