YouSaid · the spoken record

Bret Taylor

lines on the record: 154
first: 2025-04-15
most recent: 2025-04-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Success for me. We talked about how I spend my time with my family at work is having a happy, healthy family and being able to work with my co-friendly for the rest of my life, making Sarah into an enduring company. That would be success for me.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually exist for a reason. But when they accumulate without end, you end up with bureaucracy. So those are the two things that I always, and you could smell it when you go into a really bureaucratic company, the inaccurate storytelling, the process over outcomes. And it's just, it sort of sucks the energy out of you when you feel it.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. And then I think the other part on leadership is we talked about bureaucracy is process is there to serve the needs of the business. And often mid-level managers don't get credit for removing process. They often are held accountable for things going wrong. And I think it really takes top-down leadership to remove bureaucracy. And it is not always comfortable when companies remove spans of control or all the people impacted will, it's like antibodies. And for good reason, I mean, it makes sense. Their lives are negatively impacted or whatever it is. But it almost has to come from the top because you need to give air cover, almost certainly something will go wrong, by the way. I mean, like processing.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it really comes down to leadership. And I think that one of the things that most great companies have is they are obsessed with their customers. And I think the free market doesn't lie. And so I think one of the most important things I think for any enduring culture, particularly in an industry that changes as rapidly as software, is how close are your employees to customers and how much can customer, like the direct voice of your customers be a part of your decision making? That is something that I think you need to constantly work out because that person, employee number 30,462, how does he or she actually actually directly hear from customers, it's not actually a simple question to answer.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of die. And it's really remarkable to look at the blackberries of the world or the Tivos or the, you know, you can really. As the plane is crashing, like tell the story that you're not. And then similarly, as I said, culturally, you can still have the person in the back of that crashing plane being like, when am I going to get promoted to SVP? And then you're like, what the, you know, yeah. And that's, I mean, this is like, I mean, I've seen it a hundred times. And so.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's the life of a person inside of these big places. And so you end up where if you have a very senior head of product who's like, this competitor says they're faster, but this next version, we're so much better. And then everyone says all of a sudden that's like the Windows phone is going to win. That's what everyone says. And you truly believe it because everyone you meet says the same thing and you end up reflecting customer anecdotes through that lens and you end up with this sort of reality distortion field manifested from the sum of this sort of myopic storytelling that exists within companies. What's interesting about that is like the ability for a culture to believe in something is actually a great strength of a culture, but it can lead to this as well. And so the combination of bureaucracy and inaccurate storytelling, I think is the reason why a company”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and that's the thing, if you think about it, if anyone, if you've ever worked for a large company, when you work at a small company, you care about your customers and your competitors and you feel every bump in the road, when you're a junior vice president of whatever and you're eight levels below your CEO and you have a set of objectives and results you might be focused as I want to go from junior vice president to senior vice president that's what success looks like for me and you end up with this sort of myopic focus on this internal world in the same way your kids will focus on you know the social dynamics of their high school not the world outside of it and it's probably rational by the way because like you know probably their social life is more determined by those you know 1000 kids in their high school”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was definitely a two horse race between Apple and Google and iOS and Android. And I remember sitting in the lobby waiting for my friend to get me from the security check-in. Something along the lines Are you required to use Windows phones? How these other? And I just sort of curious. And then I got a really bold answer, which is like, yeah, we're going to win. We're taking over the smartphone market. I didn't say anything because it was like a little socially awkward of like, no, you're not. Like you lost four years ago.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ready Fire Aim new strategies that backfire massively, but often it can mean in the face of a technology shift or a new competitor, you just can't move fast enough to address it. The second thing that I think is more subtle is as a company grows in size, often its internal narrative can be stronger than the truth from customers. I remember one time when this sort of peak of the smartphone wars and I ended up visiting a friend on Microsoft's campus and I got off the plane in Seattle-Tacoma Airport, drove into Redmond, went on to the campus. And all of a sudden, everyone I saw was using Windows phones. I assume it must have been a requirement or formal or social, like you were definitely uncool if you're using anything else. And from my perspective at the time, Like the war had already been lost”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a really challenging thing to do at a company. One of the There's two things that I've observed that I think manifest as corporate complacency. One is bureaucracy. And I think the root of bureaucracy is often when something goes wrong, companies introduce a process to fix it. And over a sequence of 30 years, layered sum of all of those processes that were all created for good reason with good intentions end up being a bureaucratic sort of machine where the reasons for many of the rules and processes are rarely even remembered by the organization, but it creates this sort of natural inertia. Sometimes that inertia can be good. You know, it's like, you know, if you end up with, there's definitely been stories of executives coming in.