Greylock, Mozilla & Blitzscaling with John Lilly

John Lilly, partner at Greylock in Silicon Valley and former CEO of Mozilla joined us for an interesting conversation about his current stint as a venture capitalist, and the backstory of how the team from Mozilla orchestrated the onslaught against Microsoft in the browser wars may years back. He also shared how technology enabled blitzscaling has helped Mozilla to navigate from a tribe to a village stage with important lessons from mission to hiring.

Here are the interesting show notes and links to the discussion (with time-stamps included):

John Lilly (@johnolilly , LinkedIn), Partner at Greylock
- How did you start in your career?
- From your time in Reactivity, Mozilla and then Greylock Partners, what are the interesting career lessons you can share?
- How did you switch from an operator to a venture capitalist and how does it differ in moving from the sell to buy side of startup financing?
- What are the interesting companies you have invested in Greylock?
BlitzScaling at Tribe Stage and the story of Mozilla
- The course you taught together with Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue and Chris Yeh in Stanford last year: Technology enabled Blitzscaling.
- Can you provide an overview of technology enabled blitzscaling and why startups have difficulty in moving within different stages such as tribe to village?
- During the course, you discussed your time in Mozilla when the organisation is moving from a village to a tribe, can you provide the context about the web browser industry (with Microsoft dominating) in that time and what were the challenges that Mozilla trying to solve?
- Why did Mozilla start Firefox as an open source project instead of taking on Microsoft as a private company?
- How did Mozilla leverage the community to build out their influence in the web? What are the interesting hacks the team has adopted?
- You started with Mozilla as the “VP of Development & Business Operations”, what did you learn and how did you eventually end up becoming the CEO?
- How does one set the goals and metrics in the tribe stage?
- What are the key decisions made by the Mozilla team during the tribe stage in #Blitzscaling?
  - Hiring
  - Distributed organization
  - Community as Insiders
  - Ignore the enterprise
  - The importance of Mission

Podcast Information:

The show is hosted by Bernard Leong (@bleongcw) and are sponsored by Ideal Workspace (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) with their new Altizen Desk on Indiegogo (Twitter, Facebook, Medium). Also check out Ideal Workspace’s new standing desk, Altizen and sign up for their mailing list. Sound credits for the intro music: Taro Iwashiro, “The Beginning” from Red Cliff Soundtrack.