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.
In 2003, Taylor was hired by Google as an associate product manager.[3] He led the team working on features such as Search by Location and Google Local—predecessors to
Google Maps.[4][5] 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.[6][7] Taylor was CEO of FriendFeed until August 2009, when the company was acquired by
Facebook for an estimated $50 million.[8] The acquisition led to Facebook adopting the "
Like" button from FriendFeed.[9] After the acquisition, Taylor joined Facebook and became CTO in 2010.[10]
In 2017, Taylor was named chief product officer at Salesforce.[2] He was named president and chief operating officer at Salesforce two years later.[15] As COO, Taylor led Salesforce's acquisition of
Slack Technologies, which closed in 2021.[16] He also led the creation of a system dubbed Customer 360 at Salesforce[17] and started an associate product manager program at the company.[11] In November 2021, Taylor was named vice chair and co-CEO at Salesforce.[9] 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.[18][19] In February 2023, he co-founded an enterprise-focused
artificial intelligence (AI) startup, Sierra.[20][21]
He married Karen Padham in 2006, whom he met while working at Google. The couple has three children.[2] He is a fan of Stanford football. His father, mother, and older sister also attended Stanford.[26]