Profile of Bret Taylor, Salesforce's new COO and the architect of its $27.7B acquisition of Slack, who might one day succeed Marc Benioff as CEO of the company
Owen Thomas / San Francisco Chronicle : Tweets: @owenthomas , @martinsfp , @cherylszee , @jeffjarvis , @zlurie , @sfchronicle , @louisgray , @hbrucejohnson , @demianbulwa , and @kfury Tweets: Owen Thomas / @owenthomas : Bret Taylor helped invent or perfect some of your favorite apps. Now he's becoming a power player in tech with Salesforce's $27.7 billion purchase of Slack. So who is @Benioff's No. 2? My profile of @btaylor: https://www.sfchronicle.com/ ... Martin Sfp Bryant / @martinsfp : Ah, I remember when he was the humble cofounder of FriendFeed (the app that invented real-time feeds). https://twitter.com/... Cheryl Sanclemente / @cherylszee : When asked about @btaylor, @Salesforce's @Benioff said, “I'm lucky to have this guy around, it makes such a difference to have him. He's such a great technology leader.” @owenthomas reports https://www.sfchronicle.com/ ... via @sfchronicle Jeff Jarvis / @jeffjarvis : I so like @btaylor and happy to see he is ready to inherit the future. https://twitter.com/... Zander Lurie / @zlurie : High integrity human being winning the long race https://twitter.com/... @sfchronicle : Salesforce's $27.7 billion acquisition of Slack has thrust Bret Taylor, the acknowledged architect of the deal and the company's chief operating officer, into the spotlight. Few outside Silicon Valley know him, but that's likely to change soon. https://www.sfchronicle.com/ ... Louis Gray / @louisgray : Salesforce's Marc Benioff is betting $28 billion on Bret Taylor. So who is he? https://www.sfchronicle.com/ ... /by @owenthomas for @sfchronicle Bruce Johnson / @hbrucejohnson : Great, detailed article on Bret Taylor, a truly special dude. The superlatives are no exaggeration. He is as cool as he is brilliant. He was a big reason I ended up at Google, and getting to see him in action (he was our first PM) was a career highlight. https://www.sfchronicle.com/ ... Demian Bulwa / @demianbulwa : “Salesforce's $27.7B acquisition of Slack has thrust Taylor, the architect of the deal and the company's COO, into the spotlight. It has also renewed talk of who might one day succeed co-founder Marc Benioff, 56, as CEO.” @owenthomas's profile https://www.sfchronicle.com/ ... Kevin Fox / @kfury : Bret Taylor is the best engineer and founder I've ever had the pleasure to work with. This profile of him is really good and you should read it. https://www.sfchronicle.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
This December 2020 Chronicle profile is the opening chapter of a succession story that the subsequent coverage confirms almost beat for beat. Within a year of becoming COO, Taylor was telling people close to him he expected to be promoted to CEO soon, and weeks later Salesforce made him Vice Chair of the Board and co-CEO alongside Marc Benioff — exactly the trajectory the profile's framing anticipated.
The profile also fixes his résumé that matters for reading the later coverage: FriendFeed cofounder, then Google and Facebook, before joining Salesforce in 2016 and architecting the $27.7B Slack purchase. That dealmaking credential is what carried him onto the national stage again as Twitter chairman, where by late 2022 he was taking point on suing Elon Musk to enforce the $44B acquisition.
First-order effects
- Taylor enters 2021 with three simultaneous power bases — Salesforce COO, Slack-deal architect, and rumored heir — making him one of enterprise software's most-watched executives overnight.
Second-order effects
- The promotion path forced a structural clarification inside Salesforce: once the co-CEO title arrived, Benioff moved within a day to state publicly that Taylor would continue reporting to him, revealing how contested the authority line was.
Third-order effects
- If the staged COO-to-co-CEO-to-successor ladder becomes the template, large software companies will institutionalize dual-CEO arrangements as succession instruments rather than crisis measures — though whether Taylor ultimately lands the sole top job remains genuinely unresolved in this coverage.
The trend: Enterprise software succession is shifting toward dealmaker-executives elevated through staged co-CEO structures rather than abrupt handoffs.