Bret Taylor

Who is Bret Taylor?

Bret Taylor is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He was the co-creator of Google Maps and the Google Maps API. Taylor left Google in June 2007 to join venture capital firm Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence, where he and Jim Norris, another former Google employee, created the social network web site FriendFeed. Taylor was the CEO of FriendFeed until August 2009, when the company was acquired by Facebook for an estimated $50 million. Taylor was the CTO of Facebook until the summer of 2012 when he left to start his own company. On March 15, 2013, it was announced that Mike Schroepfer would fill the role as the new CTO of Facebook.

Taylor also co-wrote and maintains Tornado web server. The software was created at FriendFeed and was open-sourced after FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook in 2009.

Taylor attended Stanford University, where he earned his bachelor's degree and master's degree in computer science.

On June 15, 2012, Taylor announced his plans to leave Facebook to start a new company. On July 30, 2013, Quip announced he was a founder.