<h2>At the AlwaysOn conference opening evening sessions, Michael Moe, Co-founder and CEO of NeXtAdvisors, interviewed Bill Campbell, one of silicon valley’s most respected startup advisors</h2>
Campbell has worked for John Scully at Apple as VP Marketing, served as CEO at Claris, ran Go! (with Mitch Kapor) as CEO and sold it to AT&T, co-founded and served as CEO at Intuit, and in addition to serving as Chairman there is currently very active as a startup advisor. He was on the board of NetScape and LoudCloud with Marc Andreessen. He also currently serves as an adviser to Google and as a board member at Apple. Before moving into the world of business, Mr. Campbell was head football coach at Columbia University, where he now serves as Chairman of the Board of Trustees.
<h2>Campbell sees the tech industry turning back to a primary focus on the creation of great companies</h2>
after a period of “excessive focus on things like market cap”, versus developing great products, technologies, revenues, and growth. Instead of paraphrasing Mr. Campbell, we’ve videotaped the chat and will post some of the more compelling points from the interview here, as a condensed overview, later this evening. One of the interesting assignments he described was his stint as a strategic advisor coaching Jeff Bezos and his management team as Amazon ramped up. He also delved into the operating style of Eric Schmidt at Google, Mike Mcque at TellMe, ePinions, and other industry leaders, from the perspective of how they interact with the founders.
One of the intriguing parts of the discussion was a review of some of silicon valley’s top entrepreneurs and leaders, answering the question “what makes them unique?”. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Erik Schmidt, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz at Opsware, Vinod Koshla, Jim Barksdale, and a few vc’s including John Doerr, Vloyd Kvamme, Bill Gurley, and Mike Homer.