Brett Taylor's Executive Evolution

Sam Parr tells a story about Brett Taylor's deliberate transformation from a scruffy engineer to polished executive.

"Brett Taylor graduated from Stanford, then joined Google at 22 where he was lead product manager and helped create Google Maps. After that, he started a social networking site called FriendFeed which he sold to Facebook for $50 million. Facebook incorporated it and actually created the like button because of it.

A few years later he becomes CTO of Facebook. Then he founds a note-taking company for enterprises and sells that to Salesforce for $750 million. After that, he becomes co-CEO of Salesforce. He's also chairman of the board at Twitter, chairman of another large publicly traded security camera company, on the board at Shopify, and was just named chairman of OpenAI. He's only 43 years old.

I found this old video from about 10-15 years ago with him and Mark Zuckerberg at a press conference announcing the Facebook acquisition. He's wearing a scruffy t-shirt, messy hair - looking exactly like you'd think an early Facebook engineer would look.

Then I saw another video of him with the Figma founder at a conference where he's dressed corporate but still has charisma. During this interview, he explained that Sheryl Sandberg had told him something that changed his perspective. The next day he decided: instead of getting the company to change to him, he would change to whatever the company or job needed - whether that meant how he dressed or how he acted.

You see this shift in his demeanor. When he needs to be the tech nerd and someone wants engineering advice, he dresses like an engineer. When he becomes Salesforce CEO, he starts wearing the classic plaid shirt suit with brown shoes - the classic sales look. Later in these videos, the guy just screams poise. When you think of someone who could be chair of an important board like Twitter, he embodies that. He has charisma, poise, isn't vulgar, smiles at the right times, and dresses the part."