#367: Eric Schmidt — Lessons from a Trillion-Dollar Coach

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Well, boys and girls, lads and lasses, madames and messieurs, this is Tim Ferris, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers. What on earth does that mean? It means teasing out lessons learned, habits, routines. favorite books, et cetera, from people who are at the top of their field or fields. And that can range from business to sports, from chess. Two you name it, military strategy. And this episode we have

An icon. I would say is a fair descriptor. Eric Schmidt at Eric Schmidt, who is technical advisor and board member to Alphabet Inc., where he advises its leaders on technology, business, and policy issues. Eric joined Google in two thousand one and helped grow the company from a Silicon Valley startup to a global leader in technology. He served as Google's chief executive officer, that's CEO from two thousand one to two thousand eleven, and executive chairman from two thousand eleven to twenty eighteen, alongside founders Sergey Bryn and Larry Page. He has some incredible stories. And his career is is just

incredible to consider and discuss. We get into lots of specific takeaways, lessons, etc. Under his leadership, Google dramatically scaled its infrastructure and diversified its product offerings while maintaining a strong culture of innovation. And he believes that innovation can be systematized, by the way, and we get into what that means. Eric serves on the boards of the Mayo Clinic and the Broad Institute, among others. His philanthropic efforts through the Schmidt Family Foundation focus on climate change, including support of ocean and marine life studies at sea, as well as education, specifically cutting edge research and technology in the natural sciences and engineering. He is founder of Schmidt Futures. Which works to improve societal outcomes through the development of emerging science and technology. He's also the co author of several books. The New Digital Age, How Google Works, and his latest book, Trillion Dollar Coach.

It's a hell of a title. Subtitle, The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell, which he coauthored with Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle. I've been fascinated by Bill Campbell for decades. And when I moved to Silicon Valley in two thousand I wanted to someday have a chance to speak to him directly. Unfortunately, he passed away several years ago And in this conversation I finally get to ask a lot of the questions I've always wanted to ask about Bill Campbell, who

mentored or better put coached. A who's who. of people in Silicon Valley. uh and did it without getting paid. It's a crazy meaning he chose not to get paid. It's such a wild story. And uh it was an incredible opportunity to have a chance to sit down with Eric to discuss that and much more from his life. So without further ado, please enjoy This conversation with Eric Schmidt. And for more info on the book, which I highly recommend checking out, you can go to Trillion Dollarcoach.

dot com. Enjoy. Eric, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me.

So If we flash forward, and I'm sure we will jump around uh in in a very nonlinear fashion. When I look at your uh your undergrad experience.

I is it true that you started an architecture and then shifted to Electrical engineering. That's right. Um You know, software didn't really exist at the time, computer science didn't really exist as a field. I had been programming when I was in high school. It was a rare event at the time. When I meet some fifteen year old boy

That has three computers and is a gamer and sits at home with all sorts of screens all night. That was me back then, without the computers, without the gaming, without the screens. So when I went to college, um I actually applied as an architect because I had studied architecture in high school and I liked it. But I wasn't a very good architect, but I was quite a much better engineer. And when I got to freshman year, I was a good enough programmer that I skipped the f freshman year programming.

And that's the the hallmark of a flexible college program is they organized around my ability. So I was what we now call an early developed nerd. Although the term wasn't even used back then. What did you like about Architecture.

What drew you to architecture initially. I I've always liked building things and I've always liked structure and I've always been pretty analytical. And what's interesting about computer science is computer science is about um scale and sort of scale of systems. in organizing systems. It's all the same stuff, right?

So I found in architecture and Where again I didn't have the artistic sense, but I had the scale sense. It's the same skill set. And we're gonna talk, I I suspect, quite a bit about

mentorship, coaching, mentors and coaches in this conversation. And I I thought we could Look at a few. Periods. In your past

uh to pr to talk about influences, people you've learned from. And we c we can certainly jump all over the place if if anyone comes to mind that I don't prompt, but Uh Around nineteen eighty three, and I'm skipping Yeah. you joined Sun Microsystems. Uh

What for people who don't know, what what did Sun Microsystems do And was there anyone who comes to mind As having Taught you a lot. While you were at Sun.

So One of the things to think about when you look at your phone or your Macintosh or your PC Is that there were whole waves of predecessors of these things. that were impossibly slower and impossibly more expensive. But had those things not occurred, we wouldn't have gotten to where you are today.

So each generation builds this product that's impossibly difficult. So Sun managed to build what was impossible at the time. which was a one megz processor. A one megabyte Memory.

And a one. megabit screen. Today your phone has a gigabit that is a m a thousand or more times more than that. And we sold products for fifty thousand dollars to

engineering design systems,'cause they were busy doing technical things. And that's how it started. The work station, as it was known, was actually based on Um something called an alto. It was invented at Xerox Park.

Which which I had worked with before. And the workstation that that was invented at Xerox Alto Park was also the predecessor of the Lisa. Which was the predecessor of the Mac. So again, the provenance of these things are these very early research prototypes. There were a few hundred Altos to uh built. You can see them in museums today.

What I will tell you about them is that they are impossibly slow. compared to what you have today. But they seemed enormously powerful at the time. And U land, how did you And up at sun.

And Uh Did anyone in particular Take you under their wing or uh impart lessons to you while you were there.

So in my story what happened was I was um at Berkeley and my best friend was a brilliant computer scientist named Bill Joy. who was the chief programmer of much of the technology of the time. He did much of the early internet programming. And

When I was at Xerox I worked with another brilliant computer scientist named Butler Lampsen. I had the Best, best, smartest mentors in the technical sense. So I had a choice of staying and doing research, but I really wanted to go into a company. And my friend Bill had found Sun Microsystems, which was this technical platform at the time.

And I showed up. What happened was there were a couple of ex I had knew nothing about business. I figured it was like fine. And there were some technical founders, they had brought in a professional CEO. It's all very scrappy.

And within a month of my starting, there was a gentleman named Bernie LaCrue who was bought in. He was impossibly old. At thirty nine compared to me in my twenties. And

He had he knew everything. He knew every he'd been through everything. I I was so impressed by He knew how to build products, he understood politics inside of a company, he understood how to get things out the door, he had worked at Digital Equipment Corporation. So again, the management style of that generation imparted to the next generation. Digital Equipment Corporation was subsequently purchased uh by a series of other companies including Hewlett Packard. Sun was eventually purchased by uh Oracle, where you can buy their products today. So again that the the technology is such that

thirty years earlier. that knowledge base survives in the heads of the people who were there And in the legacy of the intellectual property that they invented. And I guess the same will be true thirty years from now for what we're talking about. Yeah.

And you mentioned Bill Joy, I'm gonna come back to Bill Joy a little bit later, but Uh I've only had a few people on this podcast. The people who are on this podcast tend to be well spoken, but I've only had a few on who seem to speak In Nearly finished.

And you see you seem to be on that short list. Hav you always been as clear a communicator as you are, or is that something that you Developed, and if so.

Or honed, and if so, how? I I don't know. to be honest. I'm just this is who I am. I think what happens is that I'm a very logical thinker and I'm a good explainer. So logical thinker plus good explainer.

Is how it works. And I also try very hard to observe things around me and try to figure out how things work. And that's been sort of my secret to having a little luck around me. But going back to mentors, so Bernie was uh an incredible force. Because he was also tough.

And he was also clear and he was also precise. And he would get upset if we weren't working hard enough on something. And he pushed us. And I learned something. I was a very polite, uh nice scientist coming out of academia I learned that in business you need to be pushed. You need somebody who says, We're gonna go do this and we're gonna push it very hard. And he really trained me in the executive arts, if you will. I worked for him for a decade.

