Eric Schmidt

64
Eric Schmidt bigraphy, stories - Software engineer, businessman

Eric Schmidt : biography

April 27, 1955 –

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American software engineer, businessman, and the executive chairman of Google. In 2013, Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 138th-richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $8.2 billion.

Early in his career, Schmidt co-authored the Lex analysis software program for the Unix computer operating system. From 1997 to 2001, he was chief executive officer of Novell. From 2001 to 2011, he served as the CEO of Google.

Schmidt served on the board of directors of Apple Inc. He also sat on the boards of trustees for both Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University.. princeton.edu (July 11, 2011). Retrieved on September 27, 2012.

Biography

Eric Emerson Schmidt was born in Washington, D.C.; some sources state Falls Church, Virginia. He was one of three sons of Eleanor, who had a master’s degree in psychology, and Wilson Schmidt, a German-American professor of international economics at the Johns Hopkins University, who worked at the U.S. Treasury Department during the Nixon Administration. He grew up in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Falls Church, Virginia.

Schmidt graduated from Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia, in 1972, after earning eight varsity letter awards in long-distance running. He then attended Princeton University, where he started as an architecture major but then switched and earned a B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1976. From 1976 to 1980, Schmidt stayed at the International House Berkeley, where he met his future wife, Wendy Boyle. In 1979, at the University of California, Berkeley, Schmidt then earned an M.S. degree for designing and implementing a network linking the campus computer center with the CS and EECS departments. There, he also earned a Ph.D. degree 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 during his summers at Bell Labs of Lex (a software lexical analyzer and an important tool for compiler construction). He taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in the 2000s as a lecturer in strategic management.

In June 1980, Schmidt married Wendy Susan Boyle (born in Short Hills, New Jersey, in 1957) and separated in 2011. They lived in Atherton, California, in the 1990s and have two daughters, Sophie and Allison. That year, Schmidt dated Lisa Shields, a communications executive for the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 2012, he was dating concert pianist Chau-Giang Nguyen.

Network neutrality

In August 2010, Schmidt clarified his company’s views on network neutrality: "I want to be clear what we mean by Net neutrality: What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don’t discriminate against one person’s video in favor of another. But it’s okay to discriminate across different types. So you could prioritize voice over video. And there is general agreement with Verizon and Google on that issue."

Career

Early career

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 Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

From Sun to Google

Schmidt joined Sun Microsystems in 1983 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 recipient 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. The next year, a working Volkswagen Beetle was taken apart and re-assembled in his office.

In April 1997, he became the CEO and chairman of the board of Novell and departed after the acquisition of Cambridge Technology Partners.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed Schmidt. Impressed by him,"CEO Eric Eric Schmidt stood out because he ‘was the only candidate who had been to Burning Man.’" From ; quoted are John Markoff and Gregg Zachary. See also Business Week‘s from September 29, 2003: "One of the first orders of business was joining his new 20-something colleagues at Burning Man, a free-form festival of artistic self-expression held in a Nevada desert lake bed. Sitting in his office shortly after his return, tanned and slightly weary, Eric Schmidt couldn’t have been happier. "They’re keeping me young," he declared." they recruited Schmidt to run their company in 2001 under the guidance of venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz.