Eric Schmidt

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and former software engineer who served as the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the company's executive chairman from 2011 to 2015.

Schmidt graduated from Yorktown High School in the Yorktown neighborhood of Arlington County, Virginia, in 1972, after earning eight varsity letter awards in long-distance running.

As an intern at Bell Labs, Schmidt in 1975 was co-author of Lex, a software program to generate lexical analysers for the Unix computer operating system.

He attended Princeton University, starting as an architecture major and switching to electrical engineering, earning a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree in 1976.

From 1976 to 1980, Schmidt resided at the International House Berkeley, where he met his future wife, Wendy Boyle.

In 1979, at the University of California, Berkeley, Schmidt earned an M.S. degree for designing and implementing a network (Berknet) linking the campus computer center with the CS and EECS departments.

There, he also earned a PhD degree in 1982 in EECS, with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems.

Early in his career, Schmidt held a series of technical positions with IT companies including Byzromotti Design, Bell Labs (in research and development), Zilog, and Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

During his summers at Bell Labs, he and Mike Lesk wrote Lex, a program used in compiler construction that generates lexical-analyzers from regular-expression descriptions.

In 1983, Schmidt joined Sun Microsystems as its first software manager.

He rose to become director of software engineering, vice president and general manager of the software products division, vice president of the general systems group, and president of Sun Technology Enterprises.

During his time at Sun, he was the target of two notable April Fool's Day pranks.

In the first, his office was taken apart and rebuilt on a platform in the middle of a pond, complete with a working phone and workstation on the corporate Ethernet network.

The next year, a working Volkswagen Beetle was taken apart and re-assembled in his office.

From 1997 to 2001, he was chief executive officer (CEO) of Novell.

Schmidt has served on various other boards in academia and industry, including the boards of trustees for Carnegie Mellon University, Apple, Princeton University, and the Mayo Clinic.

He also owns a minority stake in the Washington Commanders of the National Football League (NFL).

In April 1997, Schmidt became the CEO and chairman of the board of Novell.

He presided over a period of decline at Novell where its IPX protocol was being replaced by open TCP/IP products, while at the same time Microsoft was shipping free TCP/IP stacks in Windows 95, making Novell much less profitable.

In 2001, he departed after the acquisition of Cambridge Technology Partners.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed Schmidt.

Impressed by him, they recruited Schmidt to run their company in 2001 under the guidance of venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz.

In March 2001, Schmidt joined Google's board of directors as chair, and became the company's CEO in August 2001.

At Google, Schmidt shared responsibility for Google's daily operations with founders Page and Brin.

Prior to the Google initial public offering, Schmidt had responsibilities typically assigned to the CEO of a public company and focused on the management of the vice presidents and the sales organization.

According to Google, Schmidt's job responsibilities included "building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google's rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while the product development cycle times are kept to a minimum."

Upon being hired at Google, Eric Schmidt was paid a salary of $250,000 and an annual performance bonus.

He was granted 14,331,703 shares of Class B common stock at $0.30 per share and 426,892 shares of Series C preferred stock at purchase price of $2.34.

In 2004, Schmidt and the Google founders agreed to a base salary of US$1 (which continued through 2010) with other compensation of $557,465 in 2006, $508,763 in 2008, and $243,661 in 2009.

In 2008, during his tenure as Google's chairman, Schmidt campaigned for Barack Obama, and subsequently became a member of Obama's President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, with Eric Lander.

Lander later became Joe Biden's science advisor.

He did not receive any additional stock or options in 2009 or 2010.

He also served as the executive chairman of parent company Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, and Technical Advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020.

In April 2022, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated his net worth to be US$25.1 billion.

In the meantime, Schmidt had left Google, and founded philanthropic venture Schmidt Futures, in 2017.

Under Schmidt's tenure, Schmidt Futures provided the compensation for two science-office employees in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

In October 2021, Schmidt founded the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) and has since served as its chairman.

Schmidt was born in Falls Church, Virginia, US, and grew up in a Jewish family in Falls Church and Blacksburg, Virginia.

He is one of three sons of Eleanor, who had a master's degree in psychology, and Wilson Emerson Schmidt, a professor of international economics at Virginia Tech and Johns Hopkins University, who worked at the U.S. Treasury Department during the Nixon Administration.

Schmidt spent part of his childhood in Italy as a result of his father's work and has stated that it had changed his outlook.