Part IThe Story
The Desk on the Water
The joke depended on the cable.
On an April Fool's Day in the 1980s, engineers at Sun Microsystems took apart the office of the man who ran their software organization and rebuilt it on a platform in the middle of a pond. A cruder prank would have stopped at the furniture: desk on the water, chair on the desk, executive standing on the bank in a pressed shirt doing the arithmetic on how wet he was about to get. They did not stop there. The office went out onto the pond with a working telephone, and on the desk sat a workstation still wired into the corporate Ethernet. The man marooned in the middle of the water could, in principle, keep reading his mail. Grainy footage of the stunt survives in the archives, uploaded decades later by people who evidently thought it worth preserving. Whether Eric Schmidt ever waded out and sat down at that desk, the record does not say. What the record does establish is the logic of the gag. You could pick him up, carry him away from everyone, set him down alone in the middle of a pond, and he would still be on the network.
The following year, the same pranksters disassembled a working Volkswagen Beetle and reassembled it inside his office.
One joke isolates him. The other fills his room with something that has no business being there and makes it run anyway. Taken together they describe, with more accuracy than most of what has since been written about him, the career that followed. Eric Emerson Schmidt has spent fifty years as the connection rather than the endpoint, the man who keeps the line open between people who would otherwise not speak to each other, and the man into whose office the world keeps cramming improbable machines. He did not found Google. He did not write PageRank. He did not buy Android; that was done, in 2005, without his knowledge. He has nonetheless been, in roughly this order: co-author of a Unix utility at twenty; designer of the network that first stitched together the computers at Berkeley; the first software manager at Sun; chief executive of a networking company that the network itself destroyed; the hired adult at Google for a decade; executive chairman of Google and then of Alphabet; chairman of the Pentagon's innovation board; co-chairman of a national commission on artificial intelligence; two-time co-author with Henry Kissinger; the patron of a research ship named after a dragon from a children's movie; a limited partner in an NFL team; a citizen of Cyprus; an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire; and, since March 2025, at sixty-nine, the chief executive of a rocket company.
Bloomberg estimates his fortune at $64.3 billion. For a man who has never been the founder of anything famous, that is a great deal of money. It is also the price of being the cable.
By the Numbers
The Connector's Ledger
14,331,703Class B shares granted on joining Google in 2001, at $0.30 each
$1Annual base salary at Google, 2004 through 2010
19Years at Google and Alphabet before leaving in February 2020
$100MEquity award on stepping down as CEO in 2011
$415MSettlement paid by Adobe, Apple, Google and Intel in the no-poach litigation
$64.3BEstimated net worth, Bloomberg Billionaires Index, 2026
69His age on becoming CEO of Relativity Space, March 2025
The Economist's Son Learns to Parse
The middle name came from the father. Wilson Emerson Schmidt was a professor of international economics, first at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and later at Johns Hopkins, and during the Nixon administration he went to work at the United States Treasury, which is to say that the household Eric grew up in was organized around a man whose expertise was the flow of money across borders and whose career eventually carried him into the machinery of the federal government. Eleanor Schmidt held a master's degree in psychology. There were three sons. For part of Eric's childhood the family lived in Italy, on account of the father's work, and Schmidt has said that the stay changed his outlook. He has not, in the public record, been especially specific about how. It is the kind of statement that accumulates meaning only in retrospect, once you know that the boy who spent a stretch of his childhood as a foreigner would spend his late career flying to Pyongyang and Naypyidaw and the Vatican to explain the internet to people who had not asked.
He was born in Falls Church, Virginia, on April 27, 1955, and the family moved to Blacksburg before eventually settling closer to the capital. He graduated in 1972 from Yorktown High School in Arlington County, just across the Potomac from the city where his father's government worked, and he left with eight varsity letters in long-distance running. Not sprinting. Not the glamour events. The long ones, where the work is mostly invisible and consists of not stopping.
At Princeton he enrolled as an architecture major. He switched to electrical engineering and took a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in 1976. The swap is worth pausing on, because almost everything he built afterward was a kind of architecture conducted in a different medium: not buildings but the structures that let buildings full of people coordinate. Decades later, he and his wife would pay to rebuild Princeton's Guyot Hall as a new home for the university's computer science department, a structure to be called Eric and Wendy Schmidt Hall. The architecture student got his building eventually. It just turned out to be for the engineers.
The summer jobs were at Bell Labs, in research and development, and it was there, working with a researcher named Mike Lesk, that Schmidt co-wrote a program called Lex. The technical documentation, "Lex – A Lexical Analyzer Generator," is dated July 21, 1975, and it went into the seventh edition of the Unix Programmer's Manual. Schmidt was twenty. Lex is a program used in compiler construction; it generates lexical analyzers from regular-expression descriptions. In plainer terms, it builds the part of a compiler that reads an undifferentiated stream of characters and decides where the words are, the first and least glamorous step in getting a machine to understand anything at all. No one gets famous for the lexer. Everyone downstream depends on it.
From Princeton he went west, to the University of California, Berkeley, where from 1976 to 1980 he lived at International House. His master's degree, awarded in 1979, was earned for designing and implementing Berknet, a network linking the campus computer center with the computer science and electrical engineering departments. His PhD followed in 1982. The dissertation was titled Controlling Large Software Development in a Distributed Environment, and it concerned the problems of managing software development when the people doing it are not in the same place, along with tools for solving those problems.
Line the three documents up and the résumé reads like a prophecy written by someone with no gift for prophecy, just an accurate sense of his own temperament. A tool that parses. A network that connects. A theory of managing smart people who are not in the room. He would spend the next forty years doing nothing else, at steadily increasing scale.
At International House, in 1977, he met Wendy Boyle. She had been born in July 1955 in New Jersey, the second of five children and the only girl; she had graduated from Smith that year with a dual degree in anthropology and sociology and had come to Berkeley for a master's in journalism. An anthropologist and a journalist: someone trained to watch how groups of people actually behave, and then to tell the story. They married in June 1980.
Employee Number Forty-Two
Wendy got to Sun first.
After graduate school she had worked in marketing at Plexus Computers, and in 1982 she was recruited into the marketing department of Sun Microsystems, where she was employee number forty-two. Eric arrived the following year, in 1983, as Sun's first software manager. The company was young enough that a forty-two could still mean something; the software organization was young enough that it had needed someone to be first. He rose through the ranks with the regularity of a man running long distances: director of software engineering, vice president and general manager of the software products division, vice president of the general systems group, and finally president of Sun Technology Enterprises. Wendy left in 1986, after the company went public, studied interior design at Cañada College, and ran her own design firm for sixteen years. The architecture gene, it seems, was in the marriage twice.
It was during these years that the pranks happened, the desk on the pond and the Beetle in the office. These are not the sort of jokes engineers play on people they fear. They are the jokes you play on the grown-up who will take it well, who is senior enough to be worth the effort and secure enough not to fire anyone over it. There is a particular kind of affection in disassembling a man's car and rebuilding it next to his filing cabinet.
Sun's footprint on what came next is almost comically large, and it is worth tracing because it tells you how small the world was that produced the world we now live in. Sun's co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim would, in the late 1990s, write a check for $100,000 made out to "Google, Inc." The problem, as Mark Malseed later recounted, was that Google, Inc. did not yet exist; the company had not been incorporated, and for two weeks, while two Stanford graduate students handled the paperwork, they had nowhere to deposit the money. Bechtolsheim, the hardware savant who had helped build the workstation company that wired an executive's desk into a pond, made the first outside bet on the company that would eventually hire that executive.
And when Larry Page described the state of his research project in the late 1990s, before it had become Google, he listed the hardware. "BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on a Sun Ultra series II with 28GB of disk." The search engine that would reorganize human knowledge was, in its infancy, sitting on the machines Schmidt's company sold. Its first outside money came from Schmidt's company's founder. Its eventual chief executive was Schmidt's company's former software chief. Its future chief executive's wife had been Sun employee number forty-two.
Nobody planned this. That is rather the point. The network was already there before anyone thought to call it one.
What the Network Took Away
In April 1997, the month he turned forty-two, Schmidt became chairman and chief executive of Novell.
It is the chapter his admirers move through quickly. Novell had built its fortune on NetWare and on IPX, its own proprietary networking protocol, the plumbing that connected the office PCs of a large share of corporate America. By the time Schmidt arrived, the plumbing was being replaced. Open TCP/IP products, built on the protocol suite of the internet, were displacing IPX, and Microsoft was shipping free TCP/IP stacks inside Windows 95. The thing Novell charged for, the rest of the world now gave away. Novell became much less profitable. Schmidt presided over the decline, and in 2001, after the company's acquisition of Cambridge Technology Partners, he departed.
It would be easy to call this a failure, and it was one. It is also the most instructive four years of his career, because it was the only time he sat on the losing side of the argument he would spend the rest of his life making. Novell was a closed network beaten by an open one, a company whose product was the connection discovering that connections, once standardized, become free. A man who had written his master's thesis on wiring a campus together learned, from the inside of a failing company, exactly what happens to anyone who tries to own the wire.
He took the lesson and inverted it into a doctrine. Schmidt came to predict that, because of the growth of bandwidth, computers would depend less on the speed of their own processors than on their network connections. The network, effectively, would become the computer. The writer George Gilder named the idea after him.
— George Gilder, describing 'Schmidt's law' in Forbes, January 2007When the network becomes as fast as the backplane of your computer, the computer hollows out, its components dispersing across the Web, its value migrating to search and sort functions.
Read that sentence with Novell in mind and it stops being a forecast and becomes a confession. The value migrates. It does not stay with the hardware or with whoever owns the pipe. It flows to whoever can search and sort, which in 2001 meant a three-year-old company in Mountain View that was running, as it happened, on Sun Ultras.
A 2009 piece in VentureBeat traced Google's Chrome operating system, a laptop operating system built on the premise that almost everything lives on the web, back to roots in Schmidt's past. It is the kind of continuity that seems inevitable afterward. At the time it was a man who had just lost a war over networking protocols walking into the building of the people who had, without quite meaning to, won it.
The Only Candidate Who Had Been to Burning Man
Larry Page was six years old when his father brought home an Exidy Sorcerer. The father, Carl Victor Page Sr., was a computer science professor at Michigan State whom a BBC reporter would later describe as a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence; the mother, Gloria, taught computer programming at the same university. The house in East Lansing, Page remembered, "was usually a mess, with computers, science, and technology magazines and Popular Science magazines all over the place." He was the first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor. He played saxophone at Interlochen and later credited the music for his obsession with speed: "In music, you're very cognizant of time. Time is like the primary thing." As an undergraduate at Michigan he built an inkjet printer out of Lego bricks. He would fret, for the rest of his career, over milliseconds.
Sergey Brin was six when his family left Moscow. They had lived in a three-room apartment in the center of the city, shared with Sergey's paternal grandmother. In 1977, returning from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, his father Mikhail announced that, because of antisemitism in the Soviet Union, it was time to emigrate. The family applied for exit visas in September 1978; Mikhail was promptly fired, and Eugenia, for related reasons, had to leave her job. For eight months they lived on temporary work, afraid they would become refuseniks. The visas came in May 1979. They passed through Vienna and Paris, helped by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and landed in the United States on October 25, 1979. Thirty years later, in 2009, Brin gave $1 million to the organization that had carried his family across.
A professor's son who grew up among machines and an émigré's son who grew up among mathematicians met at a Stanford orientation and, by most accounts, disagreed about nearly everything until they didn't. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalled of the project Page was building, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry." They rented Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park for $1,700 a month. By June 2000 the search engine they built had indexed a billion URLs.
Then the money came with conditions. Before Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, the two most prominent investors in Silicon Valley, agreed to put a combined $50 million into Google, they pressed Page to step aside as chief executive so that a more experienced leader could build what they called a "world-class management team." Page resisted, then relented after meeting other technology chief executives, among them Steve Jobs and Intel's Andrew Grove. The venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz guided the search. The founders did the interviewing.
The detail that survives from that search is not about Schmidt's operating record or his doctorate or his years at Sun. It is the line, reported by John Markoff and Gregg Zachary, that he stood out because he "was the only candidate who had been to Burning Man." Brin had praised the festival; he liked that Schmidt had gone. It is an absurd criterion for selecting the chief executive of a company that would become one of the most valuable in history, and it was also, in its way, exactly right. What the founders were testing was not competence. Plenty of candidates were competent. They were testing whether the adult they were being forced to accept would recognize them as the kind of people they were.
