Here's What Steve Jobs Told Bill Campbell About Advising Apple And Google At The Same Time

Campbell, a longtime Steve Jobs ally, spoke to Adam Lashinsky about his relationship with the legendary innovator.

"[Jobs] came by one day, and we sat on a bench by the pool, and he said, 'I'd like you to join the Apple board,'" Campbell told Lashinsky. "I said, without hesitation, 'For sure.'"

Campbell is one of the few Apple insiders to have watched Steve Jobs develop professionally, first at NeXT and then at Apple.

"I watched him emerge as a CEO in real time," Campbell says. "I had a continuum with him. I watched him when he was general manager of the Mac division and when he went off and started NeXT. I watched Steve go from being a creative entrepreneur to a guy who had to run a business."

But their relationship became acrimonious when Campbell began advising Google cofounder Eric Schmidt informally, which Jobs resented.

"Steve would say, 'If you're helping them you're hurting me.' He would yell at me," said Campbell. "I'd say, 'I can't do HTML, come on. I'm just coaching them on how to run their company better.'"

Check out the full interview at Fortune.