Building new things comes naturally to Bret Taylor, CEO and cofounder of Quip, the mobile-friendly collaborative word processor.
Taylor was responsible for the creation of Google Maps in his first job at Google. He also built the ‘Like’ button at Friendfeed, the social network he built after leaving Google in 2007. Friendfeed was later acquired by Facebook for roughly $50 million in 2009.
After the acquisition Taylor became Facebook’s CTO, and, among many other things, oversaw the growth of its mobile platform, including its deep integration with Apple’s iOS ecosystem.
Taylor’s had only two bosses in his career, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Yahoo CEO-former Google exec Marissa Mayer.
So it’s not entirely surprising that the tech world was buzzing when Taylor announced his plans to leave Facebook to start his own company in 2012. He didn’t say what his startup was going to be until a year later, when he revealed Quip.
Quip, cofounded by Taylor and another ex-Googler, Kevin Gibbs, is a mobile-friendly word processor with collaborative messaging and editing features. It has a simple user interface where you can use bullet points and checklists in your document while editing and adding comments on the side. You can also create group chat rooms within the app.
“It’s like a shared whiteboard with a bunch of desks around it,” Taylor told Business Insider. “But there’s enough scaffolding to write and organize things. It’s like an evolution of messaging, documents, and email.”
Quip comes in three versions: a free personal product and subscription-based business and enterprise products.
Taylor said the business enterprise market is his main focus as he’s been able to get more than 5,000 companies to use his product so far, including Facebook, Instagram, and New Relic.
We caught up with Taylor to hear more about Quip and how’s it’s been doing in its first year.
You can also see our walkthrough of Quip here.
Business Insider: Your first product release was in July 2013. Tell us how you’ve done.
Bret Taylor: We’re very competent at cross-platform development now. That means we’re releasing on desktop, iOS, and Android simultaneously, at least once a month. We have a small team, but we’re able to keep a pretty good cadence of product releases.
On the business side, we are very widely deployed at a handful of public companies now. — For more information read the original article here.
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