He joined the board as chairman in March 2001 and became chief executive in August. He was forty-six; the founders were twenty-eight, or nearly. His offer letter, as Ken Auletta later reported, came with a salary of $250,000, an annual performance bonus, 14,331,703 shares of Class B common stock at thirty cents a share, and 426,892 shares of Series C preferred at $2.34. The common stock cost him a little under $4.3 million. It would make him a billionaire.
In the summer of 2003, BusinessWeek reported that one of Schmidt's first orders of business had been to join his new twenty-something colleagues at Burning Man, "a free-form festival of artistic self-expression held in a Nevada desert lake bed." Back in his office afterward, "tanned and slightly weary," he was quoted as saying, "They're keeping me young." The Beetle, again, in the office. Something that should not fit, made to run.
Adult Supervision
The arrangement Schmidt agreed to at Google had no clean precedent, and he seems to have understood that its strangeness was the job.
Officially he shared responsibility for daily operations with Page and Brin. Before the initial public offering he carried the responsibilities a public-company chief executive would normally carry and focused on managing the vice presidents and the sales organization. Google's own description of his duties, written in the flat diction of an investor-relations page, put it this way: "building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google's rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while the product development cycle times are kept to a minimum." Infrastructure. Quality. Cycle times. The language of a man whose doctorate was about managing distributed software development.
Unofficially, the founders kept the throne. In the eyes of employees Page remained the boss; he gave final approval on every new hire. When Google went public on August 20, 2004, it was Page's signature on the offering, and it made him a billionaire at thirty. Schmidt, for his part, acted in consultation with the founders on everything from building the executive team to creating a system for managing the sales force. He was chief executive of a company in which the decisive authority belonged to two other people, and he made that work for a decade.
The same year as the IPO, Schmidt and the founders agreed to cut their base salaries to one dollar. Schmidt's held there through 2010. His other compensation, as disclosed in proxy statements, was $557,465 in 2006, $508,763 in 2008, and $243,661 in 2009, most of it for personal security and private aircraft charters. In 2009 and 2010 he received no additional stock or options. The gesture was partly theater, since the stock he already held made the salary irrelevant, but theater with a clear message about where his interests lay: with the share price, and therefore with the founders.
The clearest picture of the arrangement is the Android deal. In 2005 Page bought a small mobile-software company called Android for $50 million, in pursuit of his ambition to put handheld computers in everyone's pocket so they could reach Google anywhere. He did it without Schmidt's knowledge. The chief executive, by Nicholas Carlson's account, was not perturbed by so small an acquisition. Page became obsessed with the project and spent long hours with Andy Rubin, its co-founder. By September 2008, T-Mobile was selling the G1, the first Android phone; by 2010, Android accounted for 17.2 percent of handset sales, ahead of Apple for the first time; soon it was the most popular mobile operating system on earth. The most consequential acquisition of Schmidt's tenure was one he heard about afterward. The open, give-it-away mobile platform that would make the Novell lesson into an empire came into the company through the side door, and the man at the front desk let it in.
He had his own frameworks. In December 2005 he gave John Battelle, writing for Business 2.0, his rules for managing innovation, a model that came to be known as 70/20/10: the bulk of the company's effort devoted to the core business, a smaller share to adjacent bets, a sliver to the genuinely new. It is a budget, not a vision, and that was the division of labor. The founders had visions. Schmidt had budgets.
Page would later call the stretch between his two terms as chief executive a period of drift; the reporter Max Nisen called it Page's "lost decade," a period in which he exerted enormous influence through product decisions while becoming, by various accounts, increasingly disconnected and less responsive. Schmidt's decade was the opposite: present, responsive, connected to everyone. In 2007 PC World ranked him first, alongside Page and Brin, on its list of the fifty most important people on the web. In 2011 Forbes put his fortune at $7 billion, 136th in the world.
On January 20, 2011, Google announced that Schmidt would step aside. He broke the news himself, on Twitter, in seven words. "Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!" It is one of the great corporate exit lines, because it names, with a straight face, the thing everyone had been too polite to say for ten years, and because it lets him walk out of the room as the joke rather than the casualty. Google gave him a $100 million equity award. On April 4, 2011, Page became chief executive again, of a company worth more than $180 billion with more than 24,000 employees.
What Page did with the job is its own story: a "zero tolerance for fighting" policy that reversed his old habit of staging furious arguments with Brin as an example for senior management; more than seventy products shut down by March 2013; a $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility, largely for its patents, sold to Lenovo in 2014 for $2.9 billion. Schmidt, meanwhile, became executive chairman, then executive chairman of the holding company called Alphabet, then a technical adviser. He wrote, with Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's former senior vice president of products, and Alan Eagle, a New York Times bestseller called How Google Works, arguing that the old rules of corporate management had changed, that companies should hire smart creative people and maximize their freedom and speed, and that decisions should not rest in the hands of a few. It is a generous book, written by a man who for a decade held a title whose decisive powers rested, as a practical matter, in the hands of two.
On December 21, 2017, he announced he would step down as Alphabet's executive chairman. "Larry, Sergey, Sundar and I all believe that the time is right in Alphabet's evolution for this transition." In February 2020 he left the technical adviser's post as well. Nineteen years. Long distance.
The Paper Trail
There is another Eric Schmidt in the court filings, and he writes shorter emails.
By early 2005, according to documents later unsealed in the High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, Schmidt was involved in an arrangement among Silicon Valley companies not to recruit one another's employees. On February 18, 2005, by one filing's account, he "got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple." Google kept what was called a "Do Not Call list" of companies whose people it would not cold-call. That same year, Google's human resources director asked Schmidt how its no-cold-call agreements should be communicated to competitors. His answer is now part of the public record.
— Eric Schmidt, 2005 email to Google's HR director, as quoted in court filingsVerbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?
The question mark is the most human punctuation in the entire corpus of Schmidt's public utterances. It is the sound of a man checking his instinct against someone else's, and the instinct is to leave no record.
On August 28, 2006, Schmidt was elected to Apple's board of directors. He served until August 2009. In March 2007, while a director of Apple, he received a complaint from Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder, about a Google recruiter who had contacted an Apple engineer. He forwarded it to his HR department. "I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple and this is a direct inbound request. Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly so please let me know as soon as you can. Thanks Eric." The recruiter, according to the documents, was "terminated within the hour." When the emails surfaced, the headlines were brutal, and the litigation that followed ended with Adobe, Apple, Google and Intel paying a combined $415 million to settle claims from employees whose wages the arrangement had suppressed. There had, in the end, been a paper trail. There always is.
