Bret Taylor
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Bret Steven Taylor (born 1980) is an American software engineer, entrepreneur, and technology executive who is chairman of the board of OpenAI and co-founder and chief executive officer of Sierra, an enterprise artificial intelligence company that builds AI agents for customer service. He is widely associated with a string of consequential products and roles across two decades of consumer and enterprise software, including the original co-creation of Google Maps, the technical leadership of Facebook during its mobile transition, and the co-chief-executive role at Salesforce during the company's acquisition of Slack.
Taylor co-founded the social aggregation site FriendFeed (acquired by Facebook in 2009), served as Facebook's chief technology officer from 2010 to 2012, founded the collaborative productivity company Quip in 2012 (acquired by Salesforce in 2016), and rose through the Salesforce executive ranks to serve as president and co-chief executive officer from November 2021 to January 2023. After a brief period out of operational roles, he co-founded Sierra with former Google executive Clay Bavor in 2023, and the company emerged from stealth in February 2024. Taylor became chairman of OpenAI in November 2023 as part of the board reconstitution that followed the OpenAI board crisis and the brief firing and reinstatement of chief executive Sam Altman.
Taylor has been called the "Forrest Gump of Silicon Valley" by industry observers for his unusual record of being present at, and often technically responsible for, multiple landmark moments in modern computing, from web mapping and the social graph to enterprise productivity software and now agentic artificial intelligence.
Taylor was born in Oakland, California in 1980 and grew up in Lafayette, California. He attended Acalanes High School, graduating in 1998. He then enrolled at Stanford University, where his parents and older sister had also studied, and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science in 2002 and a Master of Science degree in computer science in 2003. Stanford's proximity to Silicon Valley and its tight links to firms like Google shaped the early arc of his career.
In 2003 Taylor was hired by Marissa Mayer as an associate product manager at Google, part of a small intake of recent graduates who would later become some of the company's most visible alumni. He led work on what was then called Search by Location and Google Local, features that allowed users to search the web for businesses and points of interest tied to geographic coordinates.
This work fed directly into the product that launched in February 2005 as Google Maps. Taylor is widely credited as a co-creator of Google Maps and helped shape the early consumer-facing product, the underlying tile and search architecture, and the developer surface. In 2005 he also led the launch of the Google Maps application programming interface, which allowed third-party developers to embed interactive maps in their own websites. That decision turned Google Maps into a platform and accelerated the broader era of "mashups" on the early web.
While at Google, Taylor also met Clay Bavor, who would later become his co-founder at Sierra. He left the company in June 2007.
After leaving Google, Taylor joined the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence. There he co-founded FriendFeed with several former Google colleagues, including Paul Buchheit (the original creator of Gmail), Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. FriendFeed was a social aggregator that allowed users to follow each other's activity across many different services in a single, real-time feed. It served as an early laboratory for several patterns that later became standard in social software, including the "Like" button, real-time activity streams, and inline media previews.
Taylor served as chief executive officer of FriendFeed from its founding until its acquisition by Facebook in August 2009 for an estimated $50 million in cash and stock. The acquisition gave Facebook both a team of senior engineers and a set of product ideas that would substantially shape the news feed and engagement model of the larger company. Facebook's own "Like" button, launched on the site in early 2009, drew directly on patterns from FriendFeed.
Following the acquisition, Taylor joined Facebook as a director of product. In June 2010 he was promoted to chief technology officer of Facebook, replacing Mike Schroepfer in that role. He served as CTO from 2010 to 2012, a period during which Facebook crossed the threshold from a fast-growing social network to a platform of global scale, and prepared for its initial public offering in May 2012.
As CTO, Taylor was responsible for the company's product engineering and led several of its most consequential technical initiatives. He oversaw the design and launch of the Open Graph protocol in April 2010, which allowed third-party websites and applications to integrate with Facebook's social graph using a shared semantic vocabulary. Open Graph turned Facebook into a substrate for personalization across much of the consumer web and was a central piece of the company's developer strategy in the early 2010s.
Taylor announced his departure from Facebook in June 2012, shortly after the company's public market debut.
After leaving Facebook, Taylor co-founded the collaborative productivity software company Quip in 2012 with Kevin Gibbs, a former Google engineer who had worked on Google App Engine and Google Suggest. Quip combined documents, spreadsheets, and chat in a single mobile-first application designed for teams. The product launched publicly in 2013 and developed a following among design-conscious teams that wanted a lighter alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs.
