Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955 in Washington, D.C.) is Chairman and CEO of Google Inc. and a member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. He also sits on the Board of Trustees for Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University. He lives in Atherton, California with his wife Wendy.
Education
After graduating from Yorktown High School (Virginia), Schmidt attended Princeton University where he earned a BSEE in 1976. At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned an MS in 1979, for designing and implementing a network linking the campus computer center, the CS and the EECS departments, and a PhD in 1982 in EECS with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems. He was joint author of lex (a lexical analyzer and an important tool for compiler construction). He taught at Stanford Business School as a part time professor.
Previous and current work
Early in his career, Schmidt held a series of technical positions with IT companies, including Bell Labs, Zilog and Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He joined Sun Microsystems in 1983, led its Java development efforts and rose to become Chief Technology Officer. In 1997, he was appointed CEO of Novell.
While at Sun Microsystems, Eric Schmidt was interviewed by Fast Company, a Silicon Valley News Agency. During the interview, Eric Schmidt indicated he believed that “sex” oriented businesses were the future of the internet and computing industry. Several months after these interviews were published, Schmidt was recruited by Novell to the CEO position. One notable excerpt from these interviews:
…Eric Schmidt, Sun’s chief technology officer, is leaning back in a plush executive chair. Eric is thinking about sex. A smile is on his lips, and a deep, satisfied light radiates from his eyes. He has grasped a liberating truth: sex — not microchips and software — is the key to the future of business. Eric Schmidt’s job at Sun is to spawn and nurture new businesses. For Eric, organizational sex is a rich, vibrant topic. His days are often spent in flirtations — and sometimes full-fledged assignations — with new companies and their founders. What he tries to do is create a union of the fertile ideas of rebels and visionaries and the organizational DNA of Sun. Read the rest of this entry »