Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt is a businessman, CEO, investor, and board member of various technology companies. He has served as the CEO of Google and Novell.

Schmidt attended Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia and graduated in 1972. He then attended Princeton University and graduated in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. After, he was a student at University of California, Berkeley where in 1982 he earned a PhD in computer science.

At the beginning of his career in the 1970s, Schmidt interned at Bell Labs, a technology and science research development company. While there, he co-authored the software program Lex with Mike Lesk. It was released in 1975.

In 1983 after Schmidt received his PhD, he began working at Sun Microsystems as a software manager. He was promoted to multiple positions at the company over time, including director of software engineering, vice president and general manager of the software products division, CTO, and president of its subsidiary Sun Technology Enterprises. He left Sun Microsystems in 1997, at which point he became both the CEO and chairman of Novell. Schmidt stepped down from his role as CEO in 2001 after Novell acquired Cambridge Technology Partners.

In 2001, Schmidt became Google's CEO and chairman. He remained CEO until 2011 and chairman until 2015. He was also an executive chairman of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, from 2015 to 2018 and its technical advisor from 2018 to 2020.

He co-founded Innovation Endeavors, a venture capital firm, with Dror Berman in 2010.

Schmidt has served on the board of directors and trustees of many companies and organizations. He has been on the boards of trustees for Carnegie Mellon University from 2004 to 2006, Princeton University from 2007 to 2010, and the board of visitors at University of California, Berkeley from 2014 to 2021. He was a chairman at Apple from 2006 to 2009. In 2008 he became a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and was later named an emeritus board member in 2020. He has been a member of the Mayo Clinic's board of trustees since November 2013.

Schmidt has served on several boards at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): the advisory board for its MITIQ program, the MIT CEO advisory board, the task force of MIT Work of the Future, and the advisory council of MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

He has also served as chairman of several government programs. From 2009 to 2017, he served as a member of the United States President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Schmidt was chair of the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Innovation Board from 2016 to 2020, and chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) from 2018 to 2021.

Schmidt became chairman of Broad Institute on June 8, 2021. In December 2021, Schmidt joined Chainlink Labs as a strategic advisor. As of January 2022 he is a member of the international advisory board at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, the global advisory board of Khan Academy, and a chairman emeritus of New America.

Schmidt was ranked #30 on Forbes 400 2021 list, and #96 on its Billionaires 2021 list. He was also ranked #22 on Forbes Richest in Tech 2017 list. As of January 23, 2022, his net worth is $22.1 billion.

Schmidt and his wife, Wendy Schmidt, have co-founded several philanthropic companies together. They include the Schmidt Family Foundation, Schmidt Ocean Institute, and Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic fund intended to fund the ventures of "exceptional people". They also established The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund at Princeton University in 2009.

On March 25, 2021, Broad Institute launched The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center, funded by the Schmidts by a $150 million endowment. The Center focuses on research in biology and machine learning.

Schmidt has co-authored three books: Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell, How Google Works, and The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives.

In August 2020, Schmidt launched a podcast called Reimagine with Eric Schmidt, in which he speaks with leaders in government, business, and science to discuss how society can recover from, and solve challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic.