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Hi. I'm Ben Mathis. Welcome to Kickass News.

Bill Campbell might be the most important football coach you've never heard of.

He spent a dozen years of his life coaching the Boston College Eagles and the Columbia Lions through one disappointing season after another.

He never won a bowl championship and he's not enshrined alongside Bobby Bowden and Bear Bryant in the college football Hall of Fame.

But after retiring from football, he took the lessons he learned on the field and moved to Silicon Valley, where he achieved a stunning track record of success as a different kind of coach, playing an instrumental role in the growth of companies such as Intuit, Google, and Apple.

And mentoring many of the tech industries greatest visionaries including Jeff Bezos, Mark Andreessen, Larry Page, Sergey Bryn, Cheryl Sandberg, Steve Jobs, and Eric Schmidt.

Eric Schmidt met with Bill Campbell every week for 15 years while he was chairman and CEO of Google and then executive chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet.

And now he's distilled some of Campbell's most important lessons into a new book titled Trillion Dollar Coach, the leadership playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell.

And on today's podcast, Eric reveals how he initially reacted when venture capitalist John Doar told the newly minted CEO that he needed a coach.

How coach Campbell helped shape the relationship between Eric and Google founders Sergey Bryn and Larry Page.

Why Campbell initially refused Eric's invitation to join Google's board of directors and how he talked Eric out of resigning his Google CEO way back in 2004.

Eric says Campbell wasn't just another executive coach, he coached the whole team and discusses the importance of trust and even love to a team's success and ultimately the company's bottom line.

He shares some of Campbell's secrets for handling difficult personalities or the aberrant genius as he liked to call them and shed some light on Campbell's longtime friendship with one of those aberrant geniuses, Apple's Steve Jobs.

Then Eric opens up about his decision to step down as chairman of Alphabet in 2017 and his next big bet on the positive potential of artificial intelligence.

...