Bret Taylor, the new chairman of OpenAI's board, said he hadn't planned to do much of the board's work when the high-flying AI company was on the brink of collapse and called him to help him around this time last year. “That weekend after Sam [Altman] I was fired by the board, and I ended up getting calls from both the board and Sam saying that I could help resolve the situation,” said Taylor during an on-stage interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco yesterday (Oct. 29).
Taylor joined OpenAI in November 2023 as chairman of the new board after a leadership shakeup that saw CEO Sam Altman fired and rehired within days. When asked if Altman had called him to ask for his job back, Taylor said the situation was “more serious” than that. “But I think they both came to the conclusion that I can help them both to cope with the difficult situation the organization was in at that time,” he said.
Taylor, 44, has had many notable tech titles: he was chief technology officer at Facebook (now Meta (META) Platforms), former CEO of Salesforce and, for a time, chairman of the board of Twitter (before Elon Musk bought and renamed it renamed as “X”). In addition to serving as chairman of OpenAI, Taylor now owns an AI startup called Sierra, which helps companies build conversational AI to better serve their customers.
Taylor said he started the new company because of his interest in the current wave of AI, which he said was started by OpenAI's ChatGPT. “I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if it wasn't for OpenAI…ChatGPT was a moment that changed the world's consciousness around AI,” he said. “I realized that this organization that had such an important part of my story was about to be disbanded, and that I was in a rare position to be able to help.”
Advice for startup founders on surviving after a major acquisition
Taylor, a self-described entrepreneur by nature, landed top jobs at those tech giants not by climbing the corporate ladder but by selling his companies. In 2009, he sold a social media platform called FriendFeed to Facebook for $15 million and subsequently joined the company as CTO. He left in 2012 to found a productivity software company called Quip. In 2016, Salesforce acquired Quip for a whopping $750 million and it was named Taylor Salesforce's main product office the following year. He was promoted to CEO, along with co-founder Marc Benioff, in 2021.
It is not uncommon for a startup founder to succeed under a larger business umbrella after an acquisition. (Think Instagram's Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Slack's Stewart Butterfield, YouTube's Jawed Karim, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, to name a few.) Taylor said she credits her success to advice she got from Sheryl Sandberg, a former Facebook executive. a working officer.
“I had just become the chief technology officer at Facebook and I was managing a team that was bigger than any team I had ever managed before. He gave me a critical response that basically meant, 'You should expect more from your leaders and stop trying to do all the work yourself,'” he said.
“I had the mindset that I was a professional and a product thinker, so I was trying to get my new team to match my thinking,” he continued. “But of course
I realized that I had to change my perception of who I am to be a better leader… and I asked, 'What is the most impactful thing I can do to make Facebook a successful place?' Some days it can be technology; other days it would be close to hiring; other days it can be near our customers.”
The point is, “entrepreneurs go through different stages of their company. When you're starting out, you need to build something that people want. But at some point, you have to build the company as a CEO,” Taylor said. “If you're too married to know who you are, you're not going to make that change.”
