TruthWorks

John Lilly has had a front row seat to almost every major shift in technology over the last thirty years, and he has sat in almost every chair while it happened.

He was a Senior Scientist at Apple in 1997, when the market cap was two billion dollars and most people assumed the company was finished. He co-founded Reactivity, later acquired by Cisco. He became CEO of Mozilla and led Firefox past 450 million users, running an open source nonprofit at a time when nobody else in Silicon Valley was doing anything like it. Then he spent over a decade as a General Partner at Greylock, where he led investments in Instagram, Dropbox, Figma, Tumblr and Quip. He sits on the boards of Figma, Duolingo and Nuro, and recently joined Gigascale Capital as an Advising Partner, backing companies rebuilding the physical economy.

In this conversation with Jessica Neal and co-host Jeff Markowitz, John walks through what he actually saw in the founders everyone else missed.

He tells the story of chasing Kevin Systrom for six months, wiring the money on a Thursday, and getting the call three days later that Instagram was selling to Facebook. He explains the moment a friend showed him Instagram and what clicked was not the filters, it was the distribution. And he describes meeting a 19 year old Dylan Field at a Starbucks in Palo Alto, telling him his product did not matter, and then spending the next decade watching him prove it wrong.

He is also honest about the parts that are harder to hear. Why some partners at Greylock wanted Dylan replaced. Why he thinks micromanaging the right things is a feature of good leadership, not a flaw. Why he does not tell CEOs anything, and what he does instead. And why, at a moment when OpenAI and Anthropic are pulling talent out of every company on earth, the answer is not matching the money.

He closes with something a colleague at Mozilla told him years ago that he still carries: we had a chance to make the world we wanted, and we did it.

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WHAT WE COVER

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THE FOUNDER QUESTION

→ How John spotted Dylan Field at 19
→ Why recruiting senior people is the strongest early signal
→ The trait every great founder shares: relentless about getting help
→ Why non-defensiveness beats raw intelligence
→ The lunch where they told Dylan he had to build a go to market

THE INVESTMENTS

→ Chasing Kevin Systrom for six months
→ The underwater photographer who explained Instagram to him
→ Why the network mattered and the filters did not
→ The four day flip to Facebook and what he told his LPs
→ The Adobe Killers that came before Figma and why this one was different

LEADERSHIP AND SCALE

→ Going from 12 people to a quarter of the internet at Mozilla
→ Why he never learned the delegation lesson everyone teaches
→ Larry and Sergey reviewing every resume and what that signals
→ Learning to be simpler in your message as you grow
→ Deciding you would rather be successful than comfortable

THE TALENT WAR

→ Why every great person is now a free agent
→ The spreadsheet exercise he gives every CEO
→ Tour of duty and the bilateral deal between company and employee
→ Never making an offer until you know it will be accepted
→ Why money is rarely the only reason people leave

THE CURRENT MOMENT

→ Why leadership now means stability without pretending anything is stable
→ The collision of faster scaling and total vulnerability
→ Why org size no longer scales with impact
→ Alpha nerds, Tim O'Reilly, and following the most technical people around
→ Investing in transformers, copper recycling and rare earth supply chains
→ Why none of the AI future is settled and it is all still to play for

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CONNECT WITH JOHN LILLY

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnlilly

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Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, with co-host Jeff Markowitz.

What if your teams became 10x more productive — and your business got nothing out of it?

Dr. Mik Kersten has the data to prove it's already happening. After studying more than 8,000 value streams across enterprises, he found that only 8% of end-to-end delivery time is teams actually creating value. 

The rest disappears into planning, approvals, reviews, and coordination. Which means you can multiply team productivity by 2x or 10x with AI, and deliver nothing faster to your customers.

Mik started his career as a research scientist at Xerox PARC, completed his PhD in Computer Science, and founded Tasktop, which he led as CEO until its acquisition by Planview in 2022. 

He's the creator of the Flow Framework and the bestselling author of Project to Product. His new book, Output to Outcome: An Operating Model for the Age of AI, launches July 14, and it argues that the constraint on knowledge work is gone. What's left is your organizational structure. And for most companies, it's the thing standing in the way.

