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Bret Taylor out as co-CEO of Salesforce (yahoo.com)
26 points by mandeepj on Dec 1, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments



Looks like they've gotta get Benioff his next babysitter -- er, I mean, "co-CEO".

Benioff has been checked out from most of what Salesforce does for a while now, and each of these co-CEOs have been largely responsible both for actually setting direction on goals other than Benioff's random "WE HAVE TO GET INTO NFTs!" brain farts, and for doing damage control to the rest of the company for the internal (and external) fallout from said brain farts (and other unpopular moves, like their mass layoffs a year or so ago that came _right_ after their "no pandemic layoffs" promise had technically-expired depending-on-which-public-statement-you-believed).

Benioff doesn't really contribute much to the company, and he has a team of handlers that have to clean up his "just the tip"-tweet messes all the time.

The next "co-CEO", if there is one, will once again be the next _actual_ CEO of Salesforce, other than when Benioff jams a random bad idea down everyone's throats successfully.

I'm so glad not to be working there anymore. The last few months since I left have been a huge improvement in my working life.


Bret Taylor tried to fuse all social media types into one open [friend]feed [1]. Facebook killed it and walled the garden (+ Made him CTO) .

So who will keep that vision alive ? Could distributed social networks also aggregate for us ?

Bret Taylor tried to fuse all office documents types into one (mobile-ready) doc [2]. Salesforce asphyxiated it (+ Made him co-CEO).

So who kept it alive ? Notion leaned more towards DBs to augment its pages. Excel/Sheets are just too established. Coda is "spreadsheeting" its DB. A nice angle.

What is next Bret ?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20081002005949/http://friendfeed... [2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/quips-bret-t...


>So who will keep that vision alive ? Could distributed social networks also aggregate for us ?

For sure, someone will.


Great time to leave. Very smart move on his behalf. If I was Bret, I'd be laughing all the way to the bank on this exit. The board and the executive team is a virtue-signalling version of Oracle circa 2000.

Once the recession has settled, looking forward to the next wave of cashed up VP's and Execs who'll follow suit. Great time to start fostering relationships if you're a young employee at that organisation.


Seems like Larry Ellison figured out this model where Benioff hasn't been able to (keep in mind, Benioff is a former Oracle employee).

Keith Block (Oracle) joined Salesforce as COO and then co-CEO after departing 1-year later.

Same story for Brett, he was COO and then co-CEO after departing 1-year later.

Seems like Benioff can't let go.


Will be interesting to see what Bret works on next, he seems to have done largely a good job at Salesforce in the past two years

I wonder if the co-ceo model will return again.


Who else read that as "Bart Taylor" at first glance? As in "They say this guy Bart Taylor is gonna walk Helltrack".




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