Bret Taylor | |
---|---|
Born | Bret Steven Taylor 1980 (age 43–44) Oakland, California, U.S. [1] |
Education | Stanford University (BS, MS) |
Occupation | Entrepreneur |
Known for | |
Board member of | |
Spouse | Karen Padham (m. 2006) |
Children | 3 |
Website | backchannel |
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 sits on the board 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. [2]
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 2012, Taylor left Facebook to found Quip, a competitor to Google Docs. [11] Quip was acquired by Salesforce in 2016. [2] That year, Twitter, Inc. announced that Taylor was appointed to their board of directors. [12] In 2021, he became chairman of Twitter. [9] He remained in the position until the entire board of directors was dissolved following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in October 2022. [13] [14]
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]
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. [22] [23] [24] He also serves on the board of Shopify since 2023. [25] [22]
He married Karen Padham in 2006, whom he met while working at Google. The couple has three children. [2]
Quip is a collaborative productivity software suite for mobile and the Web. It allows groups of people to create and edit documents and spreadsheets as a group, typically for business purposes.
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, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.
Acalanes High School is a public secondary school located in Lafayette, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, within Contra Costa County. Acalanes was the first of four high schools established in the Acalanes Union High School District. It was built in 1940 on what was then a tomato field, using federal government funds with labor provided by the Works Project Administration, the largest and most ambitious New Deal agency introduced by the Roosevelt administration. Lafayette businessman M.H. Stanley suggested the name "Acalanes", the name of Rancho Acalanes, the Mexican grant from which all land title within the City of Lafayette derives. Rancho Acalanes itself seems to have been named by its Hispanic settlers after the local Native American Bay Miwok tribe called Saklan (Saclan), referred to by Spanish missionaries as Saclanes. The first graduating class of 1941 selected the school colors of blue and white. For the school sports mascot, they chose the Don.
Marc Russell Benioff is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist. Benioff is best known as the co-founder, chairman and CEO of the software company Salesforce, as well as being the owner of Time magazine since 2018.
Samuel Harris Altman is an American entrepreneur and investor best known as the CEO of OpenAI since 2019. He is one of the leading figures of the AI boom, He dropped out of university after studying for two years and founded Loopt, a mobile social networking service, raising more than $30 million in venture capital. In 2011 Altman joined Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and was its president from 2014 to 2019.
Shopify Inc. is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. Shopify is the name of its proprietary e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. The Shopify platform offers online retailers a suite of services, including payments, marketing, shipping and customer engagement tools.
Adam D'Angelo is an American internet entrepreneur. He is best known for his role as the co-founder and CEO of Quora, based in Mountain View, California.
Peter Fenton is an American venture capitalist based in Silicon Valley. He is a general partner at Benchmark, a venture capital firm. Fenton has steadily worked his way up the Forbes Midas List of the 100 top technology investors, starting at no. 94 in 2007, then rising to no. 62 in 2008 and no. 50 in 2009. Fenton was ranked no. 4 when Forbes resumed publishing its Midas List in 2011 and was described as the "most productive venture capitalist on our list". In 2012, Fenton was ranked no. 5 on the Forbes Midas List and was no. 2 in 2015. He has been a perennial member on the Midas List since 2007.
Emmett Shear is an American Internet entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder of live video platform Justin.tv. He served as the chief executive officer of Twitch when it was spun off from Justin.tv until March 2023. In 2011, Shear was appointed as a part-time partner at venture capital firm Y Combinator. In November 2023, he briefly served as interim CEO of OpenAI.
Vicarious was an artificial intelligence company based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. They use the theorized computational principles of the brain to attempt to build software that can think and learn like a human. Vicarious describes its technology as "a turnkey robotics solution integrator using artificial intelligence to automate tasks too complex and versatile for traditional automations". Alphabet Inc acquired the company in 2022 for an undisclosed amount.
Rebecca Enonchong is a Cameroonian technology entrepreneur and also the founder and CEO of AppsTech. She is best known for her work promoting technology in Africa.
OrderAhead was a mobile ordering and payments company that allowing users to order food for pickup from local restaurants.
Chuck Dietrich is an American entrepreneur and current CEO of MileIQ. Prior to MileIQ, Dietrich worked at Salesforce.com and was the CEO at SlideRocket before facilitating its sale to VMWare and its eventual divestment to ClearSlide. Dietrich is also credited as one of the early adopters of wing foiling in the San Francisco Bay Area having started in early 2019.
OpenAI is a U.S. based artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015, researching artificial intelligence with the goal of developing "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence, which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". As one of the leading organizations of the AI Spring, it has developed several large language models, advanced image generation models, and previously, released open-source models. Its release of ChatGPT has been credited with starting the artificial intelligence spring.
Cloudwords is an American software company based in San Francisco, California, specializing in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology.
Convoy was an American trucking software company co-founded by CEO Dan Lewis and CTO Grant Goodale.
Greg Brockman is an American entrepreneur, investor and software developer who is a co-founder and currently the president of OpenAI. He began his career at Stripe in 2010, upon leaving MIT, and became their CTO in 2013. He left Stripe in 2015 to co-found OpenAI, where he also assumed the role of CTO.
Humane, Inc. is an American consumer electronics and fitness company founded in 2018 by Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno. The company created and produces the Ai Pin, which launched on November 9, 2023.
The Removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI refers to the series of events leading up to and following the ousting of Sam Altman, co-founder and former chief executive of OpenAI, from the company. This incident, occurring in late 2023, marked a significant turning point in the history of OpenAI, a prominent artificial intelligence firm known for its groundbreaking work in AI technology, including the development of ChatGPT. The event garnered considerable attention due to Altman's notable contributions to the company and the tech industry at large.
Warp is a terminal emulator written in Rust available for macOS. Notable features include Warp Drive for sharing commands across teams, Warp AI for command suggestions and assistance, and an IDE with text selection and cursor positioning.
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