YouSaid · the spoken record

John Lilly

lines on the record: 22
first: 2017-01-23
most recent: 2017-01-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, well, the one that I just did is a communication app for a certain type of workers. Number one, they built a product that people love and is growing. Number two, I just really liked the way the entrepreneur engaged and interacts and we think and talks about problems. He's very open. So I really like the space because I think communication is changing the way we work on every front, really. I really like the person and then the traction speaks for itself because people are using it.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, that's a good question. I don't know. I feel like life is pretty good. I feel like there's a lot of amazing companies. And so you always struggle to make sure you're seeing as many as you can. I don't know. It's a good question. There's a lot of challenges and a lot of things I want to get better at, but I think it's just trying to make sure we see as many interesting entrepreneurs and we're as helpful as we can for them.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know just communicate and ask questions and try to learn every day. I think the best relationships I have are the ones where we're just open with each other and we just talk about the things that are things that we're struggling with, things that are on our mind. And just be as open as you can.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 where you're trying to engage more fully with the world. So I think the use cases are super different, even if the technology kind of rhymes.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't know how to answer this question. I've just been so lucky and had so many mentors. You know, Terry Winigrad helped me learn UI at Stanford, along with Sean White, who's now at Mozilla, you know, Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, was an investor in my company. Their partner, Reed, Hoffman, I learned from all the time. Mitchell Baker was the chair of Mozilla, and I learned from her. I learned from people everywhere I go. I just feel like we're such a fun Todd Park, who was the CTO for the White House. I learned from Jennifer Palka, Tim O'Reilly, Code for America and O'Reilly Media. I just don't follow all these people all the time. I feel like they're mentors everywhere you look in Silicon Valley and our industry is so oriented towards sharing. I learn stuff every single day.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So MFPT stands for something, something beer time. And I'll let people do their own Google searches on it because it's fun to do. But it started at Mozilla. So my Mozilla friends, it's basically when you're at the end of the long day or end of a long week and you've had enough, you're like, I'm not going to finish this. I'm not going to do one more mail. It's MFBT. Time to go grab a beer. And so now we just developed a tradition where we would call it on IRC or Slack or Twitter or whatever. And so we like to talk about that now. When you're about done and ready to go.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, my favorite book of the last five years is a book by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner. It's called Thinking Fast and Slow. It's about how we make decisions.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you move forward, Microsoft has completely lost the distribution advantage because people don't really create as much, that's a higher percentage of their material anymore on Windows machines. They create on their phones or on their tablets or on their Macs or whatever. They create on-the-go all the time. And so number one, the advantage, the company that had the distribution advantage and the dominant product no longer has a distribution advantage. So Microsoft's got to learn how to become a company with how to distribute advantage. The second thing is that the materials of this stuff change. So instead of long documents and keyboards and typing and presentations, now we're all about messages and real time.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I love productivity tools. I just think I am kind of a nerd that way. I've tried every email client on the planet and I love editors and I love that computers give us such richness and rich abilities to create new things. And if you look back again back at the chart that I mentioned earlier, the ASIMCO chart and the rise of Windows, for the past, since the mid-80s really, there's only been two sort of dominant creation suites. One is Microsoft Office, the other is Adobe Creative Suite. Microsoft had a distribution advantage for the whole time because if you had Windows, you pretty likely had Office on your computer. And Office has been in the same basic form since the late 80s, early 90s. And then Adobe had a different kind of distribution advantage, which is just every designer when they're eight, went off and pirated Photoshop and learned how to build in Photoshop and learned the key bindings and just their whole workflows built around Photoshop. Anyway, so”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, we do some seeds, but we do A's and B's, and our pace is about the same. It was a little bit slower maybe this year, but I did two investments this year. I did two investments last year, two the year before, which I've been pretty consistent.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that's usually. I kind of thought things were going to start to contract a little bit. I think that our political environment makes predictions a little bit more difficult to make. I don't really know what happened with the new U.S. administration with Trump and his people. But we'll see. 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 low capital requirements to get started, I think we'll continue to see lots of innovation, lots of starts. I don't know how to break the macroeconomy at all, though.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's plenty of space. I think the market cycle is a little funky. We're in six or seven or eight years into a long boom.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I don't know exactly what Fred's been writing about consumer downturn, but 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 people do. You look at musically, which is Grandlock Investment, which is growing very, very well. You look at gaming networks like Discord. You look at medium. So medium, when Ev pitched us on what he was doing with Medium, we had to scratch our heads a little bit because did the world really need another blogging or publishing platform? And it just turns out it did. So I think there'll be more spaces that open up. I think there'll be more opportunities for big companies to emerge. We tend to bias towards on the consumer side. We tend to bias towards things with network effects. The network is stronger. The project is stronger for me if I get all my friends and you on it. And so network effects tend to create big companies very quickly. There'll be marketplace companies that get big too, you know, Airbnb and Uber getting quite large now. We'll see more of those.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody lives will start to see new use cases and we'll start to see a secondary boom. And that might be because of sensors, it might be because of biosensors for your thumbprint. It might be because of geo kicking off. It might be because of computational photography on phones, being able to do 3D maps and things. I don't really know, but my sense is that we'll see more booms, at least in other boom for mobile, but we don't know.