BILL CAMPBELL, WHO PASSED away in 2016, was known as “Coach” to many of the most influential and famous people in in the world. His transition from head football coach at Columbia University to an extraordinarily successful business leader is legendary. His many business triumphs include serving as Apple’s vice-president of marketing beginning in 1983 and later serving on the board of directors of businesses like Intuit and Apple. Bill Campbell coached leading business executives like Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Larry Page of Google. Effective, insightful, hardworking, humble, trusted, and loyal are all words that apply to Bill Campbell. Benchmark’s Bill Gurley points out, “When you had Bill coaching the entrepreneurs, it was like having extra wild cards in a game of five-card draw.”
1. “Growth is the goal, and it comes through having innovation. Innovation comes through having great engineers, not great product-marketing guys.”
Empowered engineers are the single most important thing that you can have in a company.
An innovative culture exists where the crazy guys have stature, where engineers are important. The Campbell School is that engineers need to have clout.
I’ve seen businesses dominated by a single discipline many times. Sometimes it is the sales team, sometimes it is engineering, sometimes it is scientists, sometimes it is finance, sometimes it is operations, and sometimes it is marketing. The background of the founders and CEO makes a huge difference in terms of which discipline is predominant in a given business. It is evident which discipline Campbell thinks should dominate: engineering. Marc Andreessen adds,
This view that engineering should dominate was extremely unusual in Silicon Valley in the ’90s and early–mid-2000s when it mattered for the companies Bill worked with (Apple and Google in particular). And particularly extremely unusual for people with sales and marketing backgrounds like Bill himself has. It’s become much more common in Silicon Valley today, but I can’t tell you how unusual it was for Bill to have that view all along.
2. “When I first came out to Silicon Valley, everybody wanted to hire the IBM sales guys to be their CEO. Blue suit, white shirt, red tie. Unfortunately, these guys were all sales guys. I mean, that’s all they did. And those guys all failed miserably because they didn’t know the product, they didn’t understand the technology; all they could do was sell.”
It is no longer enough to look good in a suit, have great hair and teeth, and be a fantastic salesperson to succeed as a manager or CEO. If you don’t deeply understand the products and services of the business, the competition will eat you alive. Great CEOs and managers today have many skills and are learning machines. Campbell once said, “I was very devoted to learning the businesses. I never felt I was behind technology-wise. I could learn just like everybody else. I have a consistent bias for technical stuff, and it’s that hard to learn.” Marc Andreessen has pointed out that while Campbell was respectful of engineers, he was not threatened by them. Campbell cracked the code for how to have a productive partnership with tech visionaries.
3. “I am a big bully about the sales process where you’re the CEO and I want you to buy something, so I take you for drinks or buy your wife a gold chain. People think these guys, they’re killers, they’re machines, and they know how to do this stuff. They make sales this mysterious process. The jet pilot swoops in, bombs everybody up and down, and then everyone else is ready to go and clean up. I don’t believe it. I want to come in there with a quantitative process and say, ‘Let me tell you what our stuff does, and let me tell you based on our work what this can do for you regarding your productivity.’ ”
Campbell believed that sales is an essential profession. But he believed that sales is a different game now than during the days when people were selling IBM typewriters using old-school sales processes. There isn’t enough remaining slack in the system to make the “schmooze the CEO, buy a gold chain” sales process effective anymore. People who sell today know that the sales process is about providing a solution to real problems and helping customers with the internal processes related to approving the sale. Andreessen agrees: “Great salespeople in the modern era are consultants to the customer and help them first justify the purchase and then succeed with the product.”
