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  • Backstage at Disrupt, Greylock’s John Lilly on Building Apps for Phones vs Tablets

    Semil Shah

    I am currently an independent consultant working on mobile, growth, and operations with a small handful of early-stage, venture-backed companies. Previously, I spent six (6) months as an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm investing in software startups for consumers and the enterprise, as well as in cloud technologies and infrastructure. Prior to this,... → Learn More

    Saturday, May 26th, 2012

    Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

    If you’re building apps for phones or tablets, here’s a must-see discussion for you. We were able to corral Greylock’s John Lilly (who recently helped lead an investment in Instagram, right before it was acquired) backstage at Disrupt NYC earlier this week for a more casual conversation about the mobile app ecosystem and hardware. In this short talk, Lilly shared his views about the similarities and differences of building applications for mobile devices, taking care to point out that he sees many great entrepreneurs approaching the phone in a similar manner to how they approach the tablet. While the operating systems are similar on iPhone and other iOS devices (like iPad), for instance, the use cases, usage by time of day, and monetization opportunities are entirely different. Lilly encourages entrepreneurs to ask how to get their ideas on the homescreens of users’ phones and tablets.


    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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