Chief executive officer of Mozilla John Lilly has revealed he will be stepping down from his position, having been at the firm for almost five years.
Lilly confirmed in a blog post that he is to become a venture partner at Greylock Partners a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley.
He will continue in his role at Mozilla until a replacement has been found. Afterwards Lilly intends to stay on the board of directors and remain involved with the organisation.
"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," Lilly explained.
He described his new employer as "incredibly strongly oriented towards entrepreneurs" offering synergy with his "sensibilities as an operator".
In a letter to his co-workers, Lilly said that he had originally started at Mozilla as a volunteer effort before working his way to the chief executive role in 2008.
He revealed that the search has started for a replacement already and Mozilla is planning to carry out the process "in as transparent a way as possible".
The departing chief executive will remain at the company as it looks to get Firefox 4 going and continues with mobile developments for the browser.