4. “We have to be careful about the customer. I learned this from Steve Jobs years ago. When I came to Apple, I brought my Kodak research mentality, and Steve’s view was, ‘Stuff your research. Nobody’s ever going to give you feedback on something that they can’t conceive of.’ And so we would argue those points. And I would joke with him and say, ‘A marketing person would never have conceived of a Macintosh. But a marketing person could have made it better.’ ”
Certain people are savants about new products and services. They just seem to know instinctively what the customer wants. The best product savant I have seen up close is cable television and wireless pioneer Craig McCaw. He has an amazing way of putting himself in the shoes of the customer. Watching him with a new product is fascinating. Having a brilliant insight into products or services is a rare thing. Accordingly, processes like lean startup have been created to efficiently test a value hypothesis so that changes or pivots can be made to produce something similar to what a product savant might. A foundational lean startup principle is that the process of testing a product or service can be systematized. The best CEOs and founders have learned that trying to predict the future is vastly inferior to discovering what customers want by running experiments with real customers using methods based on the scientific method.
5. “Brilliance can’t be taught, but the operational stuff can be. Do you have operational instincts? Who cares? If you work with me for six months, I can give you enough prowess and process to be able to go run something, and do something with it.”
That operating shit—believe me, I fucked it up so many times. I’m an old guy; I’ve made many mistakes.
It is encouraging to hear from someone as accomplished as Campbell that you can learn operational excellence. It has been my experience that some people are more suited to being an operator than others. For example, managers like Jim Barksdale (FedEx, McCaw Cellular, and Netscape) are natural operators who also received the right coaching and mentoring early in life. The difference between great and not-great operating executives is that the former learn from mistakes and make more new ones than old ones.
6. “People like Mark Zuckerberg, they see an application of science that hasn’t been done before, and they run with it. They’re founders. They’re product creators.”
I don’t take the company unless the founder is passionate and wants to create something durable.
At the core of any great business is an entrepreneur who creates a value hypothesis in the first place so that core product value (a real and significant solution to a valuable customer problem) can be tested and discovered. Great entrepreneurs are persistent, obsessive, and relentless, but the really great entrepreneurs also seem to have a gift for looking at the world from a customer’s viewpoint. These entrepreneurs seem to know instinctively what a customer wants. Steve Blank believes “the best entrepreneurs are the ones who are passionate about solving a problem because they’ve had it or seen others have it, love those customers, love solving that problem, or have been domain experts. Those are authentic entrepreneurs.” He believes “entrepreneurs, at their heart, are artists. What comes out from the great artists is something completely unexpected. World-class entrepreneurs are driven by passion.” He believes entrepreneurship is a calling rather than a job.
7. “You need a leader. You have to go out and recruit the best person you can who knows how to create an innovation culture. He or she doesn’t need to be personally the most innovative person, but he or she needs to know how to foster innovation. Then give that person license to hire. Get yourself some teams. Recruit people who have the DNA that you want.”
It is all about people. If you have the right people, you will end up with the right culture.
I’ve fired more people for attitude and behavior than I ever have for performance.
Everyone pitches in to help with recruiting in a well-run business. Great people attract great people, and if a business gets the recruiting process right, the benefits of that attraction will grow in a nonlinear way because there is a positive feedback loop. Campbell believed that the right team, people, and systems can create multiplier effects to help scale a business and drive greater profits. But, in his view, it all starts with people.
8. “If you don’t have the right product and you don’t time it right, you are going to fail.”
Great product and great people is the whole answer.
The number of individuals and startups focused on growing a business without a valuable product is, well, a surprisingly large number. Even if these businesses somehow do manage to create a useful product, without great people, the result will almost certainly be a disaster. The other point that Campbell made was that being too early or too late in bringing a product to market is indistinguishable from being wrong.
9. “When I work with startups, the last thing I work with them on is marketing. I don’t want to overestimate marketing. Apple’s marketing has great products.”
Too many marketers believe advertising is what creates brands. The investment strategist and author Michael Mauboussin astutely points out, “Brands do not confer a competitive advantage in and of themselves. Customers hire them to do a particular job. Brands that do those jobs reliably and cost-effectively thrive.” Trying to create a brand via marketing without great products is like trying to make an ice cream sundae with just a glass bowl and no ice cream. Having great products is what creates a great brand. Jeff Bezos believes,
The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies…. The individual is empowered. The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention, and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other…. In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.
Bezos has also said, “Your brand is formed primarily not by what your company says about itself but what the company does.”
