Eric Schmidt
Eric Emerson Schmidt is an American businessman and software engineer. He is currently chairman of the US Department of Defense’s “Innovation Board”. He is known for being the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, Executive chairman of Google from 2011 to 2015 and executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017.
- Eric Schmidt left the board of Google parent company Alphabet in June 2019 after serving as a director for 18 years. He remains a technical advisor.
- Schmidt was Google‘s CEO from 2001 to 2011; prior to that he had stints as CEO of Novell and chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems.
- Schmidt serves on the Defense Department’s innovation board and is a visiting innovation fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well.
- He co-founded Innovation Endeavors, a venture capital firm that has invested in Uber, SoFi, and Zymergen, among others.
- In May 2015, his family’s investment vehicle bought a 20% stake in hedge fund firm D.E. Shaw & Co. for an undisclosed price.
