Bret Taylor on founder psychology, failure, and the importance of having great cofounders

Bret Taylor is now the chairman of OpenAI. Before that, he co-created Google Maps, co-founded FriendFeed (sold to Facebook for $50M), was the CTO of Facebook, co-founded Quip (sold to Salesforce for $750M), and was the co-CEO of Salesforce.

His resume looks like one home run after another. But in the clip below, he reflects on some of his failures:

“The hardest part about being an entrepreneur is managing your own psychology… I take failure very personally when it’s my company. It’s so hard not to become dejected with rejection. You’re raising money and you’re rejected by 75% of the people—it doesn’t matter, you only need to raise money from one of them—but all you remember is the rejections. And then you go and try to sell the product and you get a bunch of “no's". Usually it’s not even a “no”—they just don’t return your email—and that’s what you remember.”

The brutally hard nature of startups led Bret to be way more intentional with finding a cofounder for his second company who he could be “metaphorically married to for a long period of time who would not only be a partner in business but a partner through those struggles.”

He continues:

“My cofounder Kevin and I spend as much time investing in our relationship as we do in the company, and it has been the anchor that has kept us stable through all of the inevitable failures that come with starting a company… I don’t think people talk about it enough because it is so tough. You come home and you just feel dejected and defeated. It’s ok—it happens to everyone—and finding a cofounder or a friend that you can talk to about it is super meaningful.”

Full video: Startup Grind Local “Startup Grind hosts Bret Taylor” (Jan 2018)