Ben Metcalfe

Bret Taylor leaves Google Code to start Benchmark-backed startup

Congrats to Bret Taylor and his friend Jim Norris who have taken up Entrepreneurs in Residence positions at Benchmark Capital.

The position allows them to work on their start-up idea and immediately start receiving support and resource from Benchmark. It’s a pretty sweet opportunity, but they both deserve it.

Bret and Jim were part of the small team who created Google Maps – the project which unintentionally kick-started Google’s foray into the world of mashups.

It’s therefore no surprise that Bret went on lead Google’s developer network Google Code, which is how our paths first crossed whilst I was leading backstage.bbc.co.uk.

Bret and I gave a plenary talk at the 2006 Computer Human Interaction conference about the usability of mashups.

I wish Bret and Jim all the best with their new venture, and can’t wait to find out what it is. I’m guessing it’ll be map/geo or mashup related, but they have has told VentureBeat it’s ‘consumer orientated’ so that rules out mashups.

Best of luck guys.