Set beside that email the public philosophy of privacy Schmidt was articulating in the same years, and the effect is less hypocrisy than a kind of tragic symmetry. In 2005 he said, as CNN Money paraphrased him, that there has to be a trade-off between privacy concerns and functionality, and he invoked the company motto, "Don't Be Evil," in its defense. On December 3, 2009, in a CNBC documentary called Inside the Mind of Google, he was asked whether people should treat Google like their most trusted friend. "I think judgment matters," he said. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." He went on to note that search engines retain information for some time and that Americans are subject to the Patriot Act. At the Techonomy conference on August 4, 2010, he went further: the only way to manage the challenges technology posed was "much greater transparency and no anonymity," because in an era of asymmetric threats, "true anonymity is too dangerous."
He did not, apparently, apply the standard to Google's tax arrangements, which he described in December 2012, when asked about the company's use of corporate structures to avoid billions of pounds in British corporation tax, as "capitalism." He was, he said, "very proud of it." A British MP, not long afterward, told a Google executive, "I think that you do evil." The motto had become an accusation.
Then something shifted, or seemed to. At the Hay Festival in May 2013, Schmidt worried aloud that the sharing of personal information had become too rampant and could harm teenagers in particular. "We have never had a generation with a full photographic, digital record of what they did," he said, and then, remarkably: "We have a point at which we forget information we know about you because it is the right thing to do. There are situations in life that it's better that they don't exist." That autumn, having said government surveillance was "the nature of our society" and that he would not "pass judgment on that," he learned that the National Security Agency had been secretly tapping into Google's data centers around the world, and he called it "outrageous."
There are two readings available. In one, a man's views matured as the technology he championed revealed its costs. In the other, a man consistently believed that records are fine for other people. The honest answer is that the material supports both, and that Schmidt has never seemed especially troubled by the tension. He is, after all, the co-author of Lex. He knows better than almost anyone that the machine reads every character.
In 2024, speaking to students at Stanford, he suggested that a startup could release a product built on someone else's intellectual property and, if it succeeded, simply hire lawyers to "clean up the mess." In the same talk, he reportedly blamed remote work for Google's struggles in the AI race. The video of the session was posted online. Then, as TechCrunch put it in a headline on August 14, 2024, it "mysteriously vanishes." By then the quotes had been transcribed by The Verge, Fortune, and everyone else. The record had already been made.
Diplomacy by Other Means
The economist's son was always going to end up in Washington. The only question was by what route.
The first route was electoral. During the week of October 19, 2008, while chief executive of Google, Schmidt began campaigning for Barack Obama, whom he had advised informally and supported as a major donor. He was mentioned as a possible chief technology officer in the new administration and considered for commerce secretary. He took neither; instead he joined the transition advisory board and then the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. That same year he succeeded the journalist James Fallows as chairman of New America, a Washington think tank, a post he held until 2016. (A year after he left it, The New York Times reported that a Google critic had been ousted from the think tank, which Google funded. The connections ran in more than one direction.) He later invested in The Groundwork and its parent, Timshel, startups associated with Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign; The Groundwork charged the campaign $177,000 in the second quarter of 2015 alone, and by May 2016 the campaign had spent $500,000 on it.
The second route was diplomatic, or quasi-diplomatic, and it ran through Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, the company's in-house think tank. In 2010 the two co-wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs, "The Digital Disruption," about connectivity and the diffusion of power. It grew into a book, The New Digital Age, published in 2013, for which, according to its publisher, they traveled to thirty-five countries, some of them among the world's most volatile, to meet political leaders, entrepreneurs, and activists. The blurbs read like a seating chart at a state dinner: Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Walter Isaacson, and Henry Kissinger, who called it "a searching meditation on technology and world order."
The book's premise was that five billion people would come online within a decade, and that the network would reshape revolution, terrorism, diplomacy, and war. Its authors went out to test it. In January 2013, Schmidt flew to North Korea with Cohen, the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, and his daughter Sophie. The trip was heavily publicized and widely criticized, given the tensions between Pyongyang and Washington; the Boston Globe would later describe it as revealing both the limits and the benefits of private diplomacy. Seven months later, on August 10, 2013, North Korea's state news agency announced a domestically manufactured smartphone called the Arirang. A South Korean industry manager who examined the photographs said the phone appeared to run Android, though he doubted the North was actually manufacturing it. If the visiting delegation's message had been that the hermit kingdom should open itself to the network, the answer, it seemed, was a closed phone running the open operating system Schmidt's company had acquired without telling him.
In March 2013 he went to Myanmar, emerging from decades of military rule, and told its leaders that a free and open internet could anchor reform. He and Cohen met with Pope Francis at the Vatican, the first such meeting between the pontiff and a technology leader; others followed. He co-chaired the 2015 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, under the theme "The New Global Context." He became a regular at Bilderberg, a listed member of the Trilateral Commission, a director of the Berggruen Institute and a member of its 21st Century Council, and a participant in Dialog, the invitation-only gathering founded by Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman. He served on the boards of the Institute for Advanced Study, the Khan Academy, and The Economist. He taught at Stanford's business school. He was a trustee of Princeton, of Carnegie Mellon, of the Mayo Clinic.
Somewhere in this period, the convener became indistinguishable from the network he convened. It is hard to find a room of consequence in which Schmidt was not, at some point, seated. This is not a criticism, exactly. It is a description of a form of power that has no title and appears on no organization chart, a power that consists of being the person everyone else already knows. His father moved between universities and the Treasury. The son moved between Mountain View and everywhere.
And in the middle of all this, in 2014, he made a cameo in Dumb and Dumber To, and another in the pilot of HBO's Silicon Valley, an episode titled "Minimum Viable Product." The grown-up, again, letting the kids rebuild the car in his office.
The Pentagon's Silicon Valley Man
On March 2, 2016, the Defense Secretary, Ash Carter, announced that Schmidt would chair a new Defense Innovation Advisory Board, modeled on the Pentagon's Defense Business Board and meant to make the department more innovative and adaptive. It was, in its design, a forum for connecting the technology industry to the military: a cable laid across the widest cultural gap in American institutional life.
