Bret Steven Taylor (born 1980) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He is most notable for leading the team that co-created

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panorama, interactive panoramic views of streets (Google Street View, Street View ...

and his tenures as the CTO of Facebook (now

Meta Platforms Meta Platforms, Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Meta owns and operates several prominent social media platforms and communication services, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads ...

), as the chairman of

Twitter, Inc. Twitter, Inc. was an American social media company based in San Francisco, California, which operated and was named for its flagship social media network prior to its rebrand as X. In addition to Twitter, the company previously operated the V ...

's board of directors prior to its acquisition by Elon Musk, and as the co-CEO of

Salesforce Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, and ap ...

(alongside co-founder

Marc Benioff Marc Russell Benioff (born September 25, 1964) is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist. Benioff is best known as the co-founder, chairman and CEO of the software company Salesforce, as well as being the owner of ''Time (magazine ...

). Taylor was additionally one of the founders of

FriendFeed FriendFeed was a real-time feed aggregator that consolidated updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and microblogging updates, as well as any type of RSS/Atom (Web standard), Atom feed. It was ...

and the creator of Quip. Since 2023, he is the founder of Sierra (an AI startup), chairman of

OpenAI OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines ...

, and a board member of

Shopify Shopify Inc., stylized as ''shopify'', headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, operates an e-commerce platform for retail point-of-sale systems that offers payments, marketing, shipping, inventory management, transaction management, and customer eng ...

Early life and education

Taylor was born in

Oakland, California Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, California, Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major We ...

, in 1980, primarily growing up in the

East Bay The East Bay is the eastern region of the San Francisco Bay Area and includes cities along the eastern shores of San Francisco Bay and San Pablo Bay. The region has grown to include inland communities in Alameda and Contra Costa counties. Wi ...

. He graduated from Acalanes High School in

Lafayette, California Lafayette (formerly La Fayette) is a city in Contra Costa County, California, United States. As of 2020, the city's population was 25,391. It was named after the Marquis de Lafayette, a French military officer of the American Revolutionary ...

, in 1998. He attended

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, where he earned his

bachelor's A bachelor's degree (from Medieval Latin ''baccalaureus'') or baccalaureate (from Modern Latin ''baccalaureatus'') is an undergraduate degree awarded by colleges and universities upon completion of a course of study lasting three to six years ( ...

and

master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional prac ...

in computer science in 2002 and 2003, respectively.

Career

In 2003, Taylor was hired by Google as an associate product manager. He led the team working on features such as Search by Location and Google Local—predecessors to

. While at Google, Taylor famously rewrote the entirety of Google Maps backend code in on
weekend
Taylor left

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

in June 2007 to join

venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

firm

Benchmark Capital Benchmark is a venture capital firm founded in 1995 by Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, Kevin Harvey, and Val Vaden. The firm is known for its equal partnership structure and focus on early-stage investing, typically leading the firs ...

as an entrepreneur-in-residence, where he and several other former Google employees founded the

social network A social network is a social structure consisting of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), networks of Dyad (sociology), dyadic ties, and other Social relation, social interactions between actors. The social network per ...

web site

. Taylor was CEO of FriendFeed until August 2009, when the company was acquired by

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

for an estimated $50 million. The acquisition led to Facebook adopting the "

Like In English, the word ''like'' has a very flexible range of uses, ranging from conventional to non-standard. It can be used as a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, preposition, particle, conjunction, hedge, filler, quotative, and semi-suffix. U ...

" button from FriendFeed. After the acquisition, Taylor joined Facebook and became CTO in 2010. In 2012, Taylor left Facebook to found Quip, a competitor to

Google Docs Google Docs is an online word processor and part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google. Google Docs is accessible via a web browser as a web-based application and is also available as a mobile app on Android and iO ...

. Quip was acquired by

in 2016. That year,

announced that Taylor was appointed to their

board of directors A board of directors is a governing body that supervises the activities of a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government agency. The powers, duties, and responsibilities of a board of directors are determined by government regulatio ...

. In 2021, he became chairman of Twitter. He remained in the position until the entire board of directors was dissolved following the

acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk Businessman and U.S. political figure Elon Musk initiated an Mergers and acquisitions, acquisition of the American social media company Twitter, Inc. on April 14, 2022, and concluded it on October 27, 2022. Musk had begun buying shares of the ...

in October 2022. In 2017, Taylor was named chief product officer at Salesforce. He was named president and chief operating officer at Salesforce two years later. As COO, Taylor led Salesforce's acquisition of

Slack Technologies Slack Technologies, LLC is an American software company founded in 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, known for its proprietary communication platform Slack (software), Slack. Outside its headquarters in San Francisco, California, Slack also o ...

, which closed in 2021. He also led the creation of a system dubbed Customer 360 at Salesforce and started an associate product manager program at the company. In November 2021, Taylor was named vice chair and co-CEO at Salesforce. On November 30, 2022, it was announced that Taylor would be stepping down as co-CEO and vice chair at Salesforce at the end of January 2023. In February 2023, he co-founded an enterprise-focused

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

(AI) startup, Sierra. In November 2023, Taylor replaced Greg Brockman as the chairman of

when Sam Altman was briefly ousted and reinstated as CEO of the company by its board members. He also serves on the board of

since 2023.

Personal life

He married Karen Padham in 2006, whom he met while working at Google. The couple has three children. He is a fan of Stanford football. His father, mother, and older sister also attended Stanford.

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Taylor, Bret American computer businesspeople Living people Facebook employees Stanford University alumni Google employees American computer programmers American technology company founders American technology chief executives 21st-century American businesspeople Salesforce people 1980 births