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ways you can shoot yourself in the foot. But in particular, too, your customer experience should be wetted, should not be wetted to one model, let alone even this current generation of models. So with Sierra, you can define your customer experience once in a way that's abstracted from all of the technology. And it can be a chat, it can be, you can call you on the phone, it can be all of those things. And as new models and new technology comes out, our platform just gets better. But you're not re-implementing your customer experience. And I think that's really important because we were talking about what's happened over the past two years. Can you imagine if you're a consumer brand like ADT home security and thinking about like, how can you maintain your AI agent in the face of all of that, right? It's just not even, it's not tenable. I mean, it's not what you do as ADT. So they've worked with us to build their AI agent.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it means that your customer experience goes from the enumerated set of functionality you've decided upon on your website to whatever your customers ask. And then you can decide how to fulfill those requests or whether you want to. Yeah. But I think it would really change the dynamic to be really empowering to consumers. As you said, I mean, the reason that Air Canada case”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you have an AI agent represent your brand, the agency goes to the customer. They can express their problem any way they want in a multifaceted way.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, look, it's one thing if ChatGPT hallucinates something about your brand. It's another if your AI agent hallucinates something about your brand. So the bar just gets higher. So the robustness of these agents, the guardrails, everything is more important when it's yours and it has your brand on it. And so it's harder, but I also, I'm just so excited for it because This is a little overly intellectual, but I really like the framing. If you think about a modern website or mobile app, it's essentially you've created a directory of functionality from which you can choose. But the main person with agency in that is the creator of the website. Like, what are the universe of options that you can do?”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we really aspire that when you encounter a branded agent in the wild, we want CR to be the platform that powers it.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But when you put a conversational AI as your digital front door, people will say anything they want to it. And we're now doing product discovery, consider purchases, going back to an insurance example. Hey, I've got a 15-year-old daughter. I really am concerned about the cost of her premium until she grows up. Tell me which plan I should be on. Tell me why you'll be better than your competitors. That's a really complex interaction, right? That's not something that Can you make a web page that does that? No, but that's a great conversation.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's where we're helping our customers do it. Sarah's help them build a conversational AI that does all of that. So most of our customers start with customer service, and it's a great application because no one likes to wait on hold and having somebody that has perfect access to information is multilingual and empathetic is just amazing.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a million things you can do on it. Essentially, over the past 30 years, websites, eight companies' websites, Singular has come to be the universe of everything that you can do with that company. I like to think it was like the digital instantiation of the company.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you think about the money we spend on lawyers? That's a lot. And so you end up where you're broadening the addressable market quite a lot. The domain we're in, I think is somewhat special, which is a company's branded customer facing agent. And the reason why I think it's, one could argue we're sort of helping with customer service, which is a persona, a role. But I do think it's broader than that because if you think about a website, you know, like your insurance company's website, try to list all the things you can do on it. You can look up the stock quote. You can look up the management team. You can compare their insurance company to all their competitors. You can file a claim. You can bundle your home and auto. add a member of your family to your”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of a rote kind of law, but is really important, and AI can do it really well. So I think that's why this is the area of the economy that I think is really exciting. And I'm really excited about all the startups in this space because you're essentially taking what used to be a combination of people and software and really making something that solves a problem. And by narrowing the domain of autonomy, you can have more robust guardrails and even with current models actually achieve something that's effective enough to be commercially viable today. And by the way, it changes the total addressable market of these models too. I don't know what the total addressable market of legal software was three years ago, but it couldn't have been that.