What work? I'd love to talk about those executive arts because In in my experience, this isn't uniform of course, but Uh some technologists View

say the sales side or the management side with some degree of disdain. That's not true across the board, but it's it's somewhat common sentiment. What were some of the executive arts Or the or or uh lessons that you learned at that time. It's important to say right now that today we know much more how to run successful tech companies than we did in the nineteen eighties and nineties. The formulas, the learning, the standards of excellence are far, far more honed over the last twenty years of

executives working in each other companies and things like that. That's part of why things happen so fast in our industry. But at the time we didn't really know how to professionally release software in this new space. We didn't really have open source software established as a principle. We didn't really know how to sell it. Um

We figured we would sell direct, but how did we do that? What kind of salesman did we hire? So In that period it was much more More raw than it sounds in hindsight. We honestly didn't know. Do we hire a blue suited salesman who looks good and talks a lot? Do we hire somebody who's very technical?

Because our customers were technical. How do we goal them? How do we listen to them? Uh, we uh those of us on the technical side found the salespeople very entertaining. Because all they did was talk. And

We would sit there and and eventually I was so curious about this, I asked one of the salespeople to actually come and present to the engineers what do salespeople do. And what he did is he got up and he said, Look My job is to talk people until they buy things. And

We all said, Well what do you how do you actually do that? Says, that's why I'm always on the phone. And I don't want to have dinner with you, I wanna have lunch with you'cause I don't have dinner with my family. So so we we learned a lot about high end sales sales cycles that have since become the norm in these big ticket items. What's interesting is the industry has to some degree moved away from that.

Now that the industry's gone from more B to B to B to C, that is consumer businesses. And the big change from that sun period is now our industry is a consumer focused in industry with many, many successful such companies. And you you are a very Good.

And clear. explainer and uh feel free to fact check me on this but Uh, I believe you've taught at Uh Stanford GSP.

uh the graduate school business and Did you teach with Peter Wendell, the entrepreneurship and venture capital class? That's correct. I'm also teaching a class on artificial intelligence applied to science at Caltech. Another fantastic institution. I've spent some time with Peter because I went to Princeton undergrad and

had a chance to uh hear him as a guest speaker and then went to G S B to sit in on his class when he was teaching many, many years ago, back when I had more hair. And uh In that class are there any particular resources or books that you like to point people to. For those who want to learn. Like you said, a lot a lot of things have been codified in the last few decades.

What's interesting is a lot of the things that I'm talking about are still not written down from the engineering science perspective. How do you manage a large software project? I'm not aware of a the defining book that describes that. There's plenty of technical aspects of software. But the culture of software is still evolving. An example is that a recent change is

uh to uh essentially uh pair programming where somebody writes code and another one checks it. There are languages, a recent language is called the Go language. Which actually is designed around that principle. Right. So we just presume that that's how programming is done. These were all things that were not worked out at the time. Um

without plugging my own books too much, uh we teach how Google works. um in uh our in Peter Wendell in my class at Stanford. uh which is a very, very highly ranked class. And I having just done it I still think that the basic lessons that we talk that we talk about in how Google works

Which are fundamentally The it's the product, it's the product, it's the product, it's recruiting, it's recruiting, it's recruiting. And transparency of how you operate. are sort of the key lessons that we learned uh and they're codified in that book. And I I think we can

We can segue towards Google because we're gonna spend quite a bit of of time on it. Uh and We may hit some of the Uh you mentioned Bill Joy.

earlier. And uh as you mentioned, legendary for his prowess as a as a programmer. who also then uh spent some time as a venture capitalist and it It's

When I look at I think it was an interview or talk that uh you've given, this is actually on the Stanford G S B site, you mentioned an approach that he had, uh one of his approaches. So he'd find an area of interest, look up research papers about it, he would figure out the two or three best authors and then call them. And you know, by the way, these are people who No one ever calls, so they would call him right back. And then he would ask them, What's the most interesting thing in your field? And I bring this up. because I am seguing to another venture capitalist. Named John Door. And but before we

get into the role that John uh played, according to my reading at least. in your introduction to Google, what what who is John Dore? What makes him special? You can answer that, of course, in any order. Well, John was this mythical figure that I met when I first joined Sun. He seemed Everywhere.

Um and he was one of these prodigies at sales. He had worked at a company called Compaq. And he'd been so successful as a salesperson that he had joined Kleiner Perkins. Which became the most successful venture firm in history. And was so for a long time. And he was on the board of Sun and Compaq and a number of other companies, um and was critical.

It was interesting to me was I learned a lot from John because he had a pretty simple rule. Which is that What do venture capitalists do? They help the management team, they recruit management team, and they raise money. So his job is was once you had identified a company, you'd invest in it, you were all in on that company.

And Kleiner Perkins at the time was the highest return highest gross margin, highestly paid partners of any of them. And interestingly, Bernie, who was my mentor and coach, if you will, Um and

So it's uh the the world is much smaller than it seems. If you're an outsider looking at our world Somehow you think it's this vast world. But to me it seems like about a hundred people and they all know each other, they've all been on each other's boards. Um they were all

working together toward a common goal. I've since learned That this is how industries develop. So when you go back to the starting of the automobile industry or the starting of any other industry. They w it was a small community and everyone benefited by working together even if they were competing.

As an aside. When I first came to Google. I developed a habit of calling Terry Semmel. who was the then CEO of Yahoo was our primary competitor, congratulate him for every deal he got. And he developed the habit of calling me to congratulate me for my getting every deal.

The reason, aside from being a good person which he was was we knew that if he got a customer to buy our pr uh their product We would shortly follow into that account. And he knew that if we got a customer using this he knew that he would shortly follow into the account.

So there's a a real camaraderie around sharing the building of these new network platforms, these new sort of um forces of good, if you will. And they're they're a relatively small group for much of their time. It it also seems like uh and this is just one theory that I've come across when people are

Trying to explain why Silicon Valley happened. where it did that uh non competes. in California being difficult to enforce. seem to have also played a role.

in in a lot of that uh But I I thought that was Do you find that sort of a a plausible contributing factor when you have uh say these like national semiconductor and these other

Yeah. So so to to in one in thirty seconds the history of the valley was that it started with the Fairchild uh Fairchild Corporation in the late nineteen fifties. And then an a group of eight left. They were called the traitoress eight. And they went to Intel and a number of other companies. And

They were funded by this guy named Arthur Rock, and he was the only venture capitalist. So I interviewed him for something else I was doing. He's now uh uh elderly and retired, but incredibly impressive. And I said, Well, what was Venture like back then? And he said, Well We were the only one, so we would just Wait until we decided How long would you make people wait? Oh, six weeks, eight weeks? We were the only money in town.

And he had been clever enough to figure out the limited partner structure which fuel this industry. So you have Arthur Rock and Intel and then the beginnings of the semiconductor industry And then the beginnings of Apple and Steve Jobs and and all of these sorts of things that we know about. But it was very much at the time of

um Lockheed and things like that, but essentially engineers and they had typically come out of Stanford. So Stanford's contribution was significant. Once the business started going, the fact that there was not a non compete. Meant that people all lived essentially with each other, right? They went to each other's parties, there were intermarriages, if you will.

Um everybody knew each other. And from that strength They lifted all of us. When I was young and I joined Sun, I didn't realize that there was a half generation above me that had built this edifice. of venture funding, corporations, tech startups, and so forth, which funded during that period

Microsoft, Apple. Google Oracle and a few others. Yeah, it's it's the Yeah. Do you do you think Silicon Valley is a non recurring phenomenon?

Do you think that there are or will be areas that resemble Silicon Valley in terms of positive characteristics for entrepreneurship. So This of course is a raging debate in the world and the things Silicon Valley has going for it are At least historically, abundance of land, great opportunity.

Plenty of money. Two tremendous technical universities in Berkeley and Stanford. This history of entrepreneurial uh nature of things. A sense of of um o of going higher than others.

This is the moon shots versus roof shots. There is a set of there are a set of people who also believe that the nature of California is part of it. There was a book written that some of this happened. This is before my time Because of the anti war activities in the sixties and LSD and so forth.

And that the kind of crazy thinkers of the time, again before me And it's up here. And that also helped program the area so that it would think broader or higher. I don't know if that's true or not. But I will tell you That

In order to replicate Silicon Valley You're going to need to have leading universities, lots of money and time. We have evidence that Cambridge has the Cambridge um Massachusetts has done this. If you look at biotech, they've clearly built a model very similar. We have evidence that New York is on its way. Oh, it looks like there's enough money, enough people, enough universities there, obviously a a great draw of a city.

