Bill Campbell, a widely admired Silicon Valley coach and mentor whose homespun advice on leadership and management nurtured a range of Silicon Valley luminaries including Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Google co-founder Larry Page, has died. He was 75.
Campbell died Monday morning after a battle with cancer, his family said in a statement.
The gruff, bear hug-dispensing Campbell worked at Apple as a marketing executive in the 1980s and was appointed to the Apple board when Jobs returned to the company in 1997. He was chief executive officer of financial-software firm Intuit for five years in the 1990s and served as its chairman until January.
But it was as a leadership coach, power broker and behind-the-scenes mentor that Campbell made his real mark in Silicon Valley. Campbell, pridefully non-technical, was fondly referred to as “the contentless leader” by some of the executives who worked with him because he rarely delved into the details of a company’s technical problems or business model.
The former head football coach for Columbia University from 1974 to 1979 (overall record: 12-41-1) had an intuitive feel for how talented, driven people could work together in highly pressurized environments. The list of executives who worked with Campbell is long and includes former eBay CEO John Donahoe, ex-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Google parent Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and many of the tech world’s leading venture capitalists.
“I would argue that Bill has had a bigger impact on Silicon Valley than any other single person simply because his reach was so amazingly wide,” Bill Gurley, a partner at venture capital firm Benchmark, wrote in an e-mail. “He touched so many people from Steve Jobs down to eighth graders on the Sacred Heart flag football team. Bill inspired greatness. He helps everyone be better.”
Scott Cook, Intuit’s co-founder, said the company wouldn’t be what it is today without Campbell. “I don’t think anyone had an impact as important and far-reaching on Silicon Valley’s leaders and culture,” Cook said. “He made us all better.”
Campbell often found himself at the center of Silicon Valley’s most sensitive battles between outsize personalities. In 2011, when Jobs started railing against onetime ally Google for developing the Android mobile operating system to compete with Apple’s iPhone, Campbell advised both companies and was caught squarely in the middle. He somehow walked the tightrope and maintained both relationships.
“A man with a huge heart, who hugged everyone he met with, Campbell was more than a mentor,” Schmidt wrote on Monday. “His contribution to the success of Google and now Alphabet is incalculable.”
Jobs and Campbell were particularly close, said Mickey Drexler, the CEO and chairman of J. Crew who had served on Apple’s board with Campbell. He said Jobs sought Campbell’s advice on the most important issues facing Apple, and admired his experience and frankness. “He never had an agenda,” Drexler said. “He spoke his mind, whether it was in the boardroom or outside the boardroom. He always said what he thought.”
Campbell spent most days with Jobs, who died in 2011, during the last year of Jobs’s life and would walk with him around his Palo Alto, California, neighborhood. He also advised Jobs’s successor, Tim Cook, and then left the Apple board in 2014.
William V. Campbell was born Aug. 31, 1940, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, according to Marquis Who’s Who, a publisher of biographical information. He attended Columbia, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1962 and a master’s degree from the Teachers College in 1964. He was an offensive guard and captain of the football team that won an Ivy League championship in 1961. The National Football Foundation annually awards the William V. Campbell Trophy to the best scholar-athlete in the nation.
After his coaching stint at Columbia, he was a vice president at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York and also worked as general manager of consumer products for Eastman Kodak in Europe. He joined Apple in 1983.
In the late 1990s, Amazon’s board dispatched Campbell to Seattle to confront its hard-driving founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, and to determine whether he should step aside for his more experienced chief operating officer, Joseph Galli, a former executive at Black &Decker. Campbell later said he came away convinced Bezos “was just the right guy for the CEO role.”
Donahoe said his decision to step down as eBay CEO last year after the company split from PayPal was influenced by Campbell. Donahoe was close to Campbell, who advised him on major decisions and coached flag football for the four Donahoe children. “You’d go to his house; you’d talk for 45 minutes; he listened,” said Donahoe. “He probed, and he’d tell you, ‘I love you to death, and I’m going to tell you the truth.’ Then he’d give you his reaction.”
Campbell was a part-owner of the Old Pro, a sports bar in downtown Palo Alto, and once a month would hold beer and pizza sessions that brought together an eclectic mix of wide-eyed young entrepreneurs and his older, crustier friends. Last week, Campbell’s assistant responded to an inquiry about the events, saying they were on hiatus because Silicon Valley’s legendary coach was on “injured reserve.”
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