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're really commercially valuable because most companies hire people or consultants that do those things already, like analyze the contracts of your supply chain, right? That's”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think these agents will be really powerful. I think it might be a really hard product build because when you think about all the different services and people you interact with every day, it's kind of everything. So it's not, it has to generalize a lot to be useful to you. And because of the personal privacy and things like that, it has to work really well for you to trust it. So I think it's going to take a while to go. I think it'll be a lot of demos. I think it'll take a while to be robust. The second category of agent is I would say really filling a persona within a company. So a coding agent, a paralegal agent, an analyst agent. I think these already exist. I mentioned cursor. There's a company called Harvey that makes a legal agent. I'm sure there's a bunch in the analyst space. These do a job and they're more narrow, but they”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And help you arrange your travel. Two more complex things. Like, you know, I'm going to go ask my boss for promotion, like help me role play. And I'm setting up my resume for this job, help me do that too. I'm applying for a new job, help me find companies I haven't thought of that I should be applying to.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Define it more broadly, and then I'll tell you how we think about it, Sira, which is a more narrow view of it. The word agent comes from agency, and I think it means affording a software the opportunity to reason and make decisions autonomously. And I think that's really all it means to me. And I think there's lots of different applications of it. The three categories that I think are meaningful, and I'll end with the Sierra one just so I can talk about it a little more, but one is personal agents. So I do think that most people will have probably one, but maybe a couple AI agents that they use on a daily basis that are essentially amplifying themselves as an individual, you can do the rote things like help you triage your email to help you schedule a vacation. You're flying back to Edmonton.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's really exciting. So when I think about it, I just get so much energy because it's incredibly hard and it's harder now than it's ever been to do something that lasts beyond you. But that I think is the ultimate measure of a company.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Changing demands of society and technology when it's changing at a pace that is like unprecedented in history. So I think it's one of the most fun business challenges of all time. And I think it has as much to do with culture as it has to do with technology because every line of code in Sierra today will be completely different probably five years from now, let alone 30 years from now.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a very stark reminder that technology companies aren't entitled to their future success. And I think we'll see this actually now with AI. AI, I think, will change the landscape of software to be tools of productivity to agents that actually accomplish tasks. And I think it will help some companies for whom that's amplifies their existing value proposition and it will really hurt others where it will essentially the seat-based kind of model of legacy software will wane very quickly and then really harm them. And so when I think about what it means to build a company that's enduring, that is a really, really tall task in my mind right now because it means not only making something that's financially enduring over the next 10 years, but setting up a culture where a company can actually evolve to meet the”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then when Facebook, when we moved out of the second building we were in Palo Alto, it was slightly larger building. I think we leased it from HP, but we finally got a campus. It was from Sun Microsystems who had gone through an Oracle acquisition and had been sort of on the decline. And it was interesting to me because both SGI and Sun had been started and grown to prominence in my lifetime. Obviously, I was maybe like a little younger, obviously, but in my lifetime, enough to build a whole corporate campus and then declined fast enough to sell that corporate campus to a new software company. And for me, it was just so interesting to have done that twice, to move into like a, you know, a used campus from the previous owners.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think just actually, I don't think we've ever talked about this, but it was really interesting moment for me when Google went from its one building in Mountain View to its first corporate campus. We moved into the Silicon Graphics campus, which was right over near Shoreline Boulevard in Mountain View. And SGI had been a really successful company enough to build a campus. And it was actually quite awkward. We moved into like half the campus. They were still in half. And they're like, we're this up-and-coming company. They're declining.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I absolutely intend Zero to be an enduring company and an independent company. But to be honest, every entrepreneur with every company starts that way. And so I'm really grateful for both Facebook and Salesforce for having acquired my previous companies and hopefully I had an impact about those companies. But it start off, well, at least I never start off saying, hey, I want to make a company to sell it. But I actually think with Sarah, we have just a ton of traction in the marketplace. I really do think Sarah is the leader in helping consumer brands build customer-facing AI agents. And I'm really proud of that. So I really see a path to that. And I joke with Clay, I want to be an old man sitting on his porch, you know, complaining how the next generation of leaders at Sierra don't listen to us anymore. I want this to be something that not only is enduring but outlives me.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't regret that either. Like, I am so passionate about what we're building at Sira. I'm so passionate about OpenAI. I'm so love my family so much. Where do you spend your time? And mine is at work and with family. And so that's how I do it. I don't know if I'm particularly balanced, but I don't strive to be either. I really take a lot of pride and I love to work.