And we have evidence that Beijing has the same feeling. When you go to Beijing, you get that same feeling of crazy startups. So those are a few uh Tel Aviv is another one. We need more competitors.

than the ones I just named. We need Twenty competitors, thirty competitors, forty competitors. Yeah, it's uh it's it's been fascinating to visit, like you mentioned, Tel Aviv uh Singapore. uh and many other cities that are trying to replicate some certainly more successfully than others.

But if we if we come back to Silicon Valley and we come back to John Door. Uh when I'm and and when like you said, uh he For a long time was this. mythical being. The

the best known of the best known venture capitalists and when I moved to Silicon Valley in two thousand, certainly that was the case. What role did he have in uh Introducing you. To Google. I had known John for a very, very long time because he was on the board of Sun when I was there for fourteen years.

And I happened to be at a fundraiser, a political fundraiser at John Chambers House, who was the CEO of Uh Cisco. And John came up to me, that is John Dor came up to me and says you should check out Google. And I said, It's a search engine.

And he goes, Yes, and they're looking for a CO. And I said, It won't amount to much. He said, Look. you really will enjoy it. You'll enjoy meeting the founders. I had briefly met Larry Who seemed very smart, but relatively quiet. And so he encouraged me to come.

And We had a w uh and w and that's kicked it off. So I owe the fact that I'm at Google to John Dore. And you go to meet

Larry and Sergey, and it I don't have too many of the specifics, but as I understand it, they had a bio of you Or something like that up on a wall. bunch of food and then Proceeded.

So what's interesting is that Somehow we arrange the time, I show up and it's an old building that I used to manage when I was at Sun. So that's weird. So I'm walking into a building which has now got this Google stuff in it, and it's sort of haphazard. a typical sort of tilt up Silicon Valley. So I go up and they have a single office. Which they share.

They have a projector and they're projecting my bio on the equivalent of Wikipedia up. Oh, again, this is unusual. They had lots of food in front of them. And I thought okay. And Interesting.

And they start to question me. And they're very interested in what I'm doing at Novell. I was a CEO at the time, and they had decided that what I was doing at Novell made no sense at all. And they wanted to make sure that I knew this. Yeah. So

This went on for an hour and a half and it was rough. I mean they were very sharp. And I remember as I walked out of the building thinking Boy, I haven't had that good of an argument in years. And that was what intrigued me. the the story, by the way, is the thing we were talking about were called technically called proxy cache as they accelerate the internet, and they believed at the time

But you didn't need them, and I believe that you did. After we Purchased YouTube the way we handled the extraordinary growth in growth of YouTube is we built proxy caches.

So what I like to say is they were right. And then I was right. So we both were right. Is a proxy cache and this is I'm gonna show how ignorant I am about technology, but similar to a content delivery network in any way? Yes, it uh a CDN is made out of proxy caches. and everybody wants to watch it online. It makes no sense to send it all from the same place. It much makes much more sense to keep local copies near you

So if you're in Uzbekistan. It doesn't have to go all the way to Atlanta, Georgia. There's a copy locally. And the internet is good about making those transient copies. transparent to you and keep them up to date.

And that's what that is about. And YouTube is now the by far the largest such consumer of such such things and made an enormous difference in terms of its bandwidth. I guess uh Netflix would use the same thing. What types of questions did they ask you? Or what made Their questioning different From

Others. I it was a stimulating debate. Well made what made it so. Because they're brilliant. And because they are so technically current.

They can ask the really hard questions. And this is something that very few founders can do. Bill Gates could do it. as an example, but most founders couldn't. But they could. And that

That told me that the team that they had assembled could really address the hard questions. Their position was The the Uh the their their technical argument was that there's not an imbalance in bandwidth. And that was true at the time. Although it was not true once video took off.

And how did they assess you as a potential leader, not just a a uh not just your technical Capabilities.

I'm not sure. Um They had interviewed for about eighteen months before me. And they like to spend a lot of time with their people. Their candidates, so they would go on vacation for the day or It became

Fairly quickly clear that I would be a good fit. Because we had a uh although we were different in age We had had the same faculty members eighteen years apart, and we had a very similar technical background. They were infinitely smarter than I was, infinitely more current.

But I had been like them twenty years earlier. And uh What did uh What did John see in you that he thought they needed? My understanding

Again, you'll have to ask John. My understanding is that the two venture capitalists when they had invested wanted to bring in somebody who had operating experience. Um this came to be turned adult supervision. And um And my understanding is part of the initial investment that

Uh Sequoia and Google Made is that's what Triggered their recruiting. Um When Mm.

Mm. when we finally came to a deal, which didn't take very long, because I obviously I didn't interview anywhere else. I love these guys and I wanted to work with them. We don't need you now, but we will need you in the future. So understanding that my experience with growth companies was quite relevant.

And so I said the way we worked Which worked well was they were the technical experts. And what I set out to do was to build the company. And I I I wanna definitely dig into that because he talked about

scale and systems or systematizing as early as when we discussed architecture at the beginning of the conversation and in a Peace and Fortune magazine. This is from a while back. Two thousand fifteen. Uh the quote that I have here, feel free to correct it, of course, is my role was to manage the chaos. You need to have someone to run fast and have a good product sense.

That was Larry and Sergey. My job was to organize the world around them. What Were some of the systems or policies or rules, anything that you put in place To help manage the chaos.

Well, Um When I arrived the company was full of brilliant people, but it was sort of wandering around, they would have staff meetings that were very, very interesting, but not very structured. Mm-hmm.

Um they lacked uh at the time somebody to run all their product strategy, uh general counsel, those sorts of things. So what I did is I put in place just a management structure, pretty straightforward. So we had a um a meeting on Mondays where we would run the company. We had a meeting on Wednesdays where we would do product strategy and we had a meeting on Fridays where we would look at customers. And this was organized so that the sales lead

could leave town Monday night and return Thursday night. to wherever he needed to go. We we've changed that many times since But simple ways of getting an activity organized was my initial task.

The other thing is that We had to build a corporation and so we wanted to hire people um who could sort of grow and build build teams. We had three product managers who were Solar Kamengar, uh Susan Wujiki. And Marissa Meyer.

Marissa, of course, ultimately became the the uh CEO of of um Yahoo. Susan is the CEO of YouTube. And Solar invented the ad system. So these were people of enormous consequence. But at the time they were just individual contributors. So someone had to develop them. We hired

This fellow Jonathan Rosenberg, who is the co author on Trillion Dollar Coach. And uh this this may not be Uh Something. worth exploring, but uh I I it's come up in my in my reading, so I thought it might be worth

opening up and maybe there's something there. Could could you describe Or explain what the seventy, twenty, ten. Model is if that's the right term to use. That's correct. Um so this was Sergei's idea. And the question was

How do we organize our resources? in terms of core things, new things, and experimental things. So Surge and we had an off site. And with the whole management team. And s I still remember and Sergey got up on the board

And he did some math. He's a brilliant mathematician. And at the end of the math he said the right answer is seventy twenty ten. Seventy percent on your core business. twenty percent on adjacent or nearby things. And ten percent on

Wild bats. And he said that All of these numbers are right. You need the seventy percent'cause you need the revenue, the revenue growth. You need the twenty percent because you need to extend your franchise.

And you need the ten percent. Which is crucially important. For the things that you will want to do five or ten years from now. And so we would measure seventy, twenty, ten. And try to make sure that the

Uh the urgent was not overwhelming the important. So there's a good example of how it worked. It was Sergei's idea, it was Sergei's math. I took it over. In the sense of I think it made perfect sense. And we measured it. And we ran the company that way.