Schmidt was still on Alphabet's payroll as executive chairman and then as technical adviser. Google was, at the same time, bidding for the Pentagon's multibillion-dollar cloud computing contract, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. To manage the conflict, Schmidt had his emails and other communications screened, and he explained the arrangement in a sentence that deserves to be framed.
— Eric Schmidt, on his role chairing the Defense Innovation BoardThere's a rule: I'm not allowed to be briefed.
In April 2018, Defense One ran a headline that might have been written by the April Fool's pranksters of thirty years earlier: "Eric Schmidt Didn't Know That Google Was Working the Pentagon's AI Project." The man who had not known about Android in 2005 did not know about his own company's military AI work in 2018, and this time the ignorance was not an accident of a founder's enthusiasm but a rule he had imposed on himself. The connector, for once, had deliberately cut a wire. He left the board in November 2020.
He did not leave the work. From 2019 to 2021 he co-chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence with Robert O. Work, a former deputy secretary of defense. He became its first chair while keeping Alphabet shares worth more than $5.3 billion in 2019. The commission's final report, in March 2021, concluded that the United States was "not prepared to defend or compete in the A.I. era," and it found what one news outlet called "extraordinary" support for creating a technology-focused service academy. In July 2020 he had already begun working with the government on such a college, to train coders, cybersecurity experts, and scientists.
In 2017 he had founded Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic venture. Under his tenure, Schmidt Futures paid the compensation of two employees in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In March 2022, Politico reported that "a Google billionaire's fingerprints are all over Biden's science office." In October 2021 he founded the Special Competitive Studies Project, a successor of sorts to the commission, and became its chairman; a year later he and Ylli Bajraktari, the commission's former executive director, wrote in Foreign Affairs that "America Could Lose the Tech Contest With China." In 2022 he was appointed to the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. In 2023 he testified to the House Oversight Committee on artificial intelligence. By May 2024, Politico was calling him "D.C.'s new AI matchmaker." In April 2025 he told Congress that "our energy system will become the Achilles heel of our AI ambitions," a line he would repeat in a Fortune op-ed in March 2026 arguing that data centers should build their own power plants rather than raise ordinary Americans' electric bills.
The intellectual scaffolding came from the same man who had blurbed his first book. In 2021 Schmidt published The Age of AI: And Our Human Future with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher; in November 2024 came Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit, with Kissinger and Craig Mundie. The pairing has a certain logic. Kissinger was the twentieth century's most famous practitioner of statecraft conducted in rooms; Schmidt was the twenty-first century's most persistent practitioner of the same thing, conducted between rooms.
Meanwhile, the money followed the thesis. Schmidt invested in startups building military technology: Rebellion Defense, which Forbes would describe as a $1 billion military AI startup "hyped by Silicon Valley" that "wound up in a nosedive"; Istari; Swift Beat; and White Stork, later Perennial Autonomy, which developed a counter-drone system called Merops. Forbes reported that he was testing AI military drones, secretly, in a wealthy Silicon Valley suburb. In late 2025 a Ukrainian defense publication reported that Merops had already downed more than a thousand Shahed drones. Wired titled its profile of the project "Eric Schmidt Is Building the Perfect AI War-Fighting Machine." He chaired SandboxAQ, a quantum computing and AI company spun out of Alphabet in 2022, which in December 2024 raised $300 million at a $5.3 billion valuation, the same figure, give or take, as the Alphabet stake he had kept while running the AI commission. His family office, Hillspire, founded in 2006, invested in more than twenty-two AI companies after 2019, and in 2026 CNBC ranked it the most active family office in the country.
A New York Times investigation of his Pentagon activities, in May 2020, ran under the headline "'I Could Solve Most of Your Problems.'" Whoever said it first, it is the most accurate four-word summary anyone has produced of what it means to be the person in the middle. The connector does not solve problems directly. He connects the problem to the solution, and takes a position in both.
In December 2025 he predicted that China would fall behind the United States in AI for lack of financial-market funding, while conceding that China was ahead in open-source AI. Open source. The free protocol. The thing that killed Novell. He has been watching that particular race for thirty years.
Ballast
If the network was Eric's medium, water was Wendy's.
In 2005 she founded the 11th Hour Project, which raised awareness about climate change and renewable energy and helped distribute the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. In 2006 the couple established the Schmidt Family Foundation, with assets of more than $1 billion, including $307 million in Google Class A stock. She became its president and has directed its grant-making ever since. In March 2009 they founded the Schmidt Ocean Institute. Its first vessel was the Lone Ranger, a 255-foot former ocean tug donated by the insurance billionaire Peter B. Lewis. In 2012 the institute finished retrofitting a former German fisheries protection vessel into a research ship and renamed it Falkor, after the luckdragon in The Neverending Story, a detail that is either whimsical or deeply sincere and is probably both. In 2015 Falkor became the first oceanographic research vessel with a high-performance computing system aboard. In 2023 it was succeeded by Falkor (too), a 110-meter converted offshore support ship with eight laboratories and one of the largest cranes on any research vessel.
The institute's arrangement with scientists is an exchange worth understanding. Ship time is free. In return, the researchers commit to sharing their outcomes openly, including raw observations and data, and every dive of the ship's remotely operated vehicle, a robot called SuBastian, is streamed live to the public. It is Schmidt's 2010 argument for "much greater transparency" applied to the deep sea, where it costs no one anything but the fish their privacy.
The discoveries accumulated. The world's deepest known living fish, in the Mariana Trench. A siphonophore filmed off Australia in March 2020 that was likely the longest animal on Earth. A detached coral reef at the Great Barrier Reef more than 1,640 feet tall, the first of its kind found in more than 120 years. More than a million square kilometers of seafloor mapped.
Wendy took up competitive sailing in 2007. She became skipper of a boat called Deep Blue, and in 2022 she won the fifty-fourth Barcolana regatta in Trieste, the world's largest sailing race, the first American and the first woman ever to do so. In 2008 she founded ReMain to sustain the year-round life of downtown Nantucket, working with the San Francisco firm Hart Howerton, which specializes in large-scale land use. The interior designer and the architecture dropout had, between them, found their way back to building things people live in.
