Why Bill Campbell was so beloved in Silicon Valley

ill Campbell has passed away at the age of 75, f-rom cancer. The man known as “Coach” was a figure of major importance to Silicon Valley and the tech industry, which is why tech luminaries like Google’s Eric Schmidt, AOL’s Tim Armstrong, and Twitter’s Dick Costolo are tweeting out remembrances.

But if you are of a certain (young) age, you may not be familiar with Campbell and why he was so special to these people.

There is no one role that you would say Campbell was “best known” for—such was the breadth of his talent. At Columbia University, he was a football player, then a coach, before going into big business at Kodak. F-rom there, he joined John Sculley, then the CEO of Apple (AAPL), to be Apple’s VP of marketing, then oversaw Apple’s software division, Claris (which became ClarisWorks, which became AppleWorks) and left Apple when Claris spun off as its own company. F-rom 1994 to 1998, Campbell was CEO of software giant Intuit (INTU), and in 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, Campbell became a boardmember. Most recently, he was chairman of the board of Intuit (he stepped down in January) and was still chairman of the board of Columbia when he died. 

A very sad day. My deepest condolences to his family. Bill was instrumental as a mentor - for me, for Google, for all Valley entrepreneurs

— Eric Schmidt (@ericschmidt) April 18, 2016

As “Coach” in the tech world, Campbell was a personal advisor and mentor to a host of major names, including Mark Zuckerberg, Jobs, Schmidt, and John Doerr of VC firm Kleiner Perkins. Re/code’s Kara Swisher, who broke the news of his death, put it aptly in her post today: “Campbell was just a really decent man, with little ego.” In an extensive2008 Fortune profile of Campbell, Steve Jobs was quoted saying, “There’s something deeply human about him,” which of course was rare praise, considering the source.

To offer just one example of the central part he played in a number of major moments: Campbell was VP of marketing at Apple when it had an internal fight over whether to pull an expensive Super Bowl ad, the company’s first, that it had prepared to run during the 1984 Super Bowl. The ad showed a woman (the athlete and actress Anya Major) throwing a sledgehammer at a Big Brother-like figure’s giant image on a screen, as it bellowed commands to people in a dystopian future. Text on the screen read, “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984.'"