And the reason I h I highlight this is I believe that you can systematically manage Innovation. you'll never be able to pick which of the fifty ideas are going to be the next billion dollar corporation. It's too hard. But you can manage it so that when you get these shots on goal

You identify them, you get a chance to fund them, you look at them. You can systematize innovation. Even if you can't completely predict it. When Google starts to take off, you have a lot of brilliant people, you are starting to add structure. How did you at that time of course later and certainly now you have um many different

systems in place, but in the very early days, how did you manage The what I would imagine to be a very large volume of inbound. And You I would

Probably landing in in your inbox at that time. Yeah, I think that that's what happens with a hyper growth company. Um uh you know, growing, doubling every year is pretty easy. It's when you're quadrupling every year. Now that's insane. And you may you begin to make mistakes, in particular when people are trying to contact you, if you fail to actually deal with them, you can create an enemy or at least annoy them.

So it's sort of bad management. So things would slip through the cracks. One of the things to know is that when you're in a high growth situation You've gotta focus on the right things. It's very, very easy to get distracted.

And in a high growth scenario, the most right thing is to make your product better. In other words, product, product, product, product. Because if you have a very strong product It's relatively easy to sell. It's relatively easy with a very strong product to make money from it.

It's relatively easy to recruit people to work on it. If you have a weak problem, a product is very different. So so it i the Google famously was a product company, not anything else. And that was again because of the strengths of the founders with me helping them. And does that

Uh, does that then help you, for instance, if you're getting Just making up a number. A hundred it's probably more like a thousand. Who knows, email a day. Two filter for

Product related communication or or pri uh prioritizing for internal team first, then any external. I know this is a is a very Ground level question, but I'm curious. That as the CEO The my most important thing to do is to make the velocity of interactions faster.

So the moment I get an email, I deal with it immediately. Which is typically to send to somebody else to deal with it. So everything that lags through me is slowing it's like molasses is slowing the company down. So I am about um

Spin rate. Uh gives an example. If you want to win the bu win the bike race in the marathon bike race, the best way to do it is to establish a spin rate and hold that spin rate constant. Just chug chug chug chug chug chug at the same rate. And you eventually get there and you do really well.

So my theory of management was Just to run at the same high speed seven days a week. And that meant that every email get forwarded, every issue was addressed, and so forth. And that sort of heads down focus. I think is a key in very high growth environments.

Y you mentioned earlier having and we're gonna segue to someone you alluded to in just a moment, the trillion dollar coach. The Uh

running the company, Wednesday product, I think it was Friday customers for yourself. Did you also have uh It might have been the same schedule, but it I'm thinking of a conversation with Jack Dorsey. where he described something similar, right? Having instead of having five different pieces of the business being discussed every day, breaking it out so there are daily I

Clear priorities, whether it's the sort of administrative organizational stuff, product or otherwise. For for you to Uh help the company maintain that spin rate. Did you have What did your weekly schedule look like? And that might be a bad question, but I just wanna see if there's anything there.

Well, we initially did the the Monday, Wednesday, Friday, but remember at that time we didn't have to travel. The sales guy had to travel, but the rest of us didn't. Um as the company grew, there was much more much more physical traveling. So we ultimately resolve to a Monday Tuesday structure. Most corporations have a Monday or a Tuesday meeting. And then that allows for the rest of the week to people to travel.

And uh Walmart, by the way, is the inverse. They have the week the managers are expected to be out on the field. They fly back on Friday night and then they meet on Saturday morning after doing corporate exercises. By exercise I mean physical exercise. So These gathering Traditions are very, very important.

If I had my own way, the way I would run the company is I would meet every day at four. because to k if you operationally things happen every day and they can be quick. What I've noticed in the political campaigns that I've observed is that they typically have a nine A. daily meeting. Which is kind of a update. And before nine A. And off they go. If you look at the White House

the first thing that happens in most presidencies is that there's the presidential daily brief which is the issues going on in the world, which is typically a half an hour at eight A. So for operational jobs it looks to me like if you're not meeting with your staff often Often in a week you're not You're not running it tight enough.

Now this does not mean that I was telling them what to do. These were check ins. These were um Issue, issue, issue. And because we were talking to each other all the time, we had context. And then because that ends up causing you to think short term. You then have to have a separate process to have

An off site meeting, some kind of strategic discussion. Some kind of uh uh ideation around what people would like as opposed to what they're currently doing. You have to do both. And you would choose for the daily

uh meetings uh four PM instead of first thing in the morning. Is that right? Yeah, but that's just that's just personal preference. But I think it's one of those things where if I were to start a uh with a new firm today, the first thing I would say is What is our idealized meeting frequency? And I think if you ask people what would work for them, you would end up with a couple of meetings a week. They would be organized around the

life schedules and other personal commitments people have and it would work. It gets harder. Uh the the fundamental problem you have in global companies is time zones. And how do you accommodate people who are on video conference in Europe and things like that? Mm-hmm.

And uh Could you please tell me who Bill Campbell is? I wanna s make sure we segue there. Okay. So Jonathan Allen and I have written a book Called trillion dollar coach.

And Bill Campbell is in at least in our opinion The most successful coach in world history. He was the primary coach for Google and its rise. He was also the primary coach for Apple Yeah.

Along with a host of other companies. And the sum of the companies that he has coached have now exceeded more than two trillion dollars of value. So gives you a sense of the value that he was he he helped create. His background was that he was a um

A football coach. At Columbia. And we pointed out many times to Bill that he wasn't particularly successful, although he tried very hard. Maybe it's'cause he was at Columbia, we don't really know. But he was an extraordinary coach of humans. And so w in my first year at Google John Door, who had placed me here at Google.

said, You need a coach. And I said, I don't need a coach. I'm really good. And he said. After some back and forth, he said, Well do tennis players have coaches? And I said Yes.

And then he got me. So then I had to say, Okay. So uh we met and then the rest is history. Now he has Just an incredible And I do mean incredible in the literal sense. I mean an incredible resume, right?

He had this coaching career and then he it seemingly segued it into into technology and you go down the list and you have Bezos More. Steve Jobs, Charles Stanberg, yourself. What

What made him Different. Right? Like why why people. It's it's important to explain why coaching matters. You hear all the day that I need a mentor.

Well, by the way, you need a mentor and I need a mentor. Mentors are great. That's not what Bill was. Bill was a coach. And more importantly, he was the best coach of teams in Ever.

And why do you need a team? Because a company is not an individual, it's a team of individuals who need coaching to achieve their objective. So all those skills that he built over those many years ultimately culminated in this enormous success that he had Unfortunately he died about three years ago. But I think his legacy will will live on forever in the valley.

The The thing that he did is he understood how to coach teams of people who were themselves competitive with each other. And I mention this because You know, you would assume that if you go to a company, as you get higher and higher, you're dealing with very sophisticated, very educated, very experienced, seasoned professionals, they'll know what to do. Well in fact

Not only do they not know what to do, but they're all caught up in their own politics and their own egos and they disagree with each other and they and they wanna make their mark and they want credit and so forth. And a coach sorts that out in the same sense that a coach of a football team or a basketball team does. It's the same principle but applied to business. And we were just talking about I figure we can we can dive into uh many different aspects of His coaching.

And we talk we were talking about meetings. Not too long ago. Uh Bill Seems to have had very uh

Very clear on how to start and run a meeting. Do you r do you recall how he d how he did that or how he recommended people do it? Um I do. And what's funny about it is that he was such an integral coach. I can't tell you what ideas were mine and what ideas were his. All I can say is that we, that is he and I, implemented these principles together. Which obviously a statement of how good a coach he really was.

So for example, meetings tend to be unstructured. So His advice was Make a list of things you want to talk about. And then

start the meeting not with that list unless you're in crisis. But start with trip reports. Because people were travelling, people would We would often use Google Maps and show you. I went from here to here to here. But then that allowed people to

conversationally explain what they were worried about or what they had observed. This worked incredibly well because it humanized the organization. Another thing that Bill did Is he made you feel that he loved you?

By listening to you as a And the thing I learned from Bill was and I'm used to running fast and I'm used to blah blah blah and is this good or bad? That's fine, goodbye. Right. That doesn't work. It doesn't work for

junior employees and it doesn't work for senior employees. They're human too. So if you're gonna manage people Or lead them, lead the whole person. How are you? How is your family? How was your operation?

