He saved OpenAI, invented the “Like” button, and built Google Maps: Bret Taylor on the future of careers, coding, agents, and more

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
You're CTO of Meta, you're co-CEO of Salesforce, you're Chairman of the Board at OpenAI. How do you think the AI market is going to play out?

**Bret Taylor** (0:07)
The whole market is going to go towards agents. I think the whole market is going to go towards outcomes based pricing. It's just so obviously the correct way to build and sell software.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:15)
It makes me think about, I had Marc Benioff on the podcast, you guys were co-CEOs. He was extremely agent-pilled.

**Bret Taylor** (0:20)
It's so hard to sell productivity software, which I learned far away.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:24)
What's a story that comes to mind when you think about your biggest mistake?

**Bret Taylor** (0:27)
I was the product manager for what's called Google Local. I had a pretty tough product review with Marissa and Larry. And to not do that well with a link from the Google homepage is kind of embarrassing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:37)
I think it's really empowering for people to hear it's possible to succeed in spite of a massive failure like this.

**Bret Taylor** (0:41)
They sort of gave me another shot to do a V2 of it. It resulted in Google Maps. We got about 10 million people using it on the first day.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:48)
What mindset contributed to you being successful in such a variety of roles?

**Bret Taylor** (0:51)
Waking up every morning, what is the most impactful thing I could do today?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:56)
Today my guest is Bret Taylor. Bret is an absolute legendary builder and founder. He co-created Google Maps at Google. He co-founded the social network FriendFeed, which invented the like button and the real-time news feed, which he sold to Facebook. He then became CTO at Facebook. He then started a productivity company called Quip, which he sold to Salesforce for $750 million dollars. He then became co-CEO of Salesforce. He's also currently chairman of the board at OpenAI. At one point he was chairman of the board at Twitter. Today he's co-founder and CEO of Sierra, and AI started building agents to help companies with customer service sales and more. In our conversation, we cover so much ground, including what skills and mindsets have most helped Bret be so successful in so many roles, why we're all still sleeping on the impact that agents are going to have on the business world, how coding is going to change in the coming years, where the biggest opportunities remain for startups, lessons on pricing and go to market in AI, the story behind the like button, and so much more. This is a truly epic conversation with a legendary builder. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products, including Replet, Lovable, Bolt, N8n, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisper Flow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, JetPRD, Mobbin and more. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click Bundle. With that, I bring you Bret Taylor. This episode is brought to you by CodeRabbit, the AI code review platform, transforming how engineering teams ship faster with AI without sacrificing code quality. Code reviews are critical but time-consuming. CodeRabbit acts as your AI copilot, providing instant code review comments and potential impacts of every pull request. Beyond just flagging issues, CodeRabbit provides one-click fix suggestions and lets you define custom code quality rules using AST grep patterns, catching subtle issues that traditional static analysis tools might miss. CodeRabbit also provides free AI code reviews directly in the IDE. It's available in VS Code, Cursor and Windsurf. CodeRabbit has so far reviewed more than 10 million PRs, installed on 1 million repositories, and is used by over 70,000 open source projects. Get CodeRabbit for free for an entire year at coderabbit.ai using code LENNY. That's coderabbit.ai. This episode is brought to you by Basecamp. Basecamp is the famously straightforward project management system from 37Signals. Most project management systems are either inadequate or frustratingly complex, but Basecamp is refreshingly clear. It's simple to get started, easy to organize, and Basecamp's visual tools help you see exactly what everyone is working on and how all work is progressing. Keep all your files and conversations about projects directly connected to the projects themselves so that you always know where stuff is and you're not constantly switching contexts. Running a business is hard. Managing your projects should be easy. I've been a long time fan of what 37Signals has been up to and I'm really excited to be sharing this with you. Sign up for a free account at basecamp.com/lenny. Get somewhere with Basecamp.