- Bret Taylor, president and COO of Salesforce, has worked under three bosses — Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Benioff, and Marissa Mayer.
- At the annual World Economic Forum, Taylor sat down with Nicholas Carlson, Insider's global editor-in-chief, to discuss his key takeaways from each of his previous bosses' leadership style.
- While former Google executive, Marissa Mayer, prompted Taylor to rethink hiring strategies, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff taught him to prioritize company values and corporate sustainability.
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Bret Taylor knows what it is like to work for a demanding boss.
Taylor, who is currently president and chief operating officer at Salesforce, has worked at three corporate giants throughout his career — Facebook, Salesforce, and Google — under Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Benioff, and Marissa Mayer.
While working for each of these bosses, he participated in a number of impressive projects. At his first job, Taylor built Google Maps with Marissa Mayer. He later invented the "Like" button at Facebook working alongside Mark Zuckerberg. In 2012, he built Quip, a software app that was acquired by Salesforce for $750 million in 2016 and served as a stepping stone to earn him the executive title he has today.
Throughout Taylor's career, he navigated through contrasting leadership styles and witnessed first hand how executive decision making impacts company results. He jokingly calls himself the "anthropologist of Silicon Valley culture," he told Business Insider.
Taylor recently sat down with Insider's Global Editor-in-Chief, Nicholas Carlson, to reflect on how working under three innovative leaders prepared him for his C-suite role at Salesforce.
Here's what Taylor learned from Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Benioff, and Marissa Mayer.
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Marissa Mayer gave him a new perspective on hiring
Marissa Mayer showed Taylor that there's long-term gain in grooming young talent.
Mayer, who's also the former CEO of Yahoo, worked at Google for 13 years and quickly rose through the ranks to vice president of products. She's the one who vouched for and hired Taylor, he told Business Insider.
Mayer started the Associate Product Manager (APM) program at Google, which the company uses to train recent college graduates with computer science backgrounds to become product managers.
"They were like 'Don't get an MBA, but come get an MBA of Google,'" Taylor said.
Taylor replicated Mayer's program to recruit young graduates at Salesforce. The Salesforce APM program offers two rotational 12-week internships that bring in fellows as future product employees.
"Just think about talent development — particularly long-term — bringing in people out of universities and saying we can create the next generation of executives at the company and focus on that," he said. "That was really inspiring for me."
Mark Zuckerberg encouraged him to think long term
Taylor, who worked as Facebook's chief technology officer for three years, said his most impactful conversations with Zuckerberg were during long walks in Palo Alto.
Zuckerberg had a Socratic style of communication that made Taylor think more critically about long-term strategies, he said. Together, the two executives led the growth of Facebook's mobile platform, its integration with Apple's iOS ecosystem, and its introduction of the famous "Like" button.
In 2012, Taylor left Facebook to start his own company. Though many wonder why he left, he previously told Business Insider that he finds fulfillment in building things from scratch, and that's exactly what he did with Quip.
"I can't understate how hard it was. I think it was more emotional for me than any other job that I've left before because of the depth of the relationships I developed there," he said previously.
Taylor credits much of Quip's success to adopting Zuckerberg's mindset to always look for the bigger picture.
Marc Benioff taught him how to build a sustainable company with a customer focus
Marc Benioff, billionaire founder and CEO of Salesforce, long proclaimed Taylor as a "rising star" in the tech world. Taylor said he's learn more about leadership from Benioff than anyone else in his career.
"Mark Benioff has really built a company around its customers in a way, and that completely shifted my view of how to build a company and an enduring company," he added.
Taylor further explained that Benioff's panel at the World Economic Forum annual meeting (more commonly known as Davos) resonated with him, as the CEO called on businesses to play a larger role in global issues like climate change and income inequality, Business Insider reported.
"To me, a sign of great leadership is when you take action because it's the right thing to do — even if it's a hard thing to do," he told Business Insider.
A good leader not only has the courage to act, but also creates windows for hard conversations, Taylor added.
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