Eric Schmidt

Eric Emerson Schmidt (b. 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 Princeton University Board of Trustees.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 bachelor of science in electrical engineering. He has also obtained a MS in 1979 and a PhD in 1982 in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley. He was joint author of lex, a lexical parser and an important tool for compiler construction and taught at Stanford University as a part time professor of business.

Previous and current work

Schmidt left Novell after the acquisition of Cambridge Technology Partners. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (with the assistance of executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, Inc.) recruited Eric Schmidt to run their company in 2001 under the influence of venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz.

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.

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 neither he nor a relative was the founder. "Earlier this year, he pulled in almost $90 million from sales of Google stock and made at least another $50 million selling shares in the past two months as the stock leaped to more than $300 a share.In its 2006 'World's Richest People' list, Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 129th richest person in the world (the ranking was shared by Onsi Sawiris, Alexei Kuzmichov, and Robert Rowling) with an estimated wealth of $6.2 billion.

Schmidt was elected to Apple's board of directors on August 28, 2006.

In 2007, Schmidt was cited by PC World as #1 on the list of the 50 Most Important People on the Web, along with Google co-Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.He is also on the list of ARTnews 200 top art collectors.

from www.wikipedia.org