Bret Taylor has been promoted to co-chief executive officer of Salesforce Inc. on the same day that the company’s shares dropped in after-hours trading on a lower earnings forecast than expected.

Appointing Taylor as co-CEO is a big move from Salesforce, given that founder Marc Benioff has led the company since 2001, though he has had a co-CEO in the past.

“Bret is a phenomenal industry leader who has been instrumental in creating incredible success for our customers and driving innovation throughout our company,” Benioff said in a statement. “He has been my trusted friend for years, and I couldn’t be happier to welcome him as co-CEO.”

Onetime Googler Taylor first came to prominence as the founder of FriendFeed, a feed aggregator and social network back in the first decade of the century that fortunately didn’t have the same problems that the likes of Twitter Inc. have today. FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook Inc. in 2009 and shut down in 2015.

Post-FriendFeed acquisition, Taylor held the position of chief technology officer at Facebook, now Meta Platforms Inc. He left Facebook in 2012 to start a productivity startup called Quip, which Salesforce acquired for $750 million in 2016. With the acquisition, Taylor was named president and chief product officer of Salesforce. In 2019, Taylor was promoted to president and chief operating officer of Salesforce. With the new promotion, he’s now vice-chair and co-CEO of Salesforce.

While not entirely uncommon, it is somewhat rare that a tech-founder could be described as a nice guy versus a money-hungry egomaniac. Taylor is one of the nice tech founders. During his reign at FriendFeed, he earned a reputation as being open, friendly and even at times humble — even if he did sell out to Facebook.

For the quarter ended Oct. 31, Salesforce reported a profit of $1.27 a share before costs such as stock compensation on a 27% rise in revenue from a year ago, to $6.86 billion. Analysts had been predicting an adjusted profit of 92 cents a share on revenue of $6.8 billion.

Salesforce’s quarterly figures were positive across the board. Billings and other – which includes the share of revenue generated from new business as well as the impact of foreign currency translation – came to $5.81 billion The company’s remaining performance obligations sat at $18.8 billion as of the end of October, up 23% year-over-year.

“We delivered another phenomenal quarter, fueling strong revenue growth, margin and cash flow,” Marc Benioff, chairperson and now co-CEO of Salesforce, said in the company’s earnings statement. “Salesforce is more relevant and strategic than ever as every company accelerates their digital transformation journey.”

“Salesforce’s strong Q3 earnings report comes as no surprise as the company enjoys demand across its growing portfolio of cloud offerings,” Matt Fairhurst, CEO of deskless productivity platform Skedulo Holding Inc., told SiliconANGLE. “Organizations are clearly investing in technology infrastructure as they embrace hybrid work models. As digital transformation goes mainstream in the year ahead, we expect Salesforce and other platform companies to continue to thrive.”

Trevor White, a research manager at Nucleus Research, noted that “overall strong demand for digital modernization projects continues to drive up-sells and new customer acquisition. Salesforce continues expanding into additional business areas such as revenue optimization, and increased investment on verticalization further drives continued growth in line with targets.”

However, the better-than-expected results in the quarter were overshadowed by lower-than-expected guidance and investors noticed, with Salesforce shares down more than 6% after the bell. Salesforce is predicting fourth-quarter revenue of $7.224 billion to $7.234 billion and an adjusted profit of 72 to 73 cents per share. Analysts had been predicting 81 cents per share.

Photo: Brian Solis/Wikimedia Commons