Bret Taylor’s Journey Leading Salesforce, Sierra & OpenAI

**Joubin** (0:00)
You are one of the least known, most impressive people in the Valley. You rewrote Google Maps in a weekend because you thought it sucked.

**Bret Taylor** (0:08)
I love to work. Best way to predict the future is to invent it. And that is like my operating principle. I am extremely passionate about Sierra. I think we'll probably see the first trillion dollars software as a service company come out of this era. The reason for it is that these AI agents actually are doing jobs rather than just adding productivity enhancement. And I think that value is so quantifiable. After I left Salesforce, by coincidence, ChatGPT came out right then. I would be building open source software of not running a company right now. I just want to work in the technology and help shape it because it's the most exciting technology of my memory. And I want to play a part in shaping how we all use it.

**Joubin** (1:00)
Welcome to Grit, I'm Joubin, partner at Kleiner Perkins, a show where we go beyond the highlight reel and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history-making companies. Today on Grit, we have Bret Taylor, co-founder of Sierra, an AI native startup, reimagining how businesses connect with customers. However, Bret is probably one of the most illustrious and under known guests that I have ever had. He started FriendFeed and sold that to Facebook, within a few weeks became the CTO of Facebook. He was the chair of Twitter, during all of the drama. He then started another company that got acquired by Salesforce, within a few years, he became the co-CEO of Salesforce with Benioff. And now he's back to ground zero, starting another company. We talk about why he made the leap back to early stage startups, what it means to be in the eye of the AI hurricane, and what he's learned from a career at the center of it all. Enjoy the episode. It's interesting because you have a real way of timing these boards.
I'm curious, you were on the board in the chair of OpenAI. When it's all happening, like Sam's getting, we don't even know. I still don't actually know what's happening.

**Bret Taylor** (2:20)
Well, I wasn't there when I was brought in to mediate. To mediate, yeah. For better or worse, you know?

**Joubin** (2:27)
And then all of the stuff that happens with Twitter. When you go home, when you put your laptop down, you go home that night for dinner, do you ask yourself, how the hell did a kid from the East Bay, who still lives in the East Bay, get caught up in this stuff?

**Bret Taylor** (2:52)
It was crazy. Part of the OpenAI thing was a choice because it was in crisis and I agreed to come in and help put Humpty Dumpty back together again. So, that one was my... I just cared a lot about OpenAI. It was interesting. I was never going to do a board again. And my wife was like, are you really going to regret helping OpenAI from collapsing on your deathbed? And I was like, who set you on, honey? You know, part of it is just like, life is complicated. And to do impactful things, you can't run away from complexity. So, you just got to put on your big boy pants and make hard decisions and compartmentalize.

**Joubin** (3:35)
Do you get a call from somebody that's like, hey, like this... You said putting Humpty Dumpty back together, which is a funny phrasing for it. Like, this is happening and you have to be... Like, if somebody calls me with that, the first question that I would ask, not being you, is like, why me? Like, why are you calling me to put this thing back together? Is that how you reacted?

**Bret Taylor** (4:01)
I had an intuition why they called me. I mean, I, you know, I think there's like a running joke that I'm like the board fixer, you know. I'm not sure it's a reputation I sought out, but it's a reputation I have. I had actually chatted in the past with Sam and a couple of members of the board about maybe joining the board. And I said no, because I just wanted to focus on Sierra, my startup.
And I wasn't really sure I wanted to spend a lot of time on boards, you know, in general. And then when that Thursday or Friday, when Sam got fired, I ended up getting a call actually from one of the the board members saying, essentially relaying that, you know, they were trying to figure out a path forward and would I be willing to help. So then I called up Sam and, you know.