The philanthropy grew in the direction of everything Eric had touched. A $25 million fund at Princeton in 2009 for transformative technology. A $10 million gift to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 2015. Two million dollars to Virginia Tech's College of Engineering, endowing the Paul and Dorothea Torgersen Dean's Chair in honor of the university's former president, a longtime friend; in May 2015 Schmidt gave the commencement address in Blacksburg, the town of his childhood. In 2017, the Schmidt Science Fellows, created with the Rhodes Trust as part of a $100 million commitment, paying postdocs $100,000 to study a field outside their own. In 2019, Rise, also with the Rhodes Trust, more than $5 million a year to find teenagers from lower-income countries interested in public service. In 2021, $150 million to found the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute, combining machine learning and biology, where Schmidt chaired the board from 2021 to 2025. In 2022, $12.6 million to Berkeley, where they had met, for a center for data science and the environment. In 2024, Schmidt Sciences. In 2024, too, Britain made him an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, for services to philanthropy.
The year 2017 sits in the middle of this list, and it is the year to read slowly. In June, the couple's daughter Alison died of an illness. That same year, the Schmidts created the Schmidt Science Fellows and Eric founded Schmidt Futures; in December, he announced he would step down as executive chairman of Alphabet. The public record draws no line between the death and the decisions, and there is no reason for an outsider to draw one. It is enough to note that they happened in the same year, and that the man who had spent his life keeping lines open was, that year, closing several.
The marriage itself has been a public matter in ways neither partner chose. A number of Eric's extramarital relationships drew press attention over the years. The joint philanthropy continued. In late 2024 he reached a settlement with Michelle Ritter, with whom he had co-founded a technology startup called Steel Perlot; in 2025 she sued him in Los Angeles, alleging assault and surveillance and seeking to undo the agreement and avoid arbitration. Schmidt denied the allegations and called the suit an attempt at extortion. In June 2026 an arbitrator, Judge Beth Andrus, found Ritter's allegations false, described them as "self-centered efforts to obtain revenge," and ordered her to pay Schmidt $10.7 million. The paper trail, this time, ran in his favor.
The other details of the late life come in the form of property records and lists. In September 2020 he paid $30.8 million for a 22,000-square-foot estate overlooking Santa Barbara. In November 2020, Recode reported that he was finalizing his plan to become a citizen of Cyprus through an investor program that sells passports good for residence anywhere in the European Union; he became one of its highest-profile customers. In 2023 and 2024, the carbon emissions of his Gulfstream 650 put him at the top of lists of the most polluting private-jet owners, an unflattering statistic for the co-founder of an ocean institute. In 2023 he joined the investment group led by Josh Harris that bought the Washington Commanders for $6.05 billion, a minority stake in a football team that plays in the region where his father once worked for the Treasury. The boy from Arlington owns a piece of the home team.
Launch Window
In March 2025, having acquired a controlling stake in Relativity Space, a rocket startup, Schmidt made himself its chief executive. He was sixty-nine. It was the first time since leaving Novell that he had run a company outright, without founders above him or beside him, and he chose to do it in the one industry where the hardware is, very literally, the point, and where no amount of bandwidth can hollow out the machine. It is hard to say what this means. Perhaps nothing more than that a very rich man found the most interesting problem available and bought it. Perhaps something more like an old man going back to the architecture department.
A little more than a year later, on a May morning in 2026, he gave the commencement address at the University of Arizona. He compared the arrival of artificial intelligence to the arrival of the computer. The graduates booed him. He pressed on. "The question is not whether AI will shape the world," he told them. "It will. The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence." The clips spread, as clips do, under headlines that led with the booing. Somebody uploaded the full, unedited speech. The record was made, again, whether anyone wanted it or not.
It is the oldest version of his message, delivered to the newest audience. The network is coming. It will take the value from wherever you think it lives and move it somewhere else. You can be on the wrong side of that, as he was at Novell, or you can be the person who keeps the connection open. He has made the argument to twenty-something founders in a Nevada lake bed, to the Pope, to generals, to a hermit kingdom, to Congress. The students in Tucson were simply the first audience to answer him out loud.
The same month he took the controls at Relativity, in March 2025, the Falkor (too) was working in the South Atlantic near the South Sandwich Islands. SuBastian went down on its tether to about six hundred meters. There, in the dark, its cameras found a juvenile colossal squid, roughly thirty centimeters long, translucent as a glass sculpture: the first colossal squid ever filmed alive. Nobody on the ship had to decide whether to share it. Like every dive, it was already streaming.
A long way from the pond. A working camera, a long cable, and a line still open to the surface.
Part IIThe Playbook
Schmidt's career offers something rarer than a founder's playbook: the operating manual of the person who is not the founder, who is brought in to be the infrastructure under someone else's vision, and who turns that position into a fortune, a decade of corporate stewardship, and a second career as one of the most connected people in public life. What follows are twelve principles drawn from the record, including two that are warnings rather than recommendations. The pattern holds across fifty years: be the connection, price yourself into alignment, give away the protocol, and assume, always, that someone is keeping the record.
The principles
- 1.Build the plumbing everyone else stands on.
- 2.Take the title, leave the throne.
- 3.Price your ego at a dollar.
- 4.Learn the lesson of the war you lost.
- 5.Pass the culture test before you run the company.
- 6.Budget the future in fixed proportions.
- 7.Announce your own obsolescence, and make it a joke.
- 8.Convert operating credibility into convening power.
- 9.Write the essay, then the book, then the institution.
- 10.Name the conflict out loud, and know its limits.
- 11.Trade resources for openness.
- 12.Assume the record is permanent.
S
The Long-Distance Career
Fifty years of connecting things, in sequence.
1975
Co-writes Lex with Mike Lesk at Bell Labs, age twenty.
1979
Earns Berkeley master's for designing Berknet, linking the campus computers.
1983
Joins Sun Microsystems as its first software manager.
1997
Becomes chairman and CEO of Novell as open TCP/IP erodes its business.
2001
Joins Google as chairman in March, CEO in August.
2004
Google IPO; salary cut to $1, held through 2010.
2011
Steps aside: "Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!"
2016
Chairs the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board.
2017
Founds Schmidt Futures; steps down as Alphabet executive chairman.
2021
Founds the Special Competitive Studies Project; NSCAI final report.
2025
Takes control of Relativity Space as CEO at sixty-nine.
