Bret Taylor

In November 2023, in the middle of the crisis over Sam Altman's removal and reinstatement, Bret Taylor took the chair of OpenAI's board. He had vacated the co-CEO seat at Salesforce ten months earlier, and the company he was quietly starting with Clay Bavor would launch three months later.

Taylor is the co-founder and CEO of Sierra, an enterprise software company that builds AI agents for customer service and support at large companies. Sierra's agents handle full business tasks rather than simple chatbot question-and-answer: authenticating a patient, processing a return, ordering a replacement card, or originating a mortgage, deployed across phone, chat, WhatsApp, email, and ChatGPT in more than 30 languages.¹ Taylor co-founded the company with Clay Bavor in 2023. He also chairs the board of OpenAI and sits on the board of Shopify.

Background

Taylor was born in 1980 in Oakland, California, and grew up in the East Bay. He attended Acalanes High School in Lafayette, graduating in 1998. His parents and older sister all attended Stanford University, and Taylor followed, earning a BS in computer science in 2002 and an MS in computer science in 2003. He married Karen Padham, whom he met at Google, in 2006, and they have three children.

Getting started

Marissa Mayer recruited Taylor to Google in 2003 as an associate product manager, part of the first class of Google's APM program. He led the team behind Search by Location and Google Local, the direct predecessors to Google Maps, and is widely credited as a co-creator of Maps. He was not yet 23 at the time.

Taylor left Google in June 2007 to become an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital, then co-founded FriendFeed, a social aggregation network, with fellow former Googlers. He was CEO until Facebook acquired FriendFeed in August 2009 for roughly 50 million dollars. At Facebook he led adoption of the "Like" button and became chief technology officer in 2010.

In 2012 Taylor co-founded Quip, a company building collaborative documents in the style of Google Docs. Salesforce acquired Quip in 2016, and Taylor joined Salesforce, where he rose quickly: chief product officer in 2017, president and chief operating officer in 2019, and vice chair and co-CEO alongside Marc Benioff in November 2021. As COO he led the acquisition of Slack, which closed in 2021. He stepped down from Salesforce on January 31, 2023. Taylor also served on Twitter's board from 2016, becoming chairman in 2021; that board was dissolved after Elon Musk's acquisition of the company in October 2022.

In November 2023 Taylor became chairman of OpenAI's board during the crisis over Sam Altman's removal and reinstatement, replacing Greg Brockman in that role. Within roughly a year of leaving Salesforce, he had gone from co-CEO of a large enterprise company to chairman of OpenAI to founder of a new company.

What he built

Taylor and Bavor, a Google APM classmate and friend of about 20 years, bet that large-language-model agents could finally handle full customer-facing business processes rather than narrow chatbot exchanges. Sierra launched in February 2024. Taylor says he and Bavor reached this thesis after two decades of building products across search, social, documents, and enterprise software.²

Sierra reached 100 million dollars in annual recurring revenue seven quarters after launch, which the company describes as one of the fastest ramps in enterprise software history. Its funding climbed alongside: a raise of about 175 million dollars in late 2024, a further 350 million dollars in September 2025 at a 10 billion dollar valuation led by Greenoaks, and additional reported raises in 2026 that pushed the valuation above 15 billion dollars. Taylor reportedly holds roughly a 25 percent stake in Sierra, and Forbes recognized him as a billionaire in November 2025, largely on the strength of that stake.

Sierra's named customers include Deliveroo, Discord, Ramp, Rivian, SoFi, Sonos, Tubi, and Wayfair, alongside established firms such as ADT, Bissell, Safelite, Vans, Cigna, SiriusXM, and DIRECTV. By Sierra's account, half of its customers have revenue over 1 billion dollars and a fifth over 10 billion dollars. Its products include Agent OS 2.0 and Agent Studio 2.0, both presented at the Sierra Summit in November 2025, an Agent Data Platform, an outcome-based pricing model, and a tool the company calls Ghostwriter, described internally as an agent for building agents.¹

How he operates

Taylor structures his co-CEO partnership with Bavor around what they call "majors and minors": Taylor owns sales and engineering, while Bavor owns running the company. Bavor has said that on system design and architecture he trusts Taylor's judgment more than his own, and has called Taylor the best software engineer he knows, one who still ships production code, and the best salesperson he has met apart from Marc Benioff, from whom Taylor learned enterprise selling directly at Salesforce.² The two describe their decision method as "think apart, think together": independent thinking first, then reconciliation.²

A recurring pattern in Taylor's career is finding what he describes as a narrow zone of contribution, at Google Maps, FriendFeed, Facebook, and Salesforce, and moving on once the shape of the role changed. It sits in tension with strong evidence that Taylor remains a hands-on individual technical contributor who still writes and ships code at every stage.

Where things stand

As of mid-2026 Taylor is running Sierra as CEO at a valuation above 15 billion dollars, chairing OpenAI's board, sitting on Shopify's board, and holding a minority, non-controlling ownership stake of about 1 percent in the San Francisco 49ers, acquired in December 2025. His presence across Google, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, OpenAI, and now enterprise AI has led some observers to call him one of the most cross-connected operators in Silicon Valley.

Key facts

• Co-created what became Google Maps as a 2003 Google APM hire, before he turned 23.
• Led adoption of Facebook's "Like" button after Facebook acquired FriendFeed in 2009, and became Facebook CTO in 2010.
• Went from Salesforce co-CEO to OpenAI board chairman in November 2023 to co-founding Sierra within about a year.
• Sierra reached 100 million dollars in annual recurring revenue seven quarters after its February 2024 launch.
• Forbes named him a billionaire in November 2025, largely on his roughly 25 percent Sierra stake.
• Co-founded Sierra with Clay Bavor, a Google APM classmate and friend of about 20 years.