ByRichard Nieva,
Forbes Staff.
B
ret Taylor, CEO of Sierra, a $10 billion startup that builds AI customer service agents, is grinning as he blows into a massive alphorn stretched before him, an 11-and-a-half foot horn made of California redwood. The wail is at first shaky, but he eventually produces a sustained and clear tone. “It requires a little bit of a lesson on how to blow like a trumpet,” he later tells Forbes. “It's so awkward and goofy that it's just utterly perfect.”
Proper alphorn technique might not be the expected topic of conversation with Taylor, one of the most celebrated executives in Silicon Valley, with noted tenures at Google (co-creator of Google Maps), Facebook (CTO), Twitter (board chairman), Salesforce (co-CEO) and now OpenAI (board chairman). But it’s on the docket today because he and cofounder Clay Bavor, an 18-year Google veteran who headed the company’s emerging tech efforts in virtual and augmented reality, decided soon after they started Sierra in 2023 that they didn’t want to commemorate signing new customers by ringing a stuffy old sales gong — a cliche at other enterprise tech companies. Instead, they opted for something in line with the startup’s mountainous corporate identity. (They even list free alphorn lessons as an official benefit on job postings, and purchased the instrument, coincidentally, through a company called Sierra Alphorns.)
