Last year, when Bret Taylor made it public that he was resigning as co-CEO and co-chair at Salesforce in November, it was easy to be sceptical about him saying he wanted to go and rebuild. Now, guess what? He wanted to go and rebuild— and today, he and long-time Google engineering veteran Clay Bavor told media they were partnering up for a new mystery project.
Bavor, who in his 18-year career, spent almost seven years as the VP of AR and VR at Google with the company, did not reveal much in his LinkedIn post about what is coming next, but he was clear he’s doing it with his old pal Taylor.
He mentioned that the two have known each other for years since joining Google and that he “always admired [Taylor’s] keen product sense and entrepreneurial spirit, his technical chops, and, above all, his character and integrity.”
Whatever his new venture is about, he wasn’t saying particularly, but we might find out more next month. “I’ll be setting out with Bret on this next adventure in March and will have more to share once we get started. Until then, I’ll be focusing on transitioning my teams and projects and wrapping things up properly at Google.”
Beginning in March 2003, Taylor spent four years at Google before undertaking an entrepreneurial journey, founding the early social network FriendFeed in 2007, right after resigning from Google. Facebook purchased the company in 2009, and Taylor had a stint as CTO at the company.
Later, he founded Quip, an enterprise document collaboration company that Salesforce took over in 2016 for $750 million. He jumped through the ranks to co-CEO and will now return to his company-building roots.
It also led to Managing Partner Elias Roman being in charge of the remaining Area 120 projects.
Whatever’s about to next is already much anticipated.
