Bret Taylor (born July 10, 1980) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He is most notable for co-creating

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 panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...

and his tenures as the CTO of Facebook (now

Meta Platforms Meta Platforms, Inc., (file no. 3835815) trade name, doing business as Meta and formerly named Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc., is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns Facebo ...

), the chairman of Twitter, Inc.'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 customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, a ...

(alongside

Marc Benioff Marc Russell Benioff (born September 25, 1964) is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, an enterprise cloud computing company. In September 2018, Benioff acquired ''Time''. ...

), the latter of which he will remain as until January 2023. 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 feed. It was created in 2007 by B ...

and the creator of Quip.

Education

Taylor attended

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, where he earned his

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

and

master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is an 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 practice.

in computer science in 2002 and 2003, respectively.

Career

In 2003, Taylor was hired by Google as an associate product manager. In 2005, he co-created Google Maps. Taylor left

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

in June 2007 to join

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

firm

Benchmark Capital Benchmark is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco that provides seed money to startups. History The firm's most successful investment was a 1997 investment of $6.7 million in eBay for 22.1% of the company. In 2011, it invested $12 mill ...

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

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...

web site

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

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

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, and quotative. Uses Comparisons ' ...

" 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 included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google, which also includes: Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, Google Sites and Google Keep. Google Do ...

. Quip was acquired by

in 2016. That year, Twitter, Inc. announced that Taylor was appointed to their

board of directors A board of directors (commonly referred simply as the board) is an executive committee that jointly supervises the activities of an organization, which can be either a for-profit or a nonprofit organization such as a business, nonprofit organiz ...

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

acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk Business magnate Elon Musk initiated the acquisition of American social media company Twitter, Inc. on April 14, 2022, and concluded it on October 27, 2022. Musk began buying Twitter shares in January 2022, eventually becoming the company's ...

in October 2022. In 2017, Taylor was named chief product officer at Salesforce. In 2019, Taylor was named president and chief operating officer at Salesforce. As COO, Taylor led Salesforce's acquisition of Slack, which closed in 2021. Taylor 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.

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 1980 births