Quip raised venture funding from Benchmark and others and was acquired by Salesforce in August 2016 for approximately $750 million. The acquisition brought Taylor inside Salesforce as a senior executive and laid the groundwork for his later rise through the company.
Taylor's transition from start-up founder to large-company operator happened entirely inside Salesforce, the customer relationship management software company led by founder and chairman Marc Benioff. After joining as a vice president following the Quip acquisition, he was promoted through a sequence of increasingly senior product and operational roles.
In 2017 he was named president and chief product officer of Salesforce, responsible for the company's entire product portfolio. In 2019 he was promoted again to president and chief operating officer, a role in which he led the operations of the firm in addition to product, and in which he became the senior executive responsible for the largest acquisition in the company's history.
In December 2020, Salesforce announced its acquisition of Slack Technologies in a cash-and-stock deal valued at approximately $27.7 billion, which closed in July 2021. Taylor led the deal from the Salesforce side. The acquisition was framed as positioning Salesforce as the operating system for distributed work in the post-pandemic enterprise.
In November 2021 Taylor was promoted to vice chair and co-chief executive officer of Salesforce, sharing the chief executive role with Marc Benioff. He stepped down from that role in January 2023, citing a desire to return to entrepreneurial work. His departure came during a period of activist investor pressure on Salesforce, although the company emphasized that his exit was driven by personal goals rather than internal conflict.
Taylor also served on the board of directors of Twitter from 2016 onward and was named chairman of Twitter's board in 2021. He held that position during Twitter's complex and litigated acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022. Taylor and the rest of the Twitter board were dismissed by Musk immediately after the deal closed in October 2022.
In November 2023, OpenAI experienced a sudden governance crisis, often called the OpenAI board crisis, in which the existing board of directors of the non-profit parent fired chief executive Sam Altman and removed president Greg Brockman as chairman. The firing prompted a near-total revolt by OpenAI employees and key partners, including Microsoft, and within five days Altman had been reinstated and the board had been almost entirely replaced.
As part of the negotiated resolution announced by OpenAI on November 21, 2023, Taylor was appointed chairman of the new initial board of OpenAI. The initial post-crisis board consisted of Taylor as chair, former United States Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Quora co-founder Adam D'Angelo, who was the sole holdover from the previous board. Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley, and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever departed.
Taylor's primary tasks as chair were to oversee an independent review of the events that led to Altman's firing, to expand the board with experienced directors, and to lead the governance redesign that would underpin OpenAI's transformation from a research non-profit into a more conventional commercial enterprise. Over the course of 2024 and 2025 the board grew to include several additional members with backgrounds in regulation, defense, and academia, and the company moved toward a restructured public-benefit corporation model. Taylor remained chairman throughout this transition.
Because he is also chief executive of a company built on top of OpenAI's models, Taylor has publicly stated that he recuses himself from any board matter at OpenAI where there is potential overlap with Sierra. He framed the role as one of stewardship of OpenAI's mission rather than operational direction of its product strategy.
In 2023 Taylor co-founded Sierra with Clay Bavor, the longtime Google executive who had previously run Gmail, Google Drive, Google's virtual and augmented reality division Google VR, and Google Labs. Sierra was incorporated in 2023 and operated in stealth for roughly a year. The two founders had first met at Google in 2005 and had remained close professionally for nearly two decades.
Sierra emerged from stealth on February 13, 2024, simultaneously announcing its product, its first wave of customers, and a $110 million seed and Series A funding round led by Benchmark and Sequoia Capital, which valued the company at roughly $1 billion at launch. The company's core product is a platform for building and deploying customer-facing AI agents that can carry on multi-turn conversations across text, voice, email, and chat, integrate with backend enterprise systems, and take real actions on behalf of customers such as processing returns, updating accounts, and scheduling appointments.
Sierra's earliest customers included WeightWatchers, Sonos, SiriusXM, and Casper, and it later added enterprise customers in retail, financial services, travel, and the public sector. The company pioneered an outcome-based pricing model in which customers pay for resolved interactions rather than per-seat or per-token, a structure Taylor has argued is the natural commercial form of agentic software.
The company has grown unusually quickly for an enterprise software start-up. By October 2024 a follow-on round valued Sierra at $4.5 billion. In September 2025, Sierra raised $350 million led by Greenoaks Capital Partners at a $10 billion valuation, joining a small group of artificial intelligence startups valued at or above that threshold. Sierra reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue within roughly seven quarters of launch, and in May 2026 announced a further $950 million round at a post-money valuation of approximately $15.8 billion, by which point its annualized revenue had crossed $150 million. Taylor's personal stake of approximately 25 percent in Sierra was the principal basis on which Forbes recognized him as a billionaire in November 2025.
