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Comment by shutton | Hacker News Reader

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shutton·

Really enjoyed listening to this recent interview with Eric Schmidt.

I’d never heard of Bill Campbell before, seems like he was a huge influence around Silicon Valley.

https://tim.blog/guest/eric-schmidt/

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For a counterpoint on Campbell as a terrific business coach read "Hatching Twitter" [1]. He was hired as Ev Williams' coach and the picture the book paints is bad. Working more for the board of directors instead the person he was hired to help. Telling Williams he was doing great then reporting to the board he was doing terrible.

The book is also a great way to understand why Twitter is such a shit show of an organization. The fundamental mismanagement from day one until now also shows the power of finding product/market fit. As the saying goes, you can mess everything else up and still succeed.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18656827-hatching-twitte...

I really enjoyed this one as well. The descriptions of Jack in the book give very interesting context for evaluating some of the decisions he's made recently about hate speech and bullying on twitter.

I would love recommendations for similar books that aren't just hagiographies of startups/tech giants.

It's really hard to tell what in this book is based in fact. It's almost entirely based off of hearsay and gossip. There are interviews with people recalling minute details of conversations they had ~5 years in the past. You can call bullshit on a lot of it.

Really good point.

My high-level take away though is that it is directionally correct regarding Twitter and its (mis)management.

If anyone else wonder which Bill Campbell is it, I guess it is this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Campbell_(business_exe...

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