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 [转帖] 苹果和谷歌的导师：硅谷最值得信赖的顾问 Bill Campbell |
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[转帖] 苹果和谷歌的导师：硅谷最值得信赖的顾问 Bill Campbell -- tutu - (11167 Byte) 2010-11-20 周六, 17:31 (3630 reads) |
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作者：tutu 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
NY Times
November 8, 2010, 4:40 PM
Bill Campbell on Coaching RockMelt and Google vs. Apple
By MIGUEL HELFT
In Silicon Valley, where even mid-level executives seem to be escorted by public relations handlers, Bill Campbell is a bit of an exception. An elder statesman of the tech industry, he prefers to remain out of the limelight.
Yet his influence behind the scenes has been enormous. He served as chief executive of Intuit; the Go Corporation, a pioneering, but ultimately failed, maker of pen computing technology; and Claris, the software maker that Apple spun off in 1987. He currently serves as chairman of Intuit and a board member of Apple. He has been a close adviser and confidant to some of the Valley’s best-known figures, including Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt and John Doerr. And he has been a mentor to scores of young entrepreneurs and executives, a role that has earned Mr. Campbell, a former football coach at Columbia University, the moniker of “coach.” Mr. Campbell said he does all this simply as way of “giving back” to colleagues and to an industry that has been good to him.
Mr. Campbell is now coaching Eric Vishria and Tim Howes, the founders of RockMelt, maker of the new “social” browser, which I wrote about in Monday’s paper. In an effort to promote the start-up, Mr. Campbell, who rarely does interviews, agreed to speak to me about his work there. When I asked him what he has done for RockMelt, he gave a characteristically understated answer.
“The normal stuff that anybody does,” Mr. Campbell said during a meeting in his Palo Alto, Calif., office. “You are a third-party Jiminy Cricket.” (That’s a reference to the character who acts the “conscience” of Pinocchio, in the Walt Disney version of the story. I had to look it up.) “There is nothing transformative that I do,” he said. “I don’t have the vision of a Marc Andreessen. I am an operating guy, so I help them think about what their company should look like, how they should organize it, how to think about data center management.”
“Since I’ve been around a little bit, I give a little advice here and there,” Mr. Campbell continued. “How fast should they grow, how fast should they hire, how should they raise money, how should they use the money, when should you bring in financial people. It’s just basic stuff.” RockMelt has raised $10 million, mostly from Andreessen Horowitz, Mr. Andreessen’s venture capital firm, but also from Mr. Campbell, Diane Greene, the co-founder of VMware, and Ron Conway, the Valley’s best known angel investor.
Mr. Campbell doesn’t charge to help entrepreneurs like Mr. Vishria and Mr. Howes. “My fees are well known,” he said. “Zero. Nobody has to negotiate with me.” But he says he typically doesn’t invest in companies he advises. “I don’t want to have anyone ever think that I am making a decision ba<x>sed on a personal financial outcome,” he said. He broke that rule for RockMelt, he said, to help Mr. Vishria and Mr. Howes. “They wanted to say that Bill felt strongly enough about it that he became an investor,” he said.
Like much of his coaching, his role at RockMelt came by way of relationships, or as he called it, his ties to the “Netscape Mafia.” Mr. Campbell served on the board of Netscape, where he got to know Mr. Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the principal financial backers of RockMelt, as well as Mr. Howes. He later served on the board of Opsware, the company that Mr. Andreessen, Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Howes founded after they left Netscape. Mr. Campbell said that Mr. Vishria, who also worked at Opsware, and Mr. Howes, were instrumental in turning around that company and preparing it for a sale to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007.
When Mr. Howes and Mr. Vishiria began thinking about RockMelt, they came to ask him for advice.
“They were right up the street,” he said. “They used to wander down here and I would wander up there.”
“I have this feeling when I go back to my Netscape Mafia, it was almost understood that if Tim was going to start the company I would help,” he added.
Mr. Campbell also confirmed for the first time that the growing rivalry between Google and Apple made his position as an adviser to both companies untenable. As we reported in March, Mr. Campbell chose to cut his ties to Google, a company where he played an instrumental role. (Mr. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, in an interview with Fortune once described Mr. Campbell the following way: “His contribution to Google — it is literally not possible to overstate. He essentially architected the organizational structure.”)
“I don’t do much for Google anymore,” Mr. Campbell said. While he still talks to Eric Schmidt once in a while, “the Android competition has changed the whole dynamic. I don’t want to be a burden to either company. I don’t want to be a focal point for any dissent.”
Mr. Campbell lamented that a rare profile of him in Fortune exposed his behind the scenes role in the Valley and at those companies. “I had a nice time for a long time being under the radar,” he said. But after the Fortune article, “instead of being an anonymous guy who wandered around in the Valley, I became someone people focused on,” he said. Using salty language, he added that there was a time when no cared about his role at Google or Apple, but that changed. “Today it is problematic,” he said. “There is nothing I would do for either company that would jeopardize one or the other, but that’s not the point.”
作者：tutu 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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