Principle 1
Build the plumbing everyone else stands on
Schmidt's first three significant pieces of work were a lexical analyzer, a campus network, and a dissertation on managing distributed software teams. None of them was a product anyone would buy. All of them were things other people's products would depend on. The pattern repeated at Google, where his official job description was "building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google's rapid growth," and in Washington, where his commissions built the policy scaffolding on which administrations would hang their AI strategies.
The career lesson is not modesty for its own sake. Infrastructure is where leverage accumulates quietly, because everything built on top of it inherits a dependency. The person who builds the lexer is invisible; the person who builds the lexer for every compiler in Unix is indispensable. Schmidt rarely occupied the spotlight's center, but he consistently occupied the layer beneath it, and that layer is far harder to replace.
Tactic: Identify the unglamorous system that three or more high-visibility projects in your organization depend on, and make yourself its owner.
Principle 2
Take the title, leave the throne
Schmidt was chief executive of Google for a decade while Larry Page approved every hire and signed the IPO. Page bought Android without telling him, and Schmidt, by the available accounts, was not perturbed. Most executives would read either fact as an intolerable humiliation. Schmidt read them as the terms of the deal, and he kept the deal for ten years.
This is a specific and underrated skill: exercising real authority inside a structure where ultimate authority belongs to someone else, without either capitulating or staging a coup. It requires knowing which decisions are yours (sales organization, executive team, operating cadence) and which are theirs (product vision, the soul of the company), and refusing to confuse the two. The professional manager who tries to become the founder destroys the company. The one who forgets he is a manager becomes useless. Schmidt found the narrow channel between.
Tactic: Before accepting a role under strong founders, write down which decisions you will own outright and which you will advise on, and get explicit agreement on the list.
Principle 3
Price your ego at a dollar
In 2004 Schmidt and the founders cut their base salaries to $1. His held there through 2010, and in 2009 and 2010 he took no additional stock or options. Most of his reported compensation in those years went to personal security and private flights, which is to say, to the logistics of being a target rather than to the man himself.
The gesture mattered less for its economics than its signal. Schmidt had joined with 14,331,703 shares at thirty cents; his fortune was already bound to the stock. The dollar salary simply made that alignment legible to employees, shareholders, and, most importantly, to two founders who needed to believe the hired adult wanted what they wanted. When your interests visibly match the people above you, they stop managing you and start trusting you.
Tactic: Structure your compensation so that the people you serve can see, at a glance, that you win only when they win.
Principle 4
Learn the lesson of the war you lost
At Novell, Schmidt watched a proprietary protocol lose to an open standard while Microsoft gave away TCP/IP stacks in Windows 95. He could have filed that experience under bad luck. Instead it became the core of his worldview, crystallized in what George Gilder called Schmidt's law: when the network gets fast enough, the computer hollows out, and value migrates to "search and sort functions."
He then spent a decade at the company that embodied the winning side. Google gave its search away, gave Android away, and built Chrome OS on the premise that the machine matters less than the connection. The most valuable thing Schmidt brought to Mountain View may not have been anything he learned at Sun. It may have been the scar tissue from Provo. Defeat, studied honestly, is a cheaper education than victory, because it tells you exactly where the value went.
Tactic: Write a one-page post-mortem on your most significant professional loss that answers a single question: where did the value go, and who captured it?
Principle 5
Pass the culture test before you run the company
The detail everyone remembers from Google's CEO search is that Schmidt was "the only candidate who had been to Burning Man." It sounds frivolous. It was diagnostic. Page and Brin were being forced by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia to accept outside management, and the question underneath every interview was whether the outsider would recognize them as who they were or try to convert them into something else.
Schmidt then doubled down, joining his twenty-something colleagues at the festival after he started and declaring, "They're keeping me young." The point was not to pretend to be a founder. It was to demonstrate that the adult would not treat the founders' culture as a problem to be managed. A senior hire who arrives with credentials but fails the culture test gets routed around. One who passes gets let into the room where real decisions happen.
Tactic: In your first ninety days in a new organization, participate fully in at least one ritual that the founding team considers sacred, before proposing any change to how things are done.
Principle 6
Budget the future in fixed proportions
Schmidt's 70/20/10 model, which he laid out for John Battelle in 2005, is not a vision statement. It is an allocation rule: most of the effort to the core, a smaller share to adjacent bets, a sliver to the genuinely new. Its genius is that it removes the argument about whether to fund speculation by agreeing in advance how much speculation to fund.
This was the necessary complement to a founder like Page, whose instinct ran toward "10X" moonshots and who would later declare, "If you're not doing some things that are crazy, then you're doing the wrong things." A company run entirely on that instinct burns itself out. A company run entirely on caution ossifies. A fixed ratio lets the visionary dream within a budget and lets the operator defend the core without having to say no to every dream. It turns a fight over values into a conversation about proportions.
7
Founder Instinct vs. Operator Discipline
How Schmidt's frameworks complemented the founders' at Google.
| Question | Founder instinct | Schmidt's operating answer |
|---|---|---|
| How much to bet on the new? | Everything that could be 10X | A fixed slice: 70/20/10 |
| Who decides? | "Do not delegate" | Freedom, speed, decisions not held by the few |
| What is the CEO for? | Pushing people ahead | Infrastructure, quality, cycle times |
| How to pay leadership? | Equity | Equity, plus a $1 salary to make it visible |
| When to leave? | Never, or by stealth | Publicly, in stages, with a punchline |
Tactic: Set an explicit percentage of your team's capacity for experimental work, publish it, and defend the number in both directions: against cuts and against creep.
Principle 7
Announce your own obsolescence, and make it a joke
"Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!" With seven words on Twitter, on January 20, 2011, Schmidt reframed what could have been read as a demotion into the successful completion of a mission. He named the arrangement everyone had politely avoided naming, took ownership of its ending, and walked out as the author of the joke rather than its subject.
The exit was also staged, not sudden: CEO to executive chairman of Google, to executive chairman of Alphabet, to technical adviser, to gone, across nine years. Each step reduced his authority while preserving his relationships, and each came with language, like his 2017 line that "Larry, Sergey, Sundar and I all believe that the time is right," that made the transition sound like consensus rather than ouster. He left Google wealthier, better connected, and more respected than when he arrived, which is a rarer achievement for a hired chief executive than it sounds.
Tactic: Define, before you need it, the condition under which your role becomes unnecessary, and when it arrives, be the first to announce it.