In this episode, Mik joins Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke to break down why AI productivity gains aren't showing up in business results, what happens to companies that spend big on tokens without rewiring how they work, and why the future of leadership means every manager becomes a maker again.

You'll learn:

- Why only 8% of enterprise delivery time is actual value creation — and where the other 92% goes

- Why 10x team productivity means nothing if your organization can't absorb it

- The four competing structures inside most companies: org chart, value streams, incentives, and architecture

- What Netflix got right about aligning technology, teams, and leadership

- The "outcome tree": one unified structure replacing the matrix

- Why humans should keep reporting to humans — even as agents join teams

- How incentives quietly sabotage transformation (and why Mik wrote half a chapter on them)

- Why outputs are easier to measure than outcomes — and why that's now a fatal trap

- The dark factory thought experiment: what happens when production cost trends toward the price of electricity

- Zero bonuses for engineers: what Mik learned from the experiment

- Why planning still matters — but on weekly and monthly cadences, not annual

- Managers to makers: why the first-line manager role is changing completely

- The middle managers whose roles are gone — and the new role that replaces them

- Why companies that get this right are hiring more people, not fewer

Mik's message to leaders: get hands-on with the latest models now. The only way to make AI work for your teams — instead of the other way around — is to lean in.

Output to Outcome: An Operating Model for the Age of AI is available now wherever books are sold.

Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix.

Everything breaks in a startup. Culture is what kicks in when it does.

Leif Abraham and Jannick Malling are the co-founders and co-CEOs of Public, the agentic brokerage putting AI agents to work directly inside your portfolio. They started in late 2019 by bringing their two former teams back together, and have since watched every market cycle twice: from launch, to the GameStop chaos of January 2021, to the AI shift they're now building on top of.

In this episode, they sit down with Jessica Neal and Peter Clarke to unpack how they actually run the company. They break down their 10 open-sourced operating principles ("Honesty kills bullshit," "Find a way," "Move fast through organised speeding"), why they treat culture as capitalistic tooling rather than fluffy values, and the moment Principle 10 drove a small engineering team to scale the trading system overnight when GameStop doubled their user base in a week, a decision that still compounds into Public's reputation for uptime today.

They also make the case for the co-CEO model most investors say never works. The trick, they argue, is that they don't share a job, only a title: Jannick lives inside product and engineering, Leif runs growth, and they only converge on the 1% of existential decisions where more perspectives actually matter. It lets them stay deep in their craft and install one C-level hire at a time instead of scaling leadership in risky staircases.

On hiring, they get pointed. Avoid the "badge hunters" who collect logos and optimise their LinkedIn, and instead find people who had to fight for their growth at companies you've never heard of. Be "truth-seeking to an uncomfortable degree" in interviews, because technical ability is table stakes, but motivation is the thing that actually predicts fit.

Plus Jannick shares how he generates 20K a month selling covered calls, why AI agents are about to compress trading strategies into a single prompt, and how the pair are betting the next decade of investing will be about resourcing individuals, not just granting them access.

00:00 Intro
02:00 What Public is: the agentic brokerage
06:00 Selling covered calls on autopilot
11:00 Access vs resources: the next 10 years of investing
16:00 Building culture from two merged teams
20:00 Principle 1: Honesty kills bullshit
27:00 Culture as the operating system, principles as the tools
33:00 The GameStop scaling story and Principle 10
39:00 Making the co-CEO model actually work
48:00 Disagreement as a feature, not a bug
53:00 Hiring: stay away from the badge hunters
1:00:00 Truth-seeking in interviews
1:05:00 Closing: problems, purpose, and health first

This episode is not investment advice.

#TruthWorks #Public #Investing #AgenticAI #Startups #Founders #CoCEO

Evan Carmichael believes the world's biggest problem is that people don't believe in themselves enough. He has spent the last 15 years trying to fix it.

Evan joins Jessica Neal and co-host Jeff on Truth Works for an honest conversation about self-belief, building a movement as an introvert, and why serving one person matters more than reaching millions.

