Business
Eric Schmidt
Chief executive of Google 2001–2011
Born 1955
Photo: Charles Haynes · CC BY-SA 2.0
«We run this company on questions, not answers.»
Eric Schmidt was brought in to run Google when its founders were in their twenties, and led it from a search engine into one of the world's largest companies. He had earlier worked on Unix tools that programmers still use.
Key achievements
- Chief executive of Google, 2001–2011
- Co-authored the Unix tool lex as a graduate student
Universities
Berkeley, California
Took his master's and 1982 PhD in computer science, working on software for distributed systems.
Princeton, New Jersey
Took a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1976.
Facts
- As a graduate student he helped write lex, a tool for building compilers that is still part of the Unix toolchain.
- Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed him for hours and reportedly argued with him about technical decisions before hiring him.
- He has since funded large philanthropic programmes in ocean science and artificial intelligence research.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.