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work a lot. I don't, I really care and love care about and love working. So one thing is that I, well, there's always trade-offs in life. If I didn't love working, I wouldn't do it as much as I do. But I just love to create things and love to have an impact. And so I like jump out of bed in the morning and work out, go to work, and then spend time with my family broadly, probably being honest. First, I'm not perfect at it, but second, I don't have a ton of hobbies. I basically work and spend time with my family the first time we talked, you saw the couple of guitars in my background. I haven't picked one of those up in a while. I mean, I literally pick it up occasionally, but I do not devote any time into it.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is really important to actually think through those if you're talking a timeframe of like 20 years. And that's why having not thought about this question ahead of time, you could be quite simplistic elsewhere. But I would say software and finance areas that I think stand to reason should benefit quite a bit”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then broadly, I think areas of like processing information are areas that will really benefit quite a bit here. And so, and I think the thing that I would think about over a 20-year period is like second and third order effects, which is why I don't have an intelligent answer. And if you're asking me to put all my money in something, I would think about it for a while. Probably use a one pro a little bit to help me. Because you can end up generated a bunch of growth in the short term, but then if everyone does it, it commoditizes the whole industry type of thing. So, you know, there used to be before the introduction of the freezer, ice was like a really expensive thing. And now it's free, you know. And so.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can that industry grow? We don't know, but we've been so constrained on software engineering as a resource. Who knows over the next 20 years, but we'll find out where the limits are. But to me, intellectually, there's just a ton of growth there.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, two that are, I think, probably going to benefit a lot are technology and finance, you know, where if you can make better financial decisions than competitors, you'll generate outsized returns. And that's why over the past 30 years of machine learning hedge funds and financial service institutions, everything from fraud prevention to true investment strategies has already been an area of domain of investment. Software similar as we talked about, I think that at some point, we will no longer be supply constrained in software, but we're not anywhere close to it right now. And you're taking something that has always been the scarce resource, which is software engineers, and you're making it not scarce. And I think as a consequence, if you just think of like how much.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You change one part of the economy, it impacts other parts of the economy, and that was what Tyler's point was in his talk. But I would probably think about that because I think that over a 20-year period, there are certain parts of society that won't be able to change extremely rapidly. But there will be some parts that probably will, and it'll probably be domains where intelligence is the scarce resource right now. And then I would probably try to find companies that will disproportionately benefit from it. And I assume this is why NVIDIA stock is so high right now, because if you want to sort of get downstream, you know, NVIDIA will probably benefit from all of the investments in AI. I'm not sure I would do that over a 20-year period, just assuming that the infrastructure will shift. So I don't have an intelligent answer, but that's the way I would think about it if we're doing that exercise.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intelligence is a limiting factor to its growth and where you can absorb almost arbitrary levels of intelligence and generate almost arbitrary levels of growth. Obviously, there's limits to all of this just because.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a good question. First of all, give you how I think about it, but I'm so having not been a public company CEO for a couple years, I'm blissfully don't pay attention as much to the public markets, and particularly right now, valuations have gone up a lot. But because it's a long-term question, maybe that doesn't matter. I think what I'd be thinking about right now is over the next 20 years, like what are the parts of the economy that will most benefit from this current wave of AI? That's not the only way to invest over a 20-year period, but certainly it's a domain that I understand. And in particular, you know, I mentioned that talk I heard a snippet of from Tyler Cohen, which is like, it will probably AI will probably benefit different parts of the economy disproportionately. There will be some parts of the economy that can essentially where”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start to treat their code as too precious. It can really impede forward progress. And I'll just take my understanding is a lot of the early self-driving car software was a lot of hand-coded heuristics and rules. And, you know, a lot of smart people think that eventually it'll probably be a more monolithic model that encodes many of the same rules. You have to throw out a lot of code in that transition, but it doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do. And so I think in general, yeah, there might have been some feathers ruffled, but at the end of the day, everyone's like, that's faster and better. Let's do it, you know, which is, I think, the right decision.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I read a lot of it too. So, yeah, I'm sure there were some around it, but actually, I think good teams want to do great work. And so I think there was a lot of people constructively dissatisfied with the state of things too. And I think, you know, Particularly Lars and Jens, and I like we want to make great products. And so I don't think there was a, at the end of the day, everyone was like, wow, that's great. We went from a bundle size of 200K to a bundle size of 20K, and it was a lot faster and better. So, broadly speaking, I think good engineering cultures, you don't want a culture of ready-fire aim, but I also think you just need to be really outcomes-oriented. And I think people, if they become”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of pride of authorship with engineering and code. So I sort of knew I really wanted to finish it over the weekend so that people could use it and see how fast it was and kind of overcome anyone who was like, you know, protective of the code they had written a few months ago. And so I really wanted the prototype to go out. And so I did it. And then I didn't. It's funny, I never talked about it again, but I think Paul Buheit, who was the co-creator of Gmail, and I worked and started FriendFeed with me. He was on an interview and mentioned this story. So now all of a sudden it's like everyone's talking about it. And I was like, well, thank you, Paul. It's a little embarrassed that people know about it. But it's a true story. And XML is just the worst.