Evan is not your typical YouTuber.

At 19 he built and sold a biotech software company. At 22 he was a venture capitalist raising $500k to $15M. Then he started making videos on YouTube in 2009, long before entrepreneurs were a category there, and for five years almost nobody watched. His first year online he had three comments, two of them from his own family.

Today his #Believe channel has over 4 million subscribers, he has written four books, and Ed Mylett has called him the modern-day Napoleon Hill.

In this episode, Evan breaks down the "believe walk" he does every morning, why he thinks your purpose comes from your pain, and how a mentor named Steve pushed him from 9,000 subscribers to millions by making him film the same foundation story 40 times. He gets candid about the hardest day of his life, the one day in 15 years he could not bring himself to turn on the camera, and what it taught him about being human.

He also shares the systems behind the work: the eliminate, automate, delegate framework, why he themes every day of his week, and the "CEO day" he uses to make the calls he keeps avoiding. Plus why he leads his 60-person team with directness rooted in love, the difference between pushing someone and hugging them, and how to know which one a person needs.

TOPICS COVERED

- Why lack of belief is the world's number one problem
- The "believe walk" and curating what goes into your head every morning
- How an introvert built a movement without wanting to be famous
- Why your purpose comes from your pain
- The five-year grind from 0 to a couple thousand subscribers
- Asking for help and why most people wait too long to do it
- Big Y vs little Y: staying motivated by serving one person
- Why successful entrepreneurs take action immediately
- Eliminate, automate, delegate: scaling yourself out of the work
- Theming your week and the "CEO day" thought exercise
- Leading with love: when to push someone and when to hug them

Evan's books, including Your One Word and Built to Serve, are available now.

Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal and Jeff, two leaders pulling back the curtain on how great companies and people are really built.

What if AI is quietly making you a worse leader, and you can't even feel it happening?

Michael Bungay Stanier (MBS) is the bestselling author of The Coaching Habit, one of the most widely read leadership books of the last decade, now re-released in a 10-year anniversary edition. He is the founder of Box of Crayons and the host of the Change Signal podcast.

In this episode of Truth Works, he joins Jessica Neal and guest co-host Peter Clarke to ask an uncomfortable question: is AI making us worse leaders?

His answer is yes.

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THE CORE ARGUMENT

AI seduces us into speed, certainty, and the half-decent answer, at the exact moment leadership demands the opposite. MBS argues curiosity is being chipped away in all of us, and the leaders who survive the AI era will treat it as a discipline they practice, not a trait they assume they have.

At the center of the conversation is his framework for what leadership now requires:

→ Clarity over certainty
→ Context over content
→ Connection over cocooning
→ Courage over collusion

He and Jessica unpack why judgment and taste, not big teams, budgets, or functional expertise, are the skills that actually scale when everyone has the same information and the same tools.

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INSIDE NETFLIX

Jessica draws on her years at Netflix, where the company interviewed for curiosity, treated big decisions as "bets" instead of life-or-death calls, and reframed failure as data.

She tells the story of the $100M House of Cards bet, admits most of Netflix's decisions were actually bad ones, and explains how a culture of small experiments and honest trade-offs is what let the company take the swings that built it.

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ALSO IN THIS EPISODE

→ Why data is political, not neutral
→ Why courage is the real differentiator behind every great founder
→ The strategy question: "If we say yes to this, what must we say no to?"
→ The deeper gift of coaching that has nothing to do with having the answer: helping people feel seen, heard, and encouraged

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TOPICS COVERED

→ Why AI is deadening curiosity more than fostering it
→ The 4 C's of leadership in the AI era
→ Why judgment and taste beat big teams and budgets
→ The Netflix $100M House of Cards bet
→ Why most of Netflix's decisions were bad ones, and why that was fine
→ Building a culture of small experiments
→ Why data is political, not neutral
→ Why courage is the differentiator behind every great founder
→ The strategy question
→ The deeper gift of coaching

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Find Michael: MBS.works | boxofcrayons.com | The Coaching Habit (Amazon)

Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal & Peter Clarke.