ERIC E. SCHMIDT

www.google.com

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Birth Place : Washington, DC

Net worth : $4.4 billion USD (2009)

Eric Emerson Schmidt, 54, Who is an engineer, Chairman/CEO of Google Inc. and a former member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. 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.

Schmidt joined Google’s board of directors as chairman in March 2001 and became the company’s CEO in August 2001. At Google, Schmidt shares responsibility for Google’s daily operations with founders Page and Brin. As indicated by page 29 of Google’s 2004 S-1 Filing Schmidt, Page, and Brin run Google as a triumvirate. Schmidt possesses the legal responsibilities typically assigned to the CEO of a public company and focuses on management of the vice presidents and the sales organization.

According to Google’s website, Schmidt also focuses on “building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google’s rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while product development cycle times are kept to a minimum. While CEO of Google in 2008, Schmidt earned a base salary of just $1, and other compensation of $508,763. He did not receive any cash, stock, or options. Schmidt is one of the few people who have become billionaires (USD) based on stock options received as an employee in a corporation of which he was neither a relative nor the founder.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recruited Eric Schmidt from Novell, where he led that company’s strategic planning, management and technology development as chairman and CEO. Prior to his appointment at Novell, Eric was chief technology officer and corporate executive officer at Sun Microsystems, 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, he 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.

“Technology is always evolving, and companies.. not just search companies.. can’t be afraid to take advantage of change.”

“We don’t have a traditional strategy process, planning process like you’d find in traditional technical companies. It allows Google to innovate very, very quickly, which I think is a real strength of the company.”

“I’m able to bring business expertise but, more importantly, operating experience. The people here at Google are young. Every day there are lots of new challenges. I keep things focused. The speech I give everyday is: “This is what we do. Is what you are doing consistent with that, and does it change the world?”

“It’s a mistake to predict the size of markets that are so new. This model has shown no signs of slowing down. So we are going to get as much of it as we possibly can, and when we get close to that we’ll figure out other problems.”

“Search companies, which I won’t mention by name, tried to do so many things at the same time, they forgot all about search. They either missed the next revolution of search or they created an opening for a Google to enter.”