Welcome to Decoder. This is Alex Heath. For my final episode as your Thursday guest host, I recently sat down with Bret Taylor, the CEO of AI startup Sierra and the chairman of OpenAI, for a live event in San Francisco, California, hosted by Alix Partners.
Very few people have seen the tech industry up close like Bret has. He was an early engineer at Google before starting FriendFeed, a social network he sold to Facebook in 2009, where he then served as chief technology officer. He later founded Quip, which he sold to Salesforce.
After eventually becoming co-CEO of Salesforce, he left to start Sierra, which is rethinking how businesses use AI for customer support. Along the way, he led Twitter’s board during Elon Musk’s takeover and became chairman of the OpenAI board after the firing and rehiring of CEO Sam Altman.
As you’ll hear in our conversation, Bret is all in on AI. Just this week, Sierra raised a new round of funding, valuing it at $10 billion. In this episode, we get into Sierra’s origins and what it’s doing with AI agents. I also asked Bret about OpenAI and the overall trajectory of the AI industry. We covered a lot of ground, and I hope you find Bret’s perspective as fascinating as I do.
Okay, here’s my conversation with Bret Taylor:
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
So I hope people here are familiar with Decoder. I’ve been guest-hosting over the summer. Nilay Patel, our editor-in-chief, has been out on parental leave, and I’m very happy to be here talking with Bret. Thanks for being on the show.
Thank you for having me.
I would like to start by going back to early 2023. You’re leaving Salesforce, you were the co-CEO. Talk about that process of deciding to make a new company and what you looked at. Why did you land on Sierra at that time?
I happened to announce I was leaving Salesforce within a few days of ChatGPT coming out. I don’t know if you believe in cosmic forces. But like for every single human being, particularly a geek like me, who first uses a product like that, it’s all I could think about.
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