Taylor has been a vocal proponent of AI agents as a new computing paradigm. He has argued that the customer-facing AI agent of a brand is a uniquely strategic asset, comparable to a company's website or mobile app, and that companies should not outsource it to general-purpose chat interfaces. He has also been openly cautious about the broader AI investment environment, predicting a "culling effect" in which excess capital chasing too many companies will resolve into a small number of market leaders.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1998 | Graduates from Acalanes High School in Lafayette, California |
| 2002 | Earns BS in computer science from Stanford University |
| 2003 | Earns MS in computer science from Stanford University; joins Google |
| 2005 | Co-launches Google Maps and the Google Maps API |
| 2007 | Leaves Google; joins Benchmark Capital as entrepreneur-in-residence; co-founds FriendFeed |
| 2009 | Facebook acquires FriendFeed for an estimated $50 million |
| 2010 | Becomes chief technology officer of Facebook |
| 2012 | Leaves Facebook; co-founds Quip |
| 2016 | Salesforce acquires Quip for approximately $750 million; joins Twitter board |
| 2017 | Becomes president and chief product officer of Salesforce |
| 2019 | Becomes president and chief operating officer of Salesforce |
| 2020 to 2021 | Leads Salesforce acquisition of Slack, valued at approximately $27.7 billion |
| 2021 | Becomes co-chief executive officer of Salesforce; named chairman of Twitter board |
| 2022 | Dismissed from Twitter board following Elon Musk acquisition |
| 2023 | Steps down as Salesforce co-CEO; co-founds Sierra with Clay Bavor; appointed chairman of OpenAI |
| 2024 | Sierra emerges from stealth in February with a $1 billion valuation |
| 2025 | Sierra reaches $10 billion valuation in September |
| 2026 | Sierra raises $950 million at approximately $15.8 billion post-money valuation |
| Role | Organization | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Associate product manager and product lead, local search and maps | 2003 to 2007 | |
| Co-founder and chief executive officer | FriendFeed | 2007 to 2009 |
| Director of product | 2009 to 2010 | |
| Chief technology officer | 2010 to 2012 | |
| Co-founder and chief executive officer | Quip | 2012 to 2016 |
| Vice president, Quip | Salesforce | 2016 to 2017 |
| President and chief product officer | Salesforce | 2017 to 2019 |
| President and chief operating officer | Salesforce | 2019 to 2021 |
| Vice chair and co-chief executive officer | Salesforce | 2021 to 2023 |
| Co-founder and chief executive officer | Sierra | 2023 to present |
| Chairman of the board | OpenAI | 2023 to present |
| Company | Year founded | Co-founders | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| FriendFeed | 2007 | Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris, Sanjeev Singh | Acquired by Facebook in 2009 for about $50 million |
| Quip | 2012 | Kevin Gibbs | Acquired by Salesforce in 2016 for about $750 million |
| Sierra | 2023 | Clay Bavor | Independent; valued at approximately $15.8 billion in 2026 |
| Organization | Role | Tenure |
|---|---|---|
| Director, then chairman | 2016 to 2022 | |
| Shopify | Director | 2023 to present |
| OpenAI | Chairman of the board | November 2023 to present |
Taylor is widely regarded as one of the most thoughtful operators in the current generation of artificial intelligence companies, with a public profile shaped by his unusual breadth of experience across consumer software, enterprise software, governance, and now agentic AI. He has argued in interviews and at industry conferences that the era of clicking buttons in graphical user interfaces is gradually giving way to one in which people interact with software through natural language conversations with autonomous agents, and that the principal interface of many companies will become a branded AI agent rather than a website or application.
He has emphasized that customer-facing AI agents must be built with strong brand alignment, accountability for outcomes, and rigorous guardrails on what the agent is allowed to do, positions that he has used to frame Sierra's product strategy in contrast to general-purpose chat assistants. He has also warned of the risks of excess capital flooding into AI startups and predicted that only a small number of category leaders will emerge in each segment of the market.
On the question of OpenAI's governance, Taylor has framed his role as that of a steward of the company's mission rather than a day-to-day decision maker, and has consistently emphasized the importance of an independent board, robust safety processes, and clear separation between the non-profit mission and the commercial entity that supports it.
Taylor married Karen Padham in 2006. They met while both worked at Google. They have three children. In December 2025 he acquired an approximately one percent non-controlling minority stake in the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League.