Bret Taylor

Bret Taylor is a California-based businessperson who has had significant involvement in start-ups and technology companies such as Twitter (X), Salesforce, Shopify, and OpenAI.

Taylor attended Stanford University to study for his bachelor's and master's degrees. He earned his bachelor's degree from there in 2002 and his master's in 2003, both in the field of computer science.

After getting his master's degree, Taylor started working at Google as a group product manager. He was there until 2007, and during his time at Google, he co-created several technologies, including Google Maps, Google Local, and Google Maps API. He also helped to create the company's first developer conference, Google I/O.

In 2007, Taylor founded FriendFeed and was also the company's CEO. He sold the company to Facebook in 2009 and became the CTO of the company. In 2012, Taylor left the company to start Quip, a company that developed software to streamline sales processes. Quip was acquired by Salesforce in 2016, and Taylor held several leadership positions in the company, including co-CEO. In 2022, he left the company, and in early 2023, Taylor announced, with limited details, that he was starting a new venture related to artificial intelligence.

Taylor has been a member of several boards of directors. He was a board member of Axon from 2014 until 2019. Taylor was made a board member of Twitter in 2016 and became chairman of the board in 2021. In his role at Twitter, he negotiated the sale of the company to Elon Musk and successfully enforced the terms of the contract when Musk attempted to back out of the sale. Once Twitter was sold, the board was dissolved, and Taylor left his role there.

In June 2023, Taylor became a board member at Shopify. Later in the year, on November 21, 2023, Taylor became the chairman of OpenAI after a very public leadership reconfiguration. Just days earlier, the CEO of the company, Sam Altman, departed the company after the board stated that they had no confidence in Altman. After hundreds of OpenAI employees expressed dissatisfaction with the decision and other undisclosed negotiations, Altman returned to the company as CEO, and the majority of the board was dismissed. Taylor was thus brought in as chairman of the board due to his expertise in the technology industry.