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2000, 2001, that kind of time frame. And so now, and then you play forward, you can start to see in 2010, you start to see the jumble of platforms like it was in the late 70s, early 80s. And then you start to see Android and iOS roughly again at 10 to 1 emerge out of the pack. And they're both at scale much, much bigger than they were before, but it's still the same kind of relationship. And so you see them slow down. And so the question is, is this the early 90s for mobile or is this the actual plateau? And I personally think that technology tends to diffuse. I think that it tends to, I know that I am on my phone kind of all the time, embarrassingly often. But, you know, that's not really how my cousin uses it or whatever. And so I think that just society takes a little time to digest stuff. And we in Silicon Valley tend to think everything's all done, everything's all digested. But I think that as you see more and more technology and mobile phones diffuse into how everybody works and how”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, right. So, I mean, if you look at Horace Dadu from Asimco, it has this beautiful chart of 1977 to now. So if you imagine years on the bottom, on the x-axis and on the y-axis, it's logarithmic in terms of number of units shipped per year of different platforms. And you can see the late 70s, early 80s, there was this jumble of things. And then out pops the PC and the Mac that basically a 10-to-1 ratio. And that climbs and climbs and climbs until the early 90s when a plateaus. And then plateaus a lot like what it looks like in mobile today. And then a couple years later, it starts to grow again, a secondary boom, and call it the mid-90s, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, that kind of thing came out and started to enable more growth. And then it starts to plateau again in the late 90s. And then you'd say a tertiary boom. It's not as big as the other two booms, but it's big. And that's them when the web came out, sort of, and so we started to figure out how to use the web.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the rise of Instagram, the rise of Snapchat, the rise of Twitter, Facebook, I mean, mobile has come to dominate sort of everything we do. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that. We're all staring our phones all the time. And so I think that the last few years has been like, how do we invest in the companies that are the strongest on mobile Instagram, Facebook, and what have you? I think that when you get to the, as you get to plateaus, and I think we're a little bit of a plateau in mobile, I think the statistic that I saw was that the median number of installs by a user in America on mobile per month of a new app is zero.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like once you decide you're going to see the people you care about every week, you just make time for it. And some people you don't see every week, but you try to text them or message them or whatever. Everybody's network is a little bit different shape. And so some people might have 10 or 20 people that are close to them. Others might have a few dozen. But I just think you have to view it in a very sort of specific way, which I'm just going to invest some of my time here. But mostly what you like. Mostly I like these people and I like being with them. I like hanging out with them. And so I try every time I can to do it. Absolutely. I think kind of the organicism key. But I do want to kind of stay on the Greylock turf and ask another question from a teammate of yours, and that's Sarah Guo. And she asks, how does Greylock continue to invest in the next markets rather than what's made them successful before? Yeah, I think that's sort of a core question, right? So I think over the past five years or so, it's been, I think, blindingly obvious to everyone that mobile is the thing.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I walked at the Boom Unit, and I knew every person in the boardroom, and I knew each person for more than 10 years because Josh McFarland, I knew when he was just getting out of Stanford before he started his company, and we'd been friends since then. My partner, James, of course, our attorney was my attorney from my startup 15 years before that. Ajay Augerwall from Bain Capital is an investor, and he and I worked at Trilogy at the very beginning. And so it's just, I think you should know who you want to be with, know who you want to run with. And I think the more you can invest in people and the more you build those relationships, the more it comes back to you over time, really. Can I ask you a question that I struggle with personally, and this isn't on the schedule, but it's one that troubles me probably more than anything else. And it's how do you maintain then that network and that kind of sense of dedication towards building that tribe at scale as you kind of grow and grow and meet more and more incredible people? You have to make decisions. You have to make calls. But for me, it's kind of natural.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like right after I got out of school from Stanford, he said, Look, you should look around and figure out who you want to be on your team. The people who have values that you believe in, people who have ethical and moral frameworks you believe in, the people who just want, you get energy from and want to work with and look around and sort of start treating them well, start spending time with them and going to breakfast and dinner and lunch and just investing in those relationships. Because 20 years from now, you look around and you'll be the fabric of Silicon Valley. And that was really thoughtful and smart feedback. And sure enough, 20 years after I got out of school in 95 was now. And you look and you have friends and leadership positions really across the valley. And you collected people along the way. It shows up in tons and tons of ways. One of the ways it showed up is that I went to a board meeting a few years ago at Telepart, which is my friend Josh McFarland's company. You know, I went to the board meeting because my partner, James, was on the board.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite a lot larger, and that was a really sort of foundational thing for me. And then when I was 39, 40, I started thinking about what to do again, and I wanted to work with more startups. And I just went, I talked to the firms that I really liked and respected, and there were a handful, five or ten firms that I just really loved the people at. But Greylock was always one of two or three that I had the strongest affinity with my partner Reedhoff and I have worked together and conspired on a lot of things over the years. Is everybody at Greylock? They've worked on products and built products and companies up significantly. So just kind of my kind of people ultimately. But, you know, it took a little while to find my way here. Absolutely. But I do want to talk about that kind of team inherent element there because I've got a question from Josh Ellman. So he asks, how do you view growing one's tribe and then growing together through all of your careers very much like you have done throughout yours and I'm sure will do continue to with Greylock now? I got a piece of advice from a professor.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it took me a long time. I didn't become a VC until I was 40 or 41, I guess. I've been at Greylock for five, five and a half years, six years, I guess. But I operated for a long time. I did a startup. I joined a startup. I worked at Apple for a while in the research group in my mid-20s. I started a company when I was 26, 27. We eventually sold that to Cisco. And then, you know, maybe 10 years ago, I tried to, I was thinking about B&BC then when I was 35 or so. And I just couldn't find the right one, couldn't find the right fit. I kind of underestimated how quirky and idiosyncratic firms were and how kind of random, sort of fundamentally random they were in their hiring a little bit and not random, but I think quirky because just you don't bring on different new partners very often or even associates with stuff very often. So I ended up going to Mozilla instead and I went to Mozilla and it was in 12 employees and maybe five million users and I worked on that for a long time and built that up to be helped build that up to be.”
2017-01-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source