Former Facebook CTO Bret Taylor warns on big tech’s obsession with growth

The former chief technology officer sounds a warning for all tech giants about culture, values and trust.

Ex-Facebook CTO Bret Taylor: ‘It’s a culture where growth had commanded priority.’ Picture: Hollie Adams

Social media giants such as Facebook are grappling with a crisis of trust because they prioritise growth over all else, according to its former chief technology officer, Bret Taylor. Now president and chief product officer of tech giant Salesforce.com and a board member of Twitter, Taylor tells The Deal that the malaise plaguing the tech giants can be traced back to cultural problems deep within the companies.

The Google Maps co-founder spent three years as a top Facebook executive before departing in 2012. Over the last two years the social media giant has faced a series of challenges, with revelations Russians used the network to meddle in US elections, and that political data firm Cambridge Analytica misappropriated the data of tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge.

“Many technology companies have prioritised growth over all other things,” Taylor says. “You’ve seen this play out with the dramatic sorts of controversies around these companies. It’s a culture where growth had commanded priority, and you could see that even if a poster on the wall had one set of values, the culture had instead created a set of incentives where people are prioritising growth over all else.”

Taylor, speaking during a visit to Sydney, says the social media giants are being forced to grapple with big issues somewhat on the fly, because many of those issues are so new. “This is a very complex question we’re dealing with,” he says. “These are social, political and technological issues that we have not encountered as a society before. If you look around the world now at the politicians going directly to their constituencies on social media, for example, it’s unprecedented and it’s changed the relationships between individuals, the press and politics.”

He says while the issues Facebook is facing are to some extent specific to the company, they point to a world in which social and technological change is outpacing some of our social institutions. “We are grappling with that as a society,” he says. “I do think that when a company encounters a crisis (such as that facing Facebook) they have a responsibility to respond more quickly and aggressively because the impact of their platform is so dramatic. I think it’s important that we are collectively having a discussion around what is the future of these platforms, and I think that’s a very complex discussion.”

When he’s not attending Twitter board meetings, Taylor busies himself at Salesforce, a customer relationship management company focused on maximising sales and marketing results for businesses. Salesforce positions itself away from the social media giants, with chairman and CEO Marc Benioff outspoken on social issues including gay rights and homelessness.

Taylor says companies need to build a culture which allows employees to question decisions which do not accord with their employer’s stated values. “That’s a really challenging thing,” he says. “I think if you talk to any of the executives of major Fortune 500 corporations, they will all tell you culture is the hardest thing to change in business. And in the case of some of these companies that have continually had controversies, you might have a culture where you’ve created incentives where it makes it hard to prioritise things like trust.”

Benioff himself, and by extension Salesforce, have been criticised over the sale of software to the US federal immigration agency, Customs and Border Protection. Last year hundreds of Salesforce staffers wrote to the CEO voicing concern that the company’s software might be used as a tool in the agency’s actions on the Mexican border, including the separation of children from their parents. Benioff later stated in a letter that Salesforce was not working with CBP regarding the separation of families at the border, “nor are any Salesforce services being used by CBP for this purpose”.

The controversies point to a bigger problem with big tech, where a lack of transparency is fuelling consumer distrust. Having co-founded Google Maps in 2005 and social media website FriendFeed in 2007, Taylor has been surrounded by tech – and instrumental in building it – for decades now. As such, he is closely aware of its challenges.

As the father of children aged nine, seven and four, he says tech addiction is at the forefront of his mind. “I think every parent will tell you they think a lot about the tech their kids are using, in a similar way to how when I grew up it was all about how much TV you were watching,” he says. “In this age of iPads and iPhones, the conversation has shifted and we’re now acutely aware that consuming technology is a bit like eating junk food. Yes, I’ll still eat the bag of chips. But I’m thinking more about, am I doing this out of reflex or is it something I really need to do? I think that’s something we’re slowly working out over time: what are the social conventions here and what should our relationship with technology look like?”

When he looks around a restaurant, Taylor sees diners staring at their phones rather than talking to one another. But he remains a tech optimist.

“I don’t think this is the downfall of Western civilisation,” he says. “The fact we’re having these conversations about technology and our relationship with it, they’re the right conversations to have.”

He says the key thing for tech giants to get right aside from values is control, because consumers need to feel in control of their data and their interactions with technology. They want a basic understanding of what’s going on.

“You don’t need to understand all of the underlying tech, just like with flying aeroplanes you don’t need to understand aerodynamics,” he says. “You just need to be able to trust the system. With technology, it is immature enough that we haven’t achieved that yet. We still have a lot of work to do to reach that level of trust, and have people feel that they’re in control.”

David Swan flew to Sydney courtesy of Salesforce.