John Lilly

Career

Reactivity

Lilly co-founded and served the CTO for Reactivity, Cisco Systems bought Reactivity in 2007 for $135 million.

Mozilla

Lilly was the chief executive officer of the Mozilla Corporation from 2008 to 2010. The corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, coordinates development of open-source Mozilla Internet applications, including the Firefox web browser. Lilly, previously Mozilla's chief operating officer, succeeded Mitchell Baker as CEO in January 2008. Lilly was succeeded by Gary Kovacs on November 8, 2010. Lilly left Mozilla's board of directors in March 2014, reportedly over the appointment of Brendan Eich as CEO.

Venture capital

Lilly joined the venture capital firm Greylock Partners as a partner in 2011. His investments include Instagram, Dropbox, 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." Lilly has been a board member of Figma since December 2014, representing Greylock. He has been an independent board member of Duolingo since 2021.