10. “I can’t do HTML, come on. I’m just coaching them on how to run their company better.”
I’m a third-party Jiminy Cricket. There is nothing transformative that I do. I don’t have the vision of a Marc Andreessen. I am an operating guy, so I help them think about what their business should look like, how they should organize it, and how to think about data-center management.
I believe in management. If you give people the things you want them to do. Judge them on what they accomplish. Make sure that you are bottom line about everything.
They recognize that you’ve got a heart. You try to help them by giving them all of that rigor. They are going to call you a leader.
There was a lot of modesty in the way Campbell presented himself. He proved that you do not need to be a great engineer to be an enabler of engineers. He worked hard to understand technology. Individuals who are highly skilled at operating a business are a rare and highly valuable asset. Operating a business requires a very different set of skills than founding a business. Some founders are great operators, whereas others are not. When people describe a great operator, they will sometimes say that she or he “makes the trains run on time,” which is an excellent thing since terrible things can happen to a business if the “trains aren’t running on time.” Great leaders are great listeners. What changes their mind on something is facts combined with logic. Opinions are not facts, and someone like Jim Barksdale knows the difference. I have always loved a famous “Barksdaleism” on this topic: “Now I’m the president around here. So if I say a chicken can pull a tractor trailer, your job is to hitch ’em up. If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”
11. “The big brand names—Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Benchmark, Accel, and Andreessen Horowitz—have partners that care about growing the company, and that’s the most important. They can call the right people and ask them to help get things done. It’s not about the exit. I sit in board meetings and fend off the antibodies—board members who only care about the exit or the ‘sales pipeline.’ ”
There’s a reason why the same venture capital firms and venture capitalists persistently deliver the lion’s share of financial returns in the venture capital industry. They have the best network of people who can help a startup, as well as a brand and talent that can attract founders, people, money, distribution, and customers. Most of the time, the startup process fails to produce a grand slam, but when it succeeds, it is a marvel to behold. The key to success is the ability of the team to establish positive feedback loops. Creating both the core from which positive feedback loops grow to massive scale and the supporting systems that enable that to happen is a rare but incredibly valuable thing.
12. “My dad was a tough bastard. We had one car when I was a kid, and my mom used to drive us down to the mill to pick him up. He had worked the midnight-to-eight shift and would come out in a jacket and tie. We would drive him to school, where he would teach all day. He would go home after teaching and sleep for a few hours and then go back to the mill.”
I enjoyed being under the radar for a long time. Under the radar. Instead of being an anonymous guy who wandered around in the Valley, I became someone people focused on.
Some of the best coaches do not feel the need to be in the spotlight. They know that a great way to get things done is to let other people take the credit. I’m not saying all coaches are this way or even most, but there are great ones, like Campbell, who are like this. Unlike when he was a head football coach at Columbia, when he was working his magic in the technology industry, Campbell was not coaching college students. His students were successful executives who needed help, often in new domains. Being humble made Bill Campbell a better coach. Not being threatened by technology or technology visionaries made him great.
When I asked someone who knew Campbell well about his personality, he said, “Make sure you talk about his loyalty. Don’t leave that out.” When you look at all the good things Campbell has done for his hometown of Homestead, Pennsylvania, or organizations he supported, like Columbia University, you see the loyalty. Here’s a nice snippet illustrating Campbell’s humility:
People have asked me in Silicon Valley, “Why are you in high tech?” I ask them, “Have you seen my football record?” The crowd laughs. Then he says that football taught him about teamwork and supporting others. But most of all, he says, he learned that he had a responsibility to “give something back.”
Here’s a closing story from Marc Andreessen about how humble and giving Bill Campbell was:
When he worked with us at Opsware, he refused to take stock options (or any other form of compensation). I got upset about it because he was helping us so much, and I felt like it was wrong that he wasn’t getting compensated. I went to talk to him about it, and he shot me down as he had before, told me he didn’t want any stock options. So I threatened him: “I’m going to find out which political party you belong to, and I’m going to donate the stock options to the other one.” That finally did the trick. (And I never found out what political party he belongs to.)