Bret Taylor, Tech's Consummate Team Player, Unveils A New AI Startup

Bret Taylor seems to have a knack for teaming up on tough problems.

I spoke with him this week about the official launch of Sierra, an artificial intelligence startup he's been working on with co-founder Clay Bavor. The effort has been in "stealth mode" for nearly a year, stealth being Silicon Valley's favored term for an effort that's so new and strategic that the company isn't ready to trumpet its plans.

Sierra helps customers build custom AI agents to interact with their audience in new ways; early customers include WeightWatchers , SiriusXM and Sonos, Inc. With the big unveil, Bret and Clay are also announcing that they've raised $110 million in funding in a round led by Sequoia Capital and Benchmark .

Aside from the details, what I find interesting about the news is that Bret is teaming up yet again. I mean, it's common for a startup to have more than one founder, and in this case it's convenient that Bret and Clay have been friends for 20 years, since they were young recruits at an ascendant 谷歌 . (Bavor headed Google Labs until he left to work on Sierra in early 2023.) But Bret seems to take high-stakes team play to another level. He was recently Marc Benioff 's co-CEO at Salesforce. He did that while serving as the board chairman at Twitter who forced Elon Musk to make good on his bid to buy the company. And last November, Bret was the new chairman OpenAI brought in to stabilize things after the ouster and reappointment of Sam Altman as CEO.

During our conversation about Sierra, I asked Bret about OpenAI. Here's what he said:

I, like so many others in the technology space, was just really worried about OpenAI that weekend. Clay and I left our jobs to work in this space because we're so passionate about the potential of this technology. And you have this incredible mission-driven nonprofit and it felt for a moment like it might not exist.

So I chose to take on the role of chairman, in large part just out of a sense of OpenAI’s mission being so important for the world. At Sierra we're building a solution for businesses. So we actually build on a variety of different models. And in fact, if you chat with the OluKai agent to exchange your shoes, there's probably four or five different A.I. models that are invoked to decide what to do at that point.

So, like so many others, we’re a part of this ecosystem. And what I would say is it's pretty amazing to see the innovation in what Reid Hoffman would call these frontier models, these models that require incredible amounts of capital expenditure, probably the best researchers in the world. And I think Sierra is a benefactor of all that research and development.

And as I said, when I think about it from Sierra’s perspective, I really think of frontier models as pieces of infrastructure that are becoming fundamental to software, really trying to package up a solution so that businesses can actually solve real world problems with that infrastructure without being experts in the field.

Check out my full Fortt Knox Update conversation with Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor here: