Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt is an investor and executive chairman of Google. The company’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, recruited Schmidt from Novell to serve as CEO from 2001-2011. At Novell, Schmidt led that company’s strategic planning, management and technology development as chairman and CEO.

At Google, Schmidt focused on building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google’s rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remained high while product development cycle times were kept to a minimum.

Prior to his appointment at Novell, Schmidt was chief technology officer and corporate executive officer at Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he led the development of Java, Sun’s platform-independent programming technology, and defined Sun’s Internet software strategy. Before joining Sun in 1983, Schmidt was a member of the research staff at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and held positions at Bell Laboratories and Zilog. Schmidt has a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University, and a master’s and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California-Berkeley.