What are you worried about? What do you bet about life? What do you think about the political situation? What do you think about the Grand Prix and the race cars? Whatever it takes uh to get people to be humanized turns out to be key And the difference between a coach and a manager

This is important. Is a manager will say, Tim Please do this. A a coach will say, Tim, what do you want to do? And then he'll carefully guide you to what you want to be to what the collective good is.

That function Is critical. Imagine if we had that in our political system. Which we don't today. Imagine if we had it in most companies.

All of these issues, everyone would be kind of marching in the same direction. So t to talk about that What you want to do. Uh I I'd love to

Look at a a sp a specific example which might be related. Uh you can correct me if it's not, but so uh in two thousand one Bill asked Cheryl Sandberg, who was then at Google, What do you do here? And he refused all the traditional answers until she understood that the real answer he was looking for was not her responsibilities, but in what way she contributed value. Every day so Did he ask you that question or why was it important?

for him to ask that question either. One of one of Bill's rules was to get past the slogans. And with experienced executives, people who've been executives for a while, you know, sort of ten years of executives, let's say they're in there mid to late thirties or forties. They've they've done it for a while. They're pretty executive at it. They get pretty good at giving you the marketing answers. I'm trying to fulfill my life. Um I want to make the world a better place.

And Those marketing phrases He thought were a waste of time. Not because you don't use them to motivate people, but because they don't give you precision as to what you should be doing.

So every day you would get up And your job was to do something precisely that you wanted to do that would make the world a better place and serve the the shareholders or your boss or what have it whatever whatever it is. And y you needed to be able to articulate that as a principle. Because if you could articulate it to Bill You could articulate it to anybody.

Mm. And he was very good at that. What do you want to do and what are you doing? Hm. He also uh you mentioned Uh

political factors and differences of opinion. How how did he handle Making decisions

When people were not meeting eye to eye. Let's just say in a board meeting. He was on a lot of boards. Uh so you have two people who fundamentally disagree, or there's there's a sort of a a loggerhead Uh what what would Bill do? How would he handle that? So the rule we had about meetings was that there was a decision to maker in the room But the decision maker in the room did not make the decision in the room until after other people had been heard.

And so there was a protocol for that. So let's say that I'm the decision maker and you and you know Maria So what Bill would say Look, guys, why don't we

come back with a a joint proposal. And then he would talk to the individuals and see if he could coach them to a common agreement. Even if he couldn't uh get them to a common agreement, The fact that they had participated in the discussion had been heard And saw the decision being made.

allowed them to overcome their embarrassment or envy or unhappiness that they had lost to go back and fight For a win. And uh Uh when Google went public in in two thousand four Uh

Bill recommended that you step aside as chairman and remain CEO, but then he made sure you would get reinstated as chairman later. What was his thinking behind that? Or and how did he pitch that to you? Th there was a complicated discussion about independence involving dual class, sort of a technical matter. And they had come to this idea.

And I thought well I haven't I've I've done a good job, right? I I felt I had taken I took it personally. I took it wrong. Um it was my pride that that got to me. And so he immediately recognized

That this was a pride problem. Right. So he said look. I get it. I understand it. I think this is best for the company. And I in the next year I'll work to make this Reverse in the right way. And his credibility with me by then, this is we started working three years earlier, was so high that I naturally said

Okay. Now imagine if I'd done something stupid and allowed my pride to get ahead of me. So that's The key thing he did is he understood when people were hurt Their egos were hurt.

Where they felt that they had been dissed or not not understood. And he could mo he could Not c not m mollify them, but But understand them and get them to say there's a bigger goal here. He said Eric, there's a bigger goal here.

Than you. And that works. Right. H how did he first come into the picture? When did you you said three years earlier. So what was you do you remember your first meeting with Bill?

I had met him when I was at Sun. And he at the time worked at Intuit. He uh Uh the management at Sun was trying to hire him into Sun, but he said no. And I remember people saying to him, he's the hardest working executive we've ever met. And they described him as flying to Japan for a one hour meeting and then flying right back.

Which I thought was insane. That was his that was his work ethic. I dn knew nothing else about his Capabilities. So when John Doer called me and said, You need a coach I said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm a pretty smart guy and then he convinced me that I had to have a coach. But once I sat down with Bill.

I knew I needed a coach. And the way I knew was that He had been working with another executive. Who worked for me. at the time inside of Google.

And this other executive had a health problem. A very bad cancer problem. And he did not he, Bill did not tell me. And I thought If Bill wouldn't tell me that

Then Bill must be able to keep confidences. He must be a person who is going to be on my team. Keep secrets of the company. Protect us, and so forth. So it's interesting when you meet somebody, you kind of judge them.

of are they sincere? Are they serious? Are they professional and built with that? And I should say that the first project we gave Bill. was to get our product management. functions going. I mentioned the three product management people

getting those structure, working with them to hire people, and it worked flawlessly. How long how long did it take to Implement that. that first task. I'm just curious how he went about once he had marching orders on something like that, or had dis jointly decided with someone like yourself on the marching orders. Well It wasn't really marking marching order. It was sort of we would have a chat and he would say, What do you think about this? And I said, That's great. Why don't you see if you can make something happen there. Um

And an example would be that one day We decided um to get rid of all of the executives inside of engineering. because we didn't weren't happy with their performance. This was called the disorg. And one executive ended up with a hundred direct reports. So I told Bill, go work on that problem. Try to figure out how how are we gonna manage a hundred people. Indeed, that worked.

flawlessly, right? That it actually worked and productivity increased. It was the right decision fr from our founders. Uh once again exactly correct. But that's an example where we were responding to what the founders wanted and we did so Dramatically and quickly. How does one person manage one hundred? Or is that is the answer they don't and there's some alternate

System. at play. I mean what I I can't not ask people will Well harass me if I don't ask you. Well remember that that I use the word manage, but what I really meant was lead. Mm-hmm. Right. So the key thing to do was to get this one one person, his name is Bill Coran, by the way, um, who was incredibly talented at managing large groups, get him to be able to do this. It's the only time I know in history of a person successfully managing such a large flat organization. And of course, all of those people are now heads of major operations within Google.

So again, their development uh with with Bill Corin's leadership. Mm. But there were many, many other examples. But Bill and I worked into a a structure. Where I would meet with him once a week. And he had this habit

He he w first place. Bill was a hugger. And when I say hugger, I mean he would hug people on the street. Right. He would light up his smile.

Everyone would smile, everyone would get a hug, and we would sit down. So in my case, I would go to his office, I would have to hug his secretary, he would have to hug me, he'd have to hug his secretary, and then I would sit down and he would have written behind the whiteboard five words. And those were the things that would prompt the conversation. And I would ask him to just talk. And he would over minute many minutes Talk about what he had heard and what he saw.

And then I would say, Well, why don't we do this? Why don't we do that? It worked incredibly effectively. He worked on a similar basis with Steve Jobs. He worked with Steve's every day until his death, including on his health. And he would With Steve he would go for walks when Steve could walk.

He visited him in the hospital. You would talk to him on the phone. Um his house was very near Steve Jobs' house, so he would literally walk over And serve hel helping manage Apple. In the same way.

I am gonna ask I have a question that that involves Steve, uh but before I do that What what might there be on the board among those five words? What types of what types of things It would be the first name of an executive who's inevitably in trouble over something. There would be some theme like revenue. There would be some product that it was in trouble that we were having issues with.

Um there was some deal or a customer that he had heard about he wanted to make sure I knew about, that kind of thing. But it's literally one word. And how did he structure his thinking when he would I mean you're a as as you've mentioned and as is clear in this conversation, very structured, highly analytical H how would he structure that? That talking.

Because he was fundamentally a h a coach humanist. He would talk about how the people felt And he would predict what they were going to do. So here's an example. We would have an executive that we weren't dec we weren't sure if they were doing a good job or not. Should we replace them? Should we put them in a different job? That kind of thing. That was where he was heavily involved.

He was so good That I would have him do most of the compensation issues. If we had board meeting come up, he would call the board members before the board meeting to see if there were any concerns, to ruffle any feathers, anticipate I could say, Bill, why don't you guys let them know that I'm worried about something?

And maybe they'll have some ideas so people could prepare. So he's the perfect partner. to anticipate problems. So in the same sense that he was a coach of the team if you will, below me or with me. He was also a coach of the board. He played the same role on the Appleboard, and I know because I was on the Appleboard for four years.

with him as the coach and board member. Yeah. So I'm glad you brought that up because Uh I'm looking at a piece from uh recode.

dot net. So Kara Swisher put this up. And Kara, for those people who don't know, she's been on the podcast, but is Uh quite feared. Uh b uh uh among some in the in tech circles because she has incredible sources and she's very Direct and very honest. with her

messaging uh so so it can cut people, but uh She put out a piece after Bill's passing that is one of the warmest things, probably the warmest thing I've ever seen her put out. And In the piece she she cites

Uh a passage from a fortune magazine for twenty fourteen, which is when he stepped down from the Apple board. And This is this is part of it. And then I have a follow up question. So the heist profile danger zone was his dual role on the Apple board and advising Schmidt and Google. quote, Steve would say, If you're helping them, you're hurting me he would yell at me, recalls Campbell, whose normal banter. typically needs to be sanitized for most publications. I'd say

I can't do HTML. Come on. I'm just coaching them on how to run their company better. End quote. He continued in both roles for years. How does someone pull that off? I mean that is just remarkable. The quote is correct and Kara is correct in that. matter.

Bill was not involved in the product. the product decisions as much as he was in the coaching. And he was careful not to cross the boundaries. Um And he was also not on the Google board, he was only on the Apple board.

So again In hindsight. sort of hard to believe, but somehow we all trusted him on both sides. He eventually I think got tired of the of the tension. But

from my perspective he was so honest and so direct That there was no question he could continue. Yeah. You asked about how did he work with people? I think that

that he did a couple of things that were profound. His rule was there would be no gap between statements and fact. That you had to be relentlessly honest and candid And direct. If there was any kind of alighting of the truth

He would know it and he would nail you. And he was Shall we say very salty in his language. That kept everybody kind of on and honest. And because of that you both trusted him, you knew that there wasn't a sentence unsaid.

And he was also a very good listener. So He he he did what we call freeform listening. He would literally He listened with full and undivided attention. He wasn't doing his email and Checking his uh

iPhone and those sorts of things. You had his complete attention as a human being. And if you were rambling, he would let you ramble. And I can remember repeating myself seven or eight times and I said, Have I And he said. It's okay.

He understood as a coach. That I had to repeat it enough times to believe it. Hm. And how would he How was he able to smell B S or stress test statements so that he could tell when people were

uh bending the truth or omitting details. I I think for one thing he had just massive experience at doing this. And so you get really good at at checking it. But remember he also had many, many sources. So we would have executives that would try to do an end around around bill. And they would try to sort of s sort of, you know, go back on message, you know, this is what I did and this is why I did it, and Bill would say

I'm not sure. Let's go through that again. And then if if the person wouldn't tell Bill the truth, he would cut them off. He was pretty ruthless. We can't trust this person, we can't trust this person, we need to get them out of here.

Uh or you know, move'em out of that job or whatever. Um He is he was very, very, very committed to the goals of the organization. So think about a coach in a foot in a using a football analogy. The goal is not to have the quarterback run the have the longest

Um ball throw. The goal is to win the game. Now if as a byproduct the quarterback has this amazing achievement, that's great. Right. But it but the moment the quarterback gets confused

Right, then we've got a problem. So you've got when you're in the position of coach It's all about the team. It's all about winning. Uh in a business it's relatively straightforward. You have a set of shared goals Which are

You know, we all agree to what the goals of the firm are. Bill was very, very good at keeping everybody on that message. I'm reading a a quote here that I have in front of me. that uh was was something that Bill apparently said to the CEO of Cheg. Dan Rosenzweig.

And here here it goes. The the last part relates to much of what you just said. I don't take cash, I don't take stock, and I don't take shit. So I have two I have two questions. By the way, that's Bill. So the two I have two questions related to that, maybe more. The first is how was he compensated? Mm-hmm. He refused compensation.

So I mean this was all pro bono? Yeah, and and let me tell you why. He explained that he had done really well in his previous job and this was his Give back to the industry. Right. He wanted to do this and he didn't want to be confused Buy money.

He wanted to work with the people on the principles that he cared about. Wild. So he this was his giving back. I mean decades of coaching. And and he had made enough money. You know, from his perspective, we did create a f a foundation for football players which people donated to in his honor, which he's very he was very happy about.

Um But he's a good example of one of these people Whose He was very motivated about the happiness and success of people. He was happiest when we were winning and working as a team.

That was his that was his income. That was his success. In his personal life, um he coached many m he coached soccer, he coached he worked with an awful lot of young football players He was in his civic duty.

As principled as he was in his job coaching companies like Apple and Google. And uh now that we're talking about it. I it also strikes me that I don't take cash, I don't take stock, and I don't take shit are are somewhat interrelated in the sense that If you're not

incentivized to maximize your sort of economic return by biting your lip that more forthcoming about not taking shit. Uh it are are there any other examples of sort of binary lines that he had or things that he would not accept.

Uh Well he Mm. He had a sort of rule. That you would work the people and then the problem.

So if you think about it as a coach, a football again, using football coach analogy. Um, if you've got the wrong player in the wrong position, you need to work on that. So over and over again, is this the best person that we can get to work on this problem? Is there an alternative choice? What do we need to do to get this perform this person performing better in their job? And then he would work on the problem. What happens in businesses everybody wants to talk about the problem. He wanted to talk about the people.

And getting the right people in the right place. Mm. How did he fire people or encourage people to fire people? What was the approach? He was uh We would come to a decision pretty quickly.

uh that it wasn't gonna work out and then Uh it sort of war because he had high credibility. He even had high credibility with people who were in the process of losing their jobs. And so he would go and say, Look, this is not working out and I will help you in your next role.

And that made an enormous difference. Which of course he did. Can you think of any particular and if if it's possible to give Uh Any any historical examples that'd be really, really helpful. Any particular

Hard challenges. That Bill helped you through. Are there any moments that look back like that that were particularly stressful or agonizing or difficult? Thorny that he helped you through.

Um well we we mentioned this going public uh role for me He was very helpful with the company going public, which is a big moment in a corporation's history. helping us with the venture capitalists thinking through what the functions were, because of course he had done it many, many times. Um Yeah.

But I think it his hi there was no great event. It was one of those things where he w became in the fabric. He was so important to us that he Uh became we started having him come to my staff meeting. Initially he had been an outside coach. He actually attended our staff meeting, where he typically didn't say very much. He would make notes. And then of course later would go and work on issues that seem to come up.

He was very helpful when there there began to be tensions between Apple and Google. And because he knew both sides, he would sit there

Mm there were s serious disputes between Steve and some of the Google executives over some of the um issues in Android versus iPhone, for example. And

those disputes had to do with who could do what and intellectual and Those kinds of things. And he got people to talk to each other. So there's a case we're having Uh credibility with both groups.

was extremely helpful. Mm-hmm. You said uh Getting people to talk.

with one another who might not otherwise chat with one another. Bullet point facts. about Bill that I have in front of me is he taught Marissa Mayer, then CEO of Yahoo, how to sit quietly during a meeting and let less senior people arrive at a decision. Um Are there other

Are there any particular approaches Or coaching recommendations that he would that he's made to you or that you've seen him make to other people more than once that uh fall into that same category of Well, I'll give you an example of that. I would get worked up over some issue and I would violate my own rules. So my own rules are to listen. You know

reason and then make a make a decision collectively. And if we can't make it collectively, then I'll force a decision. But every once in a while I'd be sufficiently worked up or upset that I would just blurt out the answer. And he would inevitably say, Come on. You know better than that. Um

And uh so that's an example where a coach you know Because he's seen me operating, he says, Uh, you crossed the line there. What were some of his workplace or work day slash week rituals. Um If if any come to mind.

He would get up at uh five thirty in the morning. He would uh be on the gym from six till seven. Um and then so he was an early riser. He had he coached soccer at three or four in the afternoon, so he had

So he was typically be in the office from say eight till Two ish. And then he would go coach soccer. Of course, we all worked much later than that, so we would call him But he, for example, believed in doing one thing well. So when he was coaching, he wouldn't answer the phone. Can you imagine that today? Right, from Steve Jobs or me or whatever. And he wouldn't respond to text because he thought that that was an interruption in what he was doing. So he was one of these principled people.

Oh, this is what I'm working on. This is what I'm working on. This deserves my full attention. I'm worried that we're losing that style. uh which I value a great deal.

Hm. What what does the Uh what do the first sixty to ninety minutes of your day look like? out of curiosity, I mean do you what what does your routine morning routine look like? During the week.

I think like What I will tell you with Well, but let me tell you how Bill and I worked it out. Um His his structure of life was Monday through Friday you're just running around with your head cut off.

You know, as fast as you can, making things move. And his rule was that on Saturday mornings when you wake up When it's typically quiet. That's the time to sit down and actually think about what happened in the week. go through everything and get yourself organized. What's your week like, what's your month like

And take however long you take To think Just in your own head. Am I using my time the most effectively? And so I've tried to do that.

Every day. In the sense that before anything else happens. Once I'm awake and up and running, I try to say Is this the best use of my day?

What am I missing? What do I need to get done? What did I forget to do yesterday, that kind of thing. And Uh do you have A sort of boot up sequence that is your default most mornings? I mean, do you wake up at the same time each morning

Uh, I know this this seems pretty s quittidian, but uh Yeah. I'm I'm curious if you have any If you have a set morning routine. At this point. Um

When I'm in one place for a while, yes. Uh I typically get up and you know, eat something. Although not recently. I guess I've I've tried I'm now trying intermittent uh fasting to see if that uh makes a difference. But uh but in any case, the first thing most people that I know do is they're online, right? So they're checking the news or seeing what happened. And then And in the t the tech industry is so dynamic, the stuff really does happen overnight. And you really do you really do need to know what happened.

One of the tricks is try to focus on your own news before you have global news. Because global news is so addictive, it's like oh my God, and oh this happened, oh whatever, you can waste all your time. So try to focus on getting your own world in order. What do I care about today? What do I want to work on? Am I happy with what I'm doing today? Uh

Yeah. If you were giving advice to someone looking for A coach. A business coach. How would you tell them to vet

candidates or what to look for. Yeah, coaching is a special skill. It's like writing. There are people who are great writers, there are people who are great coaches. And there's more than one, right? So How

Is this a person who lights up a room? Is this a person who has that natural charisma that people want to listen to? Is this this person who we can get to be part of our team? And then I think it's a question of hopefully people will follow the recommendations in our book. About how to actually do it.

But co the coaching is a high, highly personal thing. Right. When you have a great coach, you love your coach. Again, go back to athletics. People talk about their coaches. in reverential terms because they get them to perform so well. So let me uh I wanna ask. Uh

Shift gears just a little bit. And Ask you a few uh questions about Uh

effectively rapid fire questions that I like to ask a lot of people who are on the podcast and and we'll wrap up in just a little bit. But before I get to those What are you hoping that intermittent fasting will do? What benefits are you Or are you hoping to drive? Well the And how do you do it? Well, so the answer is oh so

There's there's medical arguments. They're not fact. that we evolved as hunter gatherers where we had relatively low amounts of food for long periods of time. So fasting was part of being a Hunter Gatherer?

And that our bodies are in fact healthier and better when they eat they're they're not continuous grazing. And so there's there's a whole school of thought that says that the best thing to do is to not eat for like sixteen hours. And then eat a lunch or a dinner or just a dinner or things like that. And people report that their energy is equal or better That they lose weight, um, that they feel better.

Um the science is still not resolved on this, but it's worth checking out. Yeah, for people interested or if if you uh certainly it sounds like you've done your homework, uh Peter Atia, uh It was an M D. And

Dominic d'Agostino, a handful of folks out there have some really good literature. Uh exploring the benefits of fasting, both intermittent as you're describing, say 16 hours, and then looking at more extended, say three plus day uh fasts with data that they're tracking with uh ketone. uh monitors and glucometers and so on. Uh so let's just j just jump into a few of these wrapping. Let me just add that

Yeah, one of the great scourges of our Um lives today is the amount of sugar that everybody's eating and sugar in the form of carbohydrates and so forth. So experimenting with these low carb diets and uh that sort of thing might be good for your longevity and certainly your short term health. Yeah, absolutely.

Um Lots lots to say there, but I'll I'll save my my long winded soapbox for another time. Uh Do you have any books that you have gifted the most to other people?

Um and and you and I'm certainly You have to Your own books. Right, the new digital age, how Google works, and now uh trillion dollar coach, uh outside of those books, are there any that you've gifted A lot to other people.

Yeah. I think the one that has had the biggest impact on me and the ones that I've given the most number of people has been Um Angels of our better nature. Mm.

And Angels of our Better Nature is a seven hundred page book on death. And it's written by a brilliant Harvard professor. Who talks at great length About Death rates and the human condition.

And he spends a lot of time talking about what happened two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred years ago. And when you finish the book, which takes a long time You conclude that the world is in a much, much better place than it is. Than it has been in the past.

That A thousand years ago the average man died in a war and the average woman died in pregnancy in their twenties. And that a child born today has a very high likelihood In almost all parts of the world.

to live to a natural a natural old age That's an extraordinary statement. And that's why the people who run around saying, Oh, the world's falling apart, we've never had it this bad that's just not true. And the data says it's not true. And that's Steven Pinker for people who want to look that up. And it is a it is a big book, eight hundred and thirty two pages. Do you recommend and and gift that book.

Because It delivers hope in a world where the news favors uh catastrophizing or i are there other reasons that you give it to people? I th my own this is my opinion now, I think what's happened is we're surrounded by information.

The information that is emotional and negative occupies too much of our brains. Um that it crowds out optimism. uh we've seen an increase in uh depression, anxiety, and so forth, which I think is to some degree uh connected to this uh

This fire hose of negative information. And A a person who didn't know would say, Oh, it is the worst part. Worst time in the world. And I would say to them.

If you think that Th imagine you're the father of an eighteen year old boy in nineteen forty three who's just been sent to the German front. Or worse. Imagine that you're father of an eighteen year old boy in Germany. in nineteen forty three.

So again Uh people lose perspective because of the immediacy effect. And also because there's so much coming at us. Yeah now I w I wanna talk about uh This this may not be directly related. This could be an overstatement, but just d depression, anxiety

Uh darker, more Difficult times, let's just say. And Uh understanding that on the macro level, I I completely agree with you. If if if you read this book, certainly if you look at the data uh we are in and A spectacular time.

Uh for yourself just to humanize uh you a little bit for people who are listening because we've talked about many of the successes, many of the The companies you've been involved with. Uh do you have

any favorite failures. And by that I mean Failures or difficult. really difficult times that set the stage for later successes, possibly. Or taught you something that later.

Uh Ended up. uh having tremendous value. For me the The key moment in my professional career.

was the decision to go to Novelle From Sun. And then the decision to leave Novelle. And when I was in Novelle, which was a hardcore turnaround, a di a difficult business, lots of problems. That's where a lot of the skills that I had not developed when I was at Sun were developed.

You don't really know how a good leader you are until you face a really hard challenge. But more importantly. John Door would never have recruit me to Google from Sun, because it wouldn't have been appropriate for a board member. So the fact that I had gone to Novell gave me the training ground that when I got to Google and there were things that I didn't like, I would call it, I would say it

I would push it. Another thing that happened was I was um my hobby is airplane flying and I had been training in a small jet. And jet training because it's life and death. They really push you to make decisions and take command. And for me the jet training

Actually at one point they had a Oh uh co pilot and they told the co pilot to be Incredibly unhelpful. Without telling me that.

In order to train me to be to take command in a difficult situation in the simulator. So Those all contributed to my development as a strong willed leader. Whatever path you get there.

You've gotta be willing to take charge and you've gotta be willing to make decisions. What Bill would say Is Somebody's got to make the decision. Have an appropriate process and make the decision and keep going.