Principle 8
Convert operating credibility into convening power
After Google, Schmidt held almost no line authority for years, yet his influence arguably grew. He chaired the Pentagon's innovation board and a national AI commission, sat on boards from the Mayo Clinic to The Economist, co-chaired Davos, attended Bilderberg, funded White House staff through Schmidt Futures, and became, in Politico's phrase, "D.C.'s new AI matchmaker."
The mechanism is simple to describe and hard to replicate. Ten years running one of the world's most important companies gave him a credibility that no think-tank fellow could match; a vast network gave him the ability to put the right people in a room; and money gave him the ability to fund the room. Convening power compounds, because every gathering adds to the network that makes the next gathering possible. It is the most durable asset an operator can build, and it outlasts every title.
H
The Many Hats
Schmidt's roles, categorized by mode of influence.
| Role | Period | Mode |
|---|---|---|
| Google CEO | 2001–2011 | Operator |
| Apple board director | 2006–2009 | Risk |
| New America chairman | 2008–2016 | Convener |
| Defense Innovation Board chair | 2016–2020 | Convener |
| NSCAI co-chair | 2019–2021 | Convener |
| Schmidt Ocean Institute co-founder | 2009–present | Funder |
| Defense startup investor | 2019–present | Risk |
| Relativity Space CEO | 2025–present | Operator |
Tactic: For every operating role you hold, deliberately cultivate one relationship outside your industry that your current position gives you access to and your next position will need.
Principle 9
Write the essay, then the book, then the institution
Schmidt's public ideas have followed a consistent sequence. In 2010, he and Jared Cohen wrote a Foreign Affairs essay on connectivity and power. In 2013 it became The New Digital Age, backed by travel to thirty-five countries and blurbed by a former president and a former secretary of state. Around it sat Google Ideas, the institutional vehicle. The AI cycle ran the same way: a commission report, a Foreign Affairs piece with the commission's executive director, books with Kissinger, and the Special Competitive Studies Project to carry the work forward.
The sequence matters because each stage buys credibility for the next. The essay tests the idea among elites. The book broadens the audience and creates a reference point. The institution makes the idea permanent and gives it staff, a budget, and a seat at hearings. Most executives with opinions stop at the op-ed. Schmidt treats the op-ed as a prototype.
Tactic: When you have a conviction about your industry's future, publish it first as a short essay, and only build the larger vehicle once you have seen who responds.
Principle 10
Name the conflict out loud, and know its limits
Chairing the Pentagon's innovation board while still advising Alphabet, as Google competed for the JEDI contract, Schmidt adopted a simple, quotable rule: "I'm not allowed to be briefed." He had his communications screened. When critics raised the conflict, he had an answer ready.
The rule worked, in the narrow sense, well enough that he apparently did not know Google was working on the Pentagon's AI project. But the broader record shows its limits: he kept Alphabet shares worth more than $5.3 billion while leading the national AI commission, Schmidt Futures paid the salaries of White House science staff, and his investments in defense startups grew alongside his influence on defense policy. A stated firewall is necessary. It is not sufficient. The connector's greatest asset, being on every side of a relationship, is also his greatest vulnerability, and a single rule cannot fully neutralize it.
Tactic: When you hold overlapping roles, state your recusal rule publicly in one sentence, then list for yourself every interest the rule does not cover.
Principle 11
Trade resources for openness
The Schmidt Ocean Institute's model is an elegant bargain: free ship time on a world-class research vessel, in exchange for openly sharing results and raw data, with every robot dive streamed live. The same logic runs through the family's prizes, like the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge, and through fellowships that pay young scientists to cross disciplines.
It is the Novell lesson turned into philanthropy. Open protocols beat closed ones; open data spreads faster than proprietary data; the funder who demands openness gets far more impact per dollar than the funder who demands credit. The results speak for themselves: the deepest living fish, a likely record-length animal, a 1,640-foot reef, and the first live footage of a colossal squid, all made public the moment they happened. When you hold scarce resources, the most powerful condition you can attach to them is that the results be shared.
Tactic: The next time you provide funding, tools, or access to someone, make openness of the results a condition rather than a request.
Principle 12
Assume the record is permanent
This is the warning the record writes itself. In 2005, Schmidt preferred to share no-poach agreements "verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?" The paper trail appeared anyway, and the litigation ended in a $415 million settlement. In 2009 he told CNBC that if you have something you don't want anyone to know, "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." In 2024, a Stanford video in which he talked about startups hiring lawyers to "clean up the mess" was taken down, but only after its contents had been transcribed everywhere.
For a man who built tools that read every character and argued that anonymity was too dangerous, the irony is sharp but the lesson is general. The systems Schmidt helped build guarantee that almost everything a senior executive writes or says will eventually be read by someone it was not meant for. The only defense is to behave as though the record is already public. His own 2009 standard, applied to himself in 2005, would have saved everyone a good deal of money.
Tactic: Before sending any message about a sensitive decision, ask whether you would be comfortable seeing it quoted verbatim in a court filing, and if not, change the decision rather than the medium.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Eric Schmidt, to BusinessWeek, 2003, after joining Google colleagues at Burning ManThey're keeping me young.
— Eric Schmidt, on Twitter, January 20, 2011Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!
— Eric Schmidt, CNBC, 'Inside the Mind of Google,' December 3, 2009I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
— Eric Schmidt, Hay Festival, 2013We have a point at which we forget information we know about you because it is the right thing to do. There are situations in life that it's better that they don't exist.
— Eric Schmidt, University of Arizona commencement, May 2026The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence.
Maxims
- Own the layer beneath. The person who builds what everyone else stands on is harder to replace than the person standing on top.
- Authority can be shared without being surrendered. Know precisely which decisions are yours and which belong to the founders, and never confuse them.
- Make alignment visible. A one-dollar salary costs nothing and tells everyone whose interests you serve.
- Study where the value went. Every lost market is an exact map of where the next one will form.
- Pass the culture test first. Founders trust the adult who recognizes them before trying to change them.
- Budget speculation in advance. A fixed ratio ends the argument about whether to dream and starts the work of deciding what to dream about.
- Write your own exit line. Leave as the author of the joke, never its subject.
- Credibility compounds into convening power. Titles expire; the ability to fill a room does not.
- Openness is the strongest string to attach. Resources given in exchange for shared results travel farther than resources given for credit.
- Behave as though the record is already public. In a networked world, it eventually is.
