In the brief history of modern Silicon Valley, Bill Campbell, who died yesterday, at the age of seventy-five, is a giant. His various titles—Columbia football coach, Apple executive, co-founder of Go Corp., Intuit C.E.O., chairman of Apple, chairman of the Columbia University board—do not convey his influence. In the world capital of engineering, where per-capita income can seem inversely related to social skills, Campbell was the man who taught founders to look up from their computer screens. He was known throughout the Valley as “the Coach,” the experienced executive who added a touch of humanity as he quietly instructed Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, the founders of Twitter, Sheryl Sandberg, and countless other entrepreneurs on the human dimensions of management, on the importance of listening to employees and customers, of partnering with others. His obituary was not featured on the front of most newspapers, or at the top of most technology news sites, but it should have been.
Campbell fervently believed in founders, and helped coach entrepreneurs to become C.E.O.s. John Doerr, one of the Valley’s famed venture capitalists, made it a practice to ask Campbell to coach the leaders of the companies backed by his company, Kleiner Perkins. A little-known story is that, in the late nineties, Amazon’s directors were clamoring to replace Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder, with an experienced executive. Doerr, an early investor and director of Amazon, summoned Campbell. He spent six weeks in Seattle coaching Bezos on how to serve as a C.E.O., wouldn’t accept a penny as payment, and saved Bezos from the predations of his directors. Over the years, he often challenged venture-capital investors to be patient, warning that it was a mistake to replace founders with professional managers who lacked their zeal and vision.
In 1997, soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, following a twelve-year absence, he asked Campbell to become the company’s lead outside director. Campbell became both Jobs’s mentor and perhaps his closest confidante. Most Sundays they took long walks in the hills around Palo Alto. Although he was neither an employee nor a director, for more than a decade Larry Page and Sergey Brin invited him to attend Monday meetings of Google’s senior executive team as well as board-of-director meetings. In the early days of Google, as happened at Amazon, board members pressured Page and Brin to hire an experienced C.E.O. They resisted, until Doerr, with Campbell’s help, recruited Eric Schmidt. The new C.E.O. would often say that without Campbell, who served as both a sounding board and a trusted emissary to the founders, that marriage might have collapsed.
Google relied on Campbell to sort out tempests caused by imperial engineers burdened by oversized egos that prevented them from collaborating. This happened with Andy Rubin, the entrepreneur who created Android and built it into a resounding Google success. The Android team under Rubin was massive. But, as I learned through numerous interviews while writing a book about the company and in later conversations with Google executives, Rubin tended to trust only members of his élite team, and fought with other top executives, including such original Google employees as Salar Kamangar, who supervised YouTube, and Alan Eustace, the head of engineering. The weekly meetings of senior Google executives were filled with tension and discord. Executives became so dispirited by what they saw as Rubin’s dominance that they threatened to quit. Campbell advised Larry Page to make a choice, and to the relief of senior executives Page chose to remove Rubin. Campbell had earlier warned Page that Marissa Mayer, the talented engineer who went on to become the C.E.O. of Yahoo, had a similar my-way-or-the-highway approach, which also led to her demotion to a position where she no longer reported to the C.E.O. Campbell knew that a lack of empathy often translated into an inability to listen.
By the age of seventy-five, Campbell owned a Gulfstream IV, and had given many millions of dollars to Homestead, the small steel town near Pittsburgh where he was raised and where his dad worked nights in the steel mill and days at the high school, teaching physical education. Campbell spent at least a day a week coaching at Google, gratis. His voluntary coaching of Valley executives, which monopolized most of his week, was his way of giving back to a Silicon Valley that had been so generous to him throughout his career. To persuade Campbell to accept compensation for plunging in to advise one of his startups, Marc Andreessen, knowing Campbell was a devoted Democrat, threatened to donate monies to the Republican Party. Campbell would later accept compensation in stock, which he deposited in his philanthropic foundation.
Outside Silicon Valley, Campbell was little known. He rarely gave press interviews or appeared on any stage. When I was reporting my book on Google, it took me many months to get him to talk. He relented only after Google executives asked him to coöperate. He never took credit for coaching Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or anyone else. If Campbell walked into a restaurant like Il Fornaio, where the digerati congregate, or the Old Pro, the bustling sports bar he co-owned in Palo Alto, even people who don’t generally look at you when they speak would smile broadly and give him a hug.
Ben Horowitz, who was mentored by Campbell when he was the C.E.O. of LoudCloud, a successful software company that came perilously close to bankruptcy, employed sweeping language to describe his mentor: “Bill Campbell is the Oprah Winfrey of Silicon Valley.” Like Winfrey, Horowitz saw Campbell as both a great listener and a person who instantly instilled trust, communicating to the person he was with that his only interest was them. “People go on the ‘Oprah’ show and in five minutes they think Oprah is their best friend,” Horowitz told me. “In Silicon Valley, five thousand people think Bill is their best friend.” Campbell believed that Ben Horowitz deserved to be his heir as “the Coach,” for he saw in Horowitz what Horowitz wrote today on Medium that he saw in Campbell: “Whenever I struggled with life, Bill was the person that I called. I didn’t call him because he would have the answer to some impossible question. I called him because he would understand what I was feeling 100%.”
Because they trusted Campbell—his empathy, experience, and discretion—they sought his counsel. Because he was their biggest cheerleader, they adored him. Even when Steve Jobs declared war on Google, after it launched a competitor to the iPhone, Campbell continued to separately advise both Apple and Google. Unlike Winfrey, Campbell had executive experience and technical skills that went far beyond being a sharp questioner and an empathetic listener.
Campbell believed that people in the Valley do a better job today of working in teams and listening. But, he told me, “we have more headstrong people who don’t know what they don’t know.” That’s how he described his close friend Jobs when he returned to work at Apple and Campbell was head of sales. “If Steve didn’t get his way, if he was outvoted on a proposal, he would go out of his way to sabotage the decision,” he told me. But after Jobs was fired and started his own company, NeXT, Campbell says that he became a better, if still flawed, executive, because he learned the value of cooperation.
Of course, as Campbell understood, the same vices can also be virtues. “Successful startups are not run by collaborative personalities,” Marc Andreessen told me once. In truth, success is often dependent on a velvet-gloved Eisenhower as well as a brass-knuckled Patton. In the more than half a century of Silicon Valley’s digital life, partnerships have been a staple of many digital successes: Hewlett and Packard, Gates and Allen, Grove and Moore, Jobs and Wozniak (and later Ive and Cook), Brin and Page, Andreessen and Horowitz.
Without Coach Campbell, Silicon Valley would be a very different place. I wanted to tell his story, and the Valley’s, in a book. I started talking to him about a book a couple of years ago. In March of 2015, I visited him at his Palo Alto home. We talked for many hours then, and later on the phone, as I tried to persuade him to open up and share his amazing story. At the time, he had been diagnosed with cancer, but he thought he had licked it and had many fruitful years to live; he thought he would violate the very reason people trusted him if he shared secrets. Politely, he said no.
No statues in Silicon Valley salute Bill Campbell. But the story of his life, and of his values, should be widely shared.
