Mozilla CEO Gives Notice

Mozilla CEO John Lilly has announced that he will be stepping down from his post later this year to become a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners.

After nearly five years at Mozilla, the maker of the popular Firefox browser, Lilly is calling it quits to embark on a quest he says he has considered for some time.

Said Lilly in a May 11 blog post:

"Venture investing is what I’ve wanted to do for quite a long time—I’ve been involved in many startups, even building an incubator a decade ago, and have interests that span enterprise, open source, and the broader web, among others."

Though Lilly has been with Mozilla since 2005, he did not assume the role of CEO until 2008, when he took over the helm from Mozilla Chairperson Mitchell Baker. After Lilly leaves his post as Mozilla CEO to join Greylock, he will continue working with Mozilla as a member of the company's board of directors, he said in his blog. Lilly also noted that Mozilla is actively involved in a CEO search.

Ironically, Lilly selected the day Mozilla revealed detailed plans for Firefox 4 to make the news of his plan to switch jobs public.

"We’ve got Firefox 4 to ship, and Firefox on multiple mobile platforms," Lilly said in a letter to Mozilla employees. "We’ve got our web services like Weave to stand up and make available to millions of users."

The Firefox browser is estimated to have secured up to 25 percent of the browser market, and Lilly spoke to that success in his letter.

"400 million users are directly touched every day by the work we’ve done so far, and many, many more are using better browsers because of our work," he said.