Eric Schmidt

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. Since coming to Google, Schmidt has focused 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. Along with Page and Brin, Schmidt shares responsibility for Google's day-to-day operations.

Schmidt's Novell experience culminated a 20-year record of achievement as an Internet strategist, entrepreneur and developer of great technologies. Schmidt's well-seasoned perspective perfectly complements Google's needs as a young and rapidly growing search engine with a unique corporate culture.

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.