Bret Taylor

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 and his tenures as the CTO of Facebook (now Meta Platforms), as the chairman of Twitter, Inc.'s board of directors prior to its acquisition by Elon Musk, and as the co-CEO of Salesforce (alongside co-founder Marc Benioff).

Taylor was additionally one of the founders of FriendFeed and the creator of Quip.

Since 2023, he is chairman of OpenAI and a board member of Shopify.

Taylor was born in Oakland, California in 1980, primarily growing up in the East Bay.

He graduated from Acalanes High School in Lafayette, California in 1998.

He attended Stanford University, where he earned his bachelor's and master's degree in computer science in 2002 and 2003, respectively.

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 Google Maps.

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.

Taylor left Google in June 2007 to join venture capital firm Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence, where he and several other former Google employees founded the social network web site FriendFeed.

Taylor was CEO of FriendFeed until August 2009, when the company was acquired by Facebook for an estimated $50 million.

The acquisition led to Facebook adopting the "Like" 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.

Quip was acquired by Salesforce in 2016.

That year, Twitter, Inc. announced that Taylor was appointed to their board of directors.

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 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, 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 (AI) startup, Sierra.

In November 2023, Taylor replaced Greg Brockman as the chairman of OpenAI when Sam Altman was briefly ousted and reinstated as CEO of the company by its board members.

He also serves on the board of Shopify since 2023.