For even a casual observer of the tech industry, it’s been a good week for Bret Taylor: He was named board chair at Twitter on Monday, and yesterday, he became the co-CEO and co-chair at a SaaS company called Salesforce.
From outward appearances, Taylor seemed extraordinarily well positioned to influence what goes on at Twitter while simultaneously finding himself on an equal footing with Salesforce co-founder and outgoing CEO Marc Benioff.
But there was a reality check today when The Information reported that Taylor was would actually be co-CEO in name only, reporting to Benioff after all.
Salesforce has not responded to our request for comment on this report, but Taylor still has to be feeling pretty good about himself, regardless of his position on the company’s org chart.
After a stint working as a product manager on Google Maps and other services at the company, he joined Benchmark Capital in 2007 as an entrepreneur-in-residence. He eventually co-founded FriendFeed, an early social media network along with MySpace that was popular before Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok arrived on the scene.
He later joined Facebook where he was chief technology officer from 2009-2012 before co-founding Quip, a cloud-based word processing app. In 2016, he became a Salesforce employee when the company acquired Quip for a cool $750 million, which seems a bit overpriced looking back, but it did bring Taylor into the fold where he quickly rose through the ranks.
In the years since, Salesforce has been busy on the acquisition front, buying MuleSoft in 2018, Tableau in 2019 and Slack in 2020. With each acquisition came increasing complexity, and perhaps it became a little too much for one person, even someone as dynamic as Marc Benioff, to lead on his own.
Liz Herbert, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, told TechCrunch that she wasn’t surprised by the move, seeing it as the logical next step on Taylor’s career path, especially since he played a key role in bringing the Slack deal to fruition. She speculated that promoting Taylor could leave Benioff more time for some of his other passions, such as his charity work and the environment.
“Taylor also comes from a heavy collaboration technology background — having been the founder of Quip and on the board at Twitter for several years,” she said, “and is especially well positioned to help Salesforce navigate its next phase of making Slack more of a central piece of the Salesforce platform.”
This isn’t the first time that Salesforce has gone the co-CEO route. Keith Block held that title from 2018-2020 before he left the company. If Taylor truly shares power with Benioff, it will require a delicate balancing act, said Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research.
“The co-CEO setup can be a tricky one,” he told us before news leaked that the relationship may be imbalanced. “There are two models. The partner CEOs, with equal status last seen in tech at SAP with Christian Klein and Jennifer Morgan (a setup that only lasted 6 months before Klein assumed the role alone), or the senior/junior model as we see at Salesforce now. The latter only works when the senior partner relinquishes responsibilities. That will be a first for Benioff, and we will see how this will pan out,” he said.
Brent Leary, who is founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, says it’s probably the first step in a full transfer of power down the road: “It won’t come as any surprise if we have another announcement in the not too distant future of Marc Benioff fully turning over the reins and moving into the next phase of his life, whatever that may be.”
While taking this increasing responsibility at Salesforce, Taylor will also have to balance his new role as chair at Twitter. While he’s been on the board since 2016 and is no stranger to its dynamics, he now has greater responsibilities. There is also the consideration that Taylor could face conflicting responsibilities, as Twitter and Salesforce compete on some level.
Gartner analyst Jason Wong said Taylor has the energy and ability to balance both roles, but it will be interesting to see if Salesforce has any further interest in Twitter, as it did back in 2016 before Benioff backed off from a proposed acquisition.
“Interestingly, Marc Benioff has told the story of how he was intent on acquiring Twitter many years ago, and while on the way to the meeting with bankers he took a bad step off a sidewalk and broke his ankle. He took it as a sign and did not end up pursuing the acquisition. So perhaps this is a way for Marc and Salesforce to retain a tighter relationship with Twitter,” Wong said.
Wall Street appeared to be spooked by the news that Benioff may be stepping back a bit, sending its stock down 11.5% at the close today.
Regardless, Taylor finds himself in a unique position in Silicon Valley: In just one week at age 42, he’s accepted substantial positions at two tech powerhouses.
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