How Two Silicon Valley A-Listers Became Billionaires By Remaking Customer Service With AI

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How Two Silicon Valley A-Listers Became Billionaires By Remaking Customer Service With AI

By Richard Nieva | Forbes | Nov 21, 2025

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Bret Taylor, CEO of Sierra, a $10 billion startup that builds AI customer service agents is one of the most celebrated executives in Silicon Valley.  With his cofounder Clay Bavor, 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. Instead, they opted for something in line with the startup’s mountainous corporate identity.
2. Sierra  serves a mix of startups and large consumer brands, including retailer.  That particular slice of the market is intentional: The company is going after big business, touting that over half of its customers have revenue of more than $1 billion, and 20% of them have revenue of more than $10 billion. That focus has paid off, with Sierra on track to exceed $100 million in annualized revenue by the end of the fiscal year in January.
3. Sierra’s agents take care of the more knotty customer service issues — like returning a pair of shoes or canceling a subscription — that typically required chatting with a bot on a little popup screen on a corporate website, or worse, needing the attention of a human representative. But Taylor and Bavor don’t think of Sierra as a business that only helps handle customer complaints. They think agents will become so powerful that they’ll eventually become the primary way that businesses interact with customers.

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Topics:  Leadership, Strategy, Business Model

Extractive Summary of the Article | Read | Listen

Bret 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.)

Taylor says they’ve blown the horn “hundreds” of times, an indication of the health of their customer service business, though the company won’t share an exact number of clients. They include a mix of startups and large consumer brands, including retailer The North Face, electric vehicle maker Rivian, home security giant ADT and digital radio company SiriusXM. That particular slice of the market is intentional: The company is going after big business, touting that over half of its customers have revenue of more than $1 billion, and 20% of them have revenue of more than $10 billion. That focus has paid off, with Sierra on track to exceed $100 million in annualized revenue by the end of the fiscal year in January, according to a source familiar with the company’s performance.

If you’ve interacted with one of Sierra’s agents, there’s a good chance you were already annoyed. That’s because they take care of the more knotty customer service issues — like returning a pair of shoes or canceling a subscription — that typically required chatting with a bot on a little popup screen on a corporate website, or worse, needing the attention of a human representative. But Taylor and Bavor don’t think of Sierra as a business that only helps handle customer complaints. They think agents will become so powerful that they’ll eventually become the primary way that businesses interact with customers. You’ll engage with them across several channels — text, phone call, app, WhatsApp and more. And they’ll become personal concierges working on behalf of a company, remembering past conversations with customers and making suggestions based on their personal preferences. “One of the promises of the internet was personalization, but the only full manifestation of that we’ve really seen is very targeted ads,” said Bavor, with no tinge of irony for someone who spent almost two decades at Google.

For now, though, agents can still be pretty rudimentary. On Wednesday, the company announced a handful of new products designed to make its agents act more like multi-purpose concierges. The goal is to not only have their agents tend to reactive issues like complaints. Instead, they want agents to pop up proactively when a company thinks it makes sense.

Blue chip investors like Sequoia, Benchmark and Thrive Capital are sold. In September, the startup raised $350 million in a round that valued the company at $10 billion. “What differentiates them is a high ceiling,” Neil Mehta, founder of the round’s lead investor Greenoaks Capital, told Forbes. “There’s really no company that could solve the sophisticated problems that they’re solving for some large companies in America.” The infusion of funding has also paid off for Taylor and Bavor, officially minting them as billionaires for the first time, with each owning a roughly one-quarter stake in the company, according to Forbes estimates.

But back to the alphorn. It’s not only a gimmick. It’s also supposed to symbolize how Sierra is trying to stand out in an already fiercely competitive market, which includes $1.5 billion-valued Decagon, a buzzy startup that’s attracted a frenzy from venture capitalists clamoring to invest; Kustomer, a smaller New Jersey-based rival; and Intercom, an established competitor with thousands of customers. The field is crowded because it’s one of the few sectors that is primed to immediately reap the benefits of AI, said Taylor, and the market is sizable: more than $12 billion in 2024, on track to hit nearly $50 billion by 2030.