Bret Taylor

Bret Taylor

President & Chief Product Officer


Salesforce

San Francisco, CA USA


Be open-minded to opportunities. Sometimes you miss out on the great opportunities in life because you’re so focused on what’s ahead that you’re not looking around at the opportunities available to you.

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By Roadtrip Nation

Bret Taylor

Milestones

My road in life took a while to figure out.
Growing up, my mom was my role model—she was an executive at Chevron for 30 years and I ended up modeling my career after her.
I graduated from Stanford with my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and have been in the technology industry ever since.
After graduating, I worked for Google as a group product manager and co-created Google Maps.
As the internet was becoming more user-interactive, I left Google and started a social network called FriendFeed.
I sold FriendFeed to Facebook after about two years and also joined Facebook as the chief technology officer—I’m largely credited with the invention of the “like” button!
After a few years at Facebook, I founded Quip, a suite of productivity software which was later acquired by Salesforce.
I remained the CEO of Quip for Salesforce and then worked my way up to become Salesforce’s president and chief product officer.
Keep following my journey

Career

President & Chief Product Officer

I lead Salesforce’s global product vision.

Career Roadmap

Roadmap
My work combines:
My work combines:
Technology
Entrepreneurship
Building Things

Day to Day

I try to split my time between customers and technology. Every day, I interact with at least one customer in order to make sure the company authentically understands what our customers need. The other half of my job revolves around technology. This mainly involves reviewing how projects are going. I'm also involved with deciding which technologies to invest in.

Advice for Getting Started

Here's the first step for high school students

There are a lot of resources outside of the classroom that you can leverage to learn computer science concepts. I recommend starting with these to start building your skills and getting and introduction to the field.