For even a casual observer of the tech industry, it’s been a good week for Bret Taylor: He was named board chair at Twitter on Monday, and yesterday, he became the co-CEO and co-chair at a SaaS company called Salesforce.
From outward appearances, Taylor seemed extraordinarily well positioned to influence what goes on at Twitter while simultaneously finding himself on an equal footing with Salesforce co-founder and outgoing CEO Marc Benioff.
“The co-CEO setup can be a tricky one,” advised Holger Mueller of Constellation Research.
But there was a reality check today when The Information reported that Taylor was would actually be co-CEO in name only, reporting to Benioff after all.
Salesforce has not responded to our request for comment on this report, but Taylor still has to be feeling pretty good about himself, regardless of his position on the company’s org chart.
After a stint working as a product manager on Google Maps and other services at the company, he joined Benchmark Capital in 2007 as an entrepreneur-in-residence. He eventually co-founded FriendFeed, an early social media network along with MySpace that was popular before Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok arrived on the scene.
