John Lilly

Advising Partner, Gigascale Capital · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

executiveinvestorengineeracademic@johnolilly ↗LinkedIn ↗Wikipedia ↗

John Lilly is an American technology executive and investor who served as the CEO of Mozilla Corporation from 2008 to 2010. As a partner at Greylock Partners, he led investments and held board seats in companies including Instagram, Dropbox, Figma, and Tumblr.

9statements → 6claims → 2claims resolved → 3.44/5average certainty → 2.33/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 13said about them ↓

1 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 predictions · 2 assertions · 2 opinions · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how John argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

Lilly: Mozilla had 12 employees and 5M users when he joined

“I went to Mozilla, and it was maybe 12, 12 employees, and I, you know, maybe five million users, and I worked on that for a long time, and built that up to be, you know, helped build that up to be quite a lot larger”

John Lilly Jan 23, 2017 ▶ 3:26 20VC: Greylock's John Lilly on How Greylock Continues To Invest In The Next Big Markets, The Importance Of Building Tribes & Why There will Be Another Boom In Mobile

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1

none yet certainty 2

100% certainty 3

50% certainty 4

none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

281 words/min while actually speaking · 11.4 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for John Lilly: only 4 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 4 raw tape exchanges is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,502 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 1/10

pushed back at the host ▾ 2/10

setup questions received 65%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 13:19“Have you seen personally the Series A crunch as you progress companies through the funnel?” ▶ 11:13“Do you think, do you think another boom will lend to a market of consolidation or fragmentation with such behemoths like your Facebook's Googles?” ▶ 19:08“What's the biggest challenge to you today with Greylock?”

when John pushed back ▶ 18:31“Oh yeah, I don't think so. I think a lot of people think they will. Good odds that I'm wrong, but I really think they're just different use cases.” ▶ 13:22“No, I mean, we, um, we do, we do some seeds, but we do A's and B's, and our, our pace is about the same, and we, you know, it was a little bit slower maybe this year, but, you know…”

What they said9 What others said13 Episodes1

Everything John Lilly said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated

John Lilly disagrees with Fred Wilson's consumer tech downturn thesis

“I mean, I don't know exactly what Fred's been talking about consumer downturn, but I don't, I think there's plenty of space. So, I think most people didn't think there was space for Snapchat a couple years ago. Now, now people do. You used to look at Musical.l…”

John Lilly Jan 23, 2017 ▶ 11:38 20VC: Greylock's John Lilly on How Greylock Continues To Invest In The Next Big Markets, The Importance Of Building Tribes & Why There will Be Another Boom In Mobile

Opinion

Lilly: Microsoft has completely lost its software distribution advantage

“Microsoft has completely lost the distribution advantage, because people don't really create as much as a higher percentage of their material anymore on, on Windows machines.”

John Lilly Jan 23, 2017 ▶ 14:50 20VC: Greylock's John Lilly on How Greylock Continues To Invest In The Next Big Markets, The Importance Of Building Tribes & Why There will Be Another Boom In Mobile

Opinion

John Lilly argues Google Apps succeeded despite being a mediocre product

“I feel like the office, the Google office suite is not a great product, but it's amazing because it's on the web.”

John Lilly Jan 23, 2017 ▶ 16:21 20VC: Greylock's John Lilly on How Greylock Continues To Invest In The Next Big Markets, The Importance Of Building Tribes & Why There will Be Another Boom In Mobile

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Lilly: Mobile market will experience a secondary growth boom

“As you get, see more and more technology and mobile phones diffuse into how everybody works and how everybody lives, we'll start to see new use cases and we'll start to see a secondary boom.”

John Lilly Jan 23, 2017 ▶ 10:45 20VC: Greylock's John Lilly on How Greylock Continues To Invest In The Next Big Markets, The Importance Of Building Tribes & Why There will Be Another Boom In Mobile

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Lilly: Virtual reality and augmented reality will not merge over time

“Oh, yeah, I don't think so. I think a lot of people think they will. Good odds that I'm wrong, but I really think they're just different use cases. I think that the idea that you're putting on a headset to get away from the world is quite different than AR, wh…”

John Lilly Jan 23, 2017 ▶ 18:31 20VC: Greylock's John Lilly on How Greylock Continues To Invest In The Next Big Markets, The Importance Of Building Tribes & Why There will Be Another Boom In Mobile

Assertion Partly supported

Lilly: Median US mobile user installs zero new apps per month

“The median number of installs by a user in America on mobile per month of a new app is zero.”

John Lilly Jan 23, 2017 ▶ 7:50 20VC: Greylock's John Lilly on How Greylock Continues To Invest In The Next Big Markets, The Importance Of Building Tribes & Why There will Be Another Boom In Mobile

Prediction Not checkable as stated

John Lilly: Low capital requirements create permanent seed investing ecosystem

“Like, I think what I would say is that we've created a sort of a permanent seed and angel investing environment, and because companies are getting created more and more with, like, less capital, with low capital requirements to get started I think we'll contin…”

John Lilly Jan 23, 2017 ▶ 12:59 20VC: Greylock's John Lilly on How Greylock Continues To Invest In The Next Big Markets, The Importance Of Building Tribes & Why There will Be Another Boom In Mobile

Disclosure

John Lilly consistently makes exactly two venture investments per year

“I did two investments this year, I had two investments last year, I had two the year before, so I've been pretty consistent.”

John Lilly Jan 23, 2017 ▶ 13:23 20VC: Greylock's John Lilly on How Greylock Continues To Invest In The Next Big Markets, The Importance Of Building Tribes & Why There will Be Another Boom In Mobile

Assertion Supported

Lilly: Mozilla had 12 employees and 5M users when he joined

John Lilly Jan 23, 2017 ▶ 3:26 20VC: Greylock's John Lilly on How Greylock Continues To Invest In The Next Big Markets, The Importance Of Building Tribes & Why There will Be Another Boom In Mobile

The other half of the tape: John Lilly's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 12 times in 6 episodes on 20VC. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4 Nikhil Basu Trivedi 3 Dylan Field 3 Sahil Lavingia 1 Quentin Clark 1

Statements about John Lilly, by other people (1)

Disclosure

Benchmark's John Lilly rejected Figma's seed round before leading Series A

“I had met John Lilly, the seed, and he turned us down, actually. But he said, hey, look, like, if you want to keep talking, I'm down.”

Dylan Field Apr 19, 2019 ▶ 14:53 20VC: Figma Founder Dylan Field on The Biggest Mistakes Young Founders Most Often Make, How To Go Slow To Go Fast With Venture Dollars & How The Design Process Will Fundamentally Change Over The Next 5-10 Years