How did you first notice that your co pilot was being unhelpful and how did you respond to that? Well, I'm used to having good co pilots and when they start giving you information that doesn't make sense and Now you've got your flying and your crisis and he's giving you malinformation. You get annoyed. I bet. And so for me, it took a while to figure out that there was something wrong.

Because you I'm so trusting. And one of the things that that that in this particular co pilot scenario they taught me was You know what's right. Use every piece of your body, right? Your hands, your eyes, your thinking, your experience

To get yourself out of this situation. And if There's something going wrong over here. Then if it's not if it's not life critical Deal with it later.

And that prioritization really helped. So In there were many examples in early Google where there were choices that we would have around how we set up our revenue systems or accounting or what we took to business or so forth, but I knew the answers because I had been through this at Novell. And I understood that those decisions should be made in the most conservative way, conservative in the sense of least aggressive from an accounting perspective.

You were Discussing Bill earlier. Yeah. Or just I should say describing. And it it seemed to me, at least if I'm uh s reading between the lines, that he had an incredible intuitive sense.

And a as you mentioned, sort of a humanist bent that would lead him to focus on how other people are feeling and the people before the problem and so on. Uh you have superpowers It would seem in the The

sort of hyper analytical. Have you found f for instance your exposure to the arts

has aided you in a business sense as well? Or are those sort of separate domains for you? Is the analytical the primary driver in business Is there a a place for Um The more intuitive.

As an aside, uh my Wikipedia page says that I'm a world's art collector. And that's false. Um And I I've left it in because I w I use it as an example to say that not everything you read on the internet is true. You do have involvement with art, though. Yes. But but but let me but let me answer I I wanna answer your question, but I did I didn't want to

To not tell the truth. Yeah. Um So I I think when you have a hyper analytical person Uh which I am and many people of my industry are You can be tone deaf.

And Anything that you can do to increase your understanding if you're like me Of how people are gonna react to things. How people will

When we started at Google, we would just throw things across the Well. uh just throw things out. We didn't worry about what impact they had. Maybe they worked, maybe they didn't. But we fairly quickly learned That we had to have a whole release process, which again Bill and I put in place where we would judge, for example, how will this be perceived.

Should we run this test? Right. What is the moral framework of it? So businesses are more than just products and facts. They're about people and emotion and morality. And those we had very good values from the founders in that regard, but operationally It was important for me and everyone to remember that these things have affect people's lives.

You have to really think about it. How how would Bill Or maybe how did he? I don't know if he did. Think about the word success or what that

meant to him or to or what it should mean to other people. Do you have any any window into that? But he lived his life. Um the way I am talking about him now. So he was a principled person who of of high integrity. He expected it from others, and he thought that a successful life was one.

well lived that were consistent with those principles. And that where you could have a purpose that you cared about. Um that kind of and his job as a coach was to for to get everyone to that to feel that they had achieved that, while collectively Getting the team to have that feeling. I will tell you that there's nothing more fun.

Then having a Very fast moving team. Where everyone's rowing in the same direction. Right, that feeling of power and that feeling of excitement and that feeling of energy. And somebody says, Hey, I just have a new idea. Hey, I w can we do this? Hey, can I do that? I wanna make this phone call. Is that okay? I said, Sure, great, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right, there's nothing like that.

In my life. Before or after. Mm. If This is a this is sometimes a difficult

Uh. Rapid fire question. The answer doesn't need to be rapid fire, but the the the question I try to keep short. Uh Which is and if it doesn't go anywhere that's totally fine too. The The question is this, if if you could put

a anything on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to reach billions of people, non-commercial, a word, a question, a quote, a recommendation, an image, anything. Does anything come to mind that you would want You know, billions of people to notice and take stock of. Um I guess for me it's software and analytical thinking.

Um I am a believer that the next Fifty years. human society will have incredibly complicated human systems. So if you think about the things we deal with every day.

um the judicial system, the political system, the prison system, the traffic system, what have you. They were architected in a world where we didn't have a lot of data and we didn't have a lot of software and we couldn't really measure everything. And I think a lot of those systems are gonna get very, very thoroughly designed. And if you're gonna design those systems, then design based on outcomes you care about. So in prison systems are you care more about punishment or recidivism?

As an example. um in e in uh economic systems. Do you care more about Revenue growth or job growth? I would recommend the latter. 'Cause jobs are an identity for everybody.

So I would prefer an economic system which maximized job creation over total revenue. So the measurement systems and the analytics, so the sort of software and analytical systems that are buildable now. should allow us to have the world we want. Right.

Do we care More about one group or another. Now our political systems which will vary by country need to allow us to make those decisions. But there is hope. for people who are um subject to

Um Um And economic penalties that don't fit the work.

to get addressed through these uh dr uh through these programs. Systematically. We know, for example, that we can identify bias now. In ways we couldn't before. So people who have bias used against them, people who've been prejudiced against

We have a way now of both measuring it and I think eliminating it. with good systems design. So I think for the next fifty years the big narrative is going to be

Who's designing these systems? How they work. What are the values that are in them? How do we measure them? And much of the work that Google does and I do now is related to m using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

To try to build these systems to be more effective. against the goals that our country wants. Thank you. Excellent answer. Uh I think this is a good place to start to wrap up and uh this has been

Very fun for me. So thank you again for taking the time. And I highly right I highly, highly recommend people check out Trillion Dollar Coach subtitled Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill. Campbell. uh which Eric coauthored with Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle. Uh Bill has been on my mind for

so long, I mean for decades at this point. And uh I I'm so I have so much regret that I never had the opportunity to meet him in person. and have waited for a book like this to come out. Uh. I mean it's it's just incredible that It finally did.

And I'm I'm I'm thrilled that uh that that you all put this together and that people will have an opportunity to uh look over the shoul of people like yourself and like this this who's who list of entrepreneurs as they were coached by this incredible human being, not just coach, not just business mind, but human being named Bill Campbell.

Uh and people can find more. I have certainly feel free to add anything here, but they can find more about it at trillion dollarcoach.com They can wave hello to you at Eric Schmidt on Twitter. LinkedIn they can find you quite easily and also on Facebook. Eric Schmidt seventy six. And uh I'll include links to everything we've discussed in the show notes.

Uh Eric, do you have any Last words, parting comments, recommendations for people, anything you would like to say Before we wrap up. Well Tim, it's been an incredible privilege to be on on this show. Uh when I think of the way you've communicated the ideas and the principles you've s you've established

Bill would love you. Because of what you stand for. Um What's interesting about our book on bill is that

Jonathan and Alan and I started this book Just as a thank you to someone who had been our coach and mentor and had a huge impact. But what we discovered was that there was essentially no literature on how to coach teams in business. There was no there were no facts, there were no analogies, there was no way of talking about it.

So what we discovered is that the principles that he taught Right. Us directly. are the universal principles of managing teams. Right, from football to business. And everyone needs a coach.

Yep. This is Very, very true. I didn't actually get a coach in this capacity until maybe two years ago and Uh certainly for people listening, even if you have a small organization, even if you are your organization, as a single person and work with contractors, for instance.

Uh having a coach even to simply hold you accountable and and force you to clarify your thinking. is of uh s it is so leveraged and valuable. Uh I'm just thrill that uh That you guys have put this book out.

So thank you again. I really appreciate you taking the time not only to put together the book, but also to Uh share. Uh some of your lessons learned. In this conversation.

Okay, well thank you very much, Tim. I appreciate it. And to everybody listening, uh you can find links to everything in the show notes as per usual at TimDuppblog forward slash podcast. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share The coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up. in the uh the world of the esoteric as I do, it could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite.

of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com, that's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode of the Tim Fair Show is brought to you by LinkedIn, the right hire can make a huge impact on your business. The wrong hire can creator your business. And I have seen example after example from thousands of my readers at a minimum where they have told me stories of how finding the right person at the right time. And in some cases not even asking what should I do, but asking who should I find because that person can help me determine what exactly to do more intelligently. And I've had a chance to hire two such people in the last year and that has just made my business take a quantum leap forward and my complexity in my personal and business life.

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