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rewrote more or less the whole thing, and it took probably another week of working through the bugs. But yeah, I sent it out to the team after that weekend. And it was night. The reason I was able to do it, yeah, I make a decent programmer. But you'd also lived with every bad decision up to that point too. So I knew exactly the output I was going to like I had simulated in my head, like if I could do it over again, this is the way I do it. So by the time I put my hands on the keyboard on Friday night, it wasn't like I was designing a product. Like I knew I had been in every detail of that product since the beginning, including maybe the bad decisions too, that not all the bad decisions. And so it was just very clear. I knew what I wanted to accomplish. And for any engineers worked on a big system, you have the whole system mapped out in your head. So I knew everything. And I, and I also knew.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was much less XML support in Safari than there was in Internet Explorer and Firefox. And so one of the engineers implemented like a full XSLT transform engine in JavaScript to get it to work. And it was just like shit on top of shit on top of shit. And so what was a really elegant fast web application had sort of quickly become something, you know, there's a lot of dial-up modems at the time and other things. So like you'd show up to maps and it just was slow and like it just bothered me as like someone who takes a lot of pride in their craft. And so I got really energized and like over a weekend and a lot of coffee rewrote it.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of Enterprise software was like XML this, XML that. So similarly, when we were taking some of these ideas and putting them in a web browser, we kind of went into autopilot and used like a ton of XML. And it made everything just like really, really tedious. And so Google Maps launched with some really great ideas like the draggable maps. And we did a bunch of stuff with the local search technology. So you could overlay restaurant listings. It was really great. It was a really successful launch. We were like the hot shots within Google afterwards. But it really started to show its cruft. And we got to this point where we decided we wanted to support the Safari web browser, which was relatively new at the time. This is before mobile phones.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than any web application that preceded it was the standard that we needed to hit from interactivity was set by a native Windows app, not set by the legacy websites that we had used at the time. And I think that by having the goalposts so far down the field because they had just started with this Windows app, which was sort of a quirk of Lars and Jun's just like technical choices, we made much bolder technical bets than we would have otherwise. I think we would have ended up much less interactive had we not started with that quirky technical sort of decision. But the other thing was this Windows app, there's a lot of like, it's hard to describe the like early 2000s when people didn't live it, but like XML was like really in fashion. So most things in Windows and other places like XML and XSLT, which was a way of transforming XML into different XML, was the basis of everything. It was like.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A beautiful mapping product. It was running on Windows long after it was sort of out of fashion to make Windows apps, but that was sort of where the technology they were comfortable with. But they're really, their maps modeled the A to Z maps in the UK and were just beautiful. And they just had a lot of passion for mapping. We did a little Aquaire of them and took together the Google Local team and Lars and Yenz's team and said, okay, like let's take the good ideas from this Windows app and the good ideas from Google Local and like let's bring them together to make something completely new. And that's what became Google Maps. But there's a couple of idiosyncrasies in the integration because it was a Windows app, it really helped and hurt us in a number of ways. Like one of the ways it helped us is the reason why Google Maps we were able to drag the map and it was so much more”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I'll start with just like the story of Google Maps, the abbreviated version. We had launched a product at Google called Google Local, which was sort of a yellow pages search engine. Probably most listeners don't even know what yellow pages are, but it was a thing back then. We had licensed maps from MapQuest, which was a dominant sort of mapping provider at the time. It was sort of an eyesore on the experience and also always felt like it could be a more meaningful part of the kind of local search and navigation experience on Google. So Larry Page in particular was really pushing us to really invest more in maps. We found this small company with like four people in it. If I'm remembering correctly, started by Lars and Jens Rasmussen called WhereTo Technologies where they had made a Windows application called Expedition that was just”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pats make sense of it's predicting something that's an active use that you invented and you're trying to stand legal rationale for patents just generating a bunch of ideas and patenting it seems destructive to the value of a content. So here's the”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seems like that should not be allowed. This is what I'm saying, though. Well, in general, I think that companies, you know, I think.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source