Eric
Schmidt

The Longest Game in Silicon Valley

In March 2025, Eric Schmidt walked into Relativity Space - a rocket startup that 3D-prints its launch vehicles - as CEO and controlling shareholder. He was 69 years old. The previous CEO, Tim Ellis, moved to the board. This is not how most people spend their late sixties. Then again, Eric Schmidt has never been most people.

He designed a proto-internet at UC Berkeley in 1979 as a master's student. He co-authored a Unix tool as a Bell Labs intern that developers still rely on today. He arrived at Google in 2001 when the founders, then 28 and 27, reportedly needed someone who could sit across from a room full of investors without making them nervous. He gave Google a decade of steady organizational architecture while Page and Brin pointed at the horizon and said that way. And then he kept going.

The word "retired" has apparently never entered Schmidt's vocabulary. Since leaving Alphabet in 2020, he has chaired a national AI commission that warned Congress the United States was not prepared for what was coming. He spun a quantum computing company out of Google's moonshot division. He co-authored books with Henry Kissinger. He funded ocean research vessels that filmed a live colossal squid for the first time in human history. And now he is building rockets.

Born in Falls Church, Virginia in 1955, Schmidt grew up partly in Italy - his father Wilson was an international economics professor who worked stints at the U.S. Treasury under Nixon. That early exposure to the intersection of economics, policy, and global power dynamics seems to have stuck. Schmidt is the rare Silicon Valley titan who genuinely reads government procurement documents for fun.

He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from UC Berkeley in 1982. His dissertation was on managing distributed software development - which is either a remarkable piece of foreshadowing or the kind of origin story that only makes sense in retrospect. He then spent 14 years at Sun Microsystems, rising to President of Sun Technology Enterprises, before a stint as CEO of Novell that coincided with Novell's painful collision with Microsoft's strategy of shipping free TCP/IP stacks with Windows 95. You learn a lot about competition watching your company lose a network standards war.

What Schmidt brought to Google was something the founders could not provide themselves: the ability to scale a brilliant, chaotic, genius-dense organization into something that could actually operate at global scale. He hired Jonathan Rosenberg to run product. He built out the sales infrastructure. He convinced Page and Brin to keep the engineers happy while also, occasionally, shipping products on time. When Google went public in 2004, Schmidt, Page, and Brin all adopted $1 annual salaries, banking on equity. By any measure, that worked out.

When Tech CEOs Go to Washington

Most tech founders and executives treat Washington as a regulatory nuisance to manage from a distance. Schmidt moved toward it. He joined the Defense Innovation Advisory Board in 2016. He co-chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence from 2019 to 2021. The NSCAI's final report did not equivocate: the United States was not sufficiently prepared to defend against or compete with China in the AI era. It recommended doubling AI R&D from $2 billion annually to $32 billion by 2026. The report was not ignored.

In 2021, Schmidt founded the Special Competitive Studies Project, a bipartisan nonprofit that continued NSCAI's work on U.S. technological competitiveness. By 2023, he was testifying before the House. By March 2026, he was writing pieces with titles like "China Could Dominate the Physical AI Future." He is not a figure who sounds alarms and then retreats.

The U.S.-China tech race is Schmidt's defining obsession of the 2020s. He frames it not as trade policy but as civilizational stakes - and his frustration with American bureaucratic pace relative to Chinese state-directed investment is evident in everything he writes and funds. The SCSP and Schmidt Sciences both exist, in part, because Schmidt believes the private sector and private philanthropy need to move faster than government can.

Building the Next Thing (and the Thing After That)

Schmidt's post-Google professional life is not a single focused pursuit. It is a portfolio of bets on different versions of the future, running simultaneously.

SandboxAQ was spun out of Alphabet's secretive moonshot division in 2022 with Schmidt as chairman and $500 million in initial funding. It works on quantum computing applications layered with AI - quantum-resistant cybersecurity, drug discovery, quantum navigation. The problems it is trying to solve are decades-long infrastructure questions: how do you secure communications when quantum computers can break existing encryption? How do you find drugs faster when molecular simulation requires quantum-level computation?

Relativity Space is the most surprising chapter. The company 3D-prints its rockets, reducing the number of parts dramatically versus traditional manufacturing. The Terran R is its reusable heavy-lift vehicle, targeting a first orbital launch in late 2026. When Schmidt took the CEO role in March 2025, he took a controlling interest. He is not an advisor or a board observer. He is running the company. At 69.

Innovation Endeavors, his early-stage VC firm co-founded with Dror Berman in 2010, has backed companies including Uber, Planet (the satellite imaging company), AlphaSense, and Atom Computing. It reflects an investment thesis built around physical-world applications of computing - logistics, imaging, sensors, food systems - not just software.

Schmidt Ocean Institute, co-founded with Wendy Schmidt in 2009, operates two research vessels - RV Falkor and RV Falkor (too) - and has mapped over one million square kilometers of seafloor. In March 2025, the Institute captured the first footage of a live colossal squid ever recorded. Separately, it has discovered the likely longest animal on Earth (a siphonophore), the world's deepest living fish in the Mariana Trench, and the largest peaked coral reef documented in 120 years on the Great Barrier Reef. These are not small achievements. They are the kind of scientific firsts that rewrite textbooks.

Five Books on the Machine That Changed Everything

Every Schmidt book is co-authored. He does not write alone, which is itself a data point about how he thinks: collaboratively, across expertise domains, toward a synthesis that no single person could reach alone.

The Details That Define the Man

1. His Ph.D. dissertation at UC Berkeley was titled "Managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems." He then went and managed the largest distributed software company on Earth. The recursion is either coincidental or destiny.
2. Schmidt sat on both Apple's and Google's boards simultaneously from 2006 to 2009 - one of the most audacious conflicts of interest in tech history. The FTC eventually told him to pick a lane. He picked Google.
3. When Steve Jobs called in 2007 to complain that Google was poaching Apple employees, Schmidt personally emailed Google HR. That email later surfaced as evidence in the $415 million antitrust settlement over Silicon Valley's no-hire agreements.
4. In 2009, he told a CNBC interviewer: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." The backlash was immediate and sustained. He did not apologize.
5. He co-authored Lex - a foundational Unix lexical analyzer - as a 20-year-old Bell Labs intern in 1975. Developers building compilers still use derivatives of that tool today.
6. He obtained Cypriot citizenship in 2020 through the country's immigrant investor program - colloquially known as the "golden passport" scheme. Cyprus shut down the program months later after an undercover investigation revealed officials were approving passports for convicted criminals.
7. He earned 8 varsity letters in long-distance running at Yorktown High School. The endurance athlete who became the endurance executive.
8. The Schmidt Ocean Institute has now filmed a live colossal squid for the first time in history (March 2025). For context, the colossal squid is the largest invertebrate on Earth by mass. Scientists had found dead specimens and pieces, but never a living one. Schmidt funded the ship that changed that.

The Foundations Behind the Headlines

Schmidt philanthropy operates at a scale that most foundations never approach. The key is that it is institutional, not symbolic. Schmidt does not write checks to existing organizations and attend galas. He builds parallel infrastructure.

Schmidt Sciences (formally launched 2024) runs five research centers: AI and Advanced Computing, Astrophysics and Space, Biosciences, Climate, and Science Systems. In just its launch year, it awarded $45 million for carbon cycle research, $18 million to AI2050 Fellows, and $11 million for humanities and AI research. By January 2026, it announced a private space telescope and ground-based observatory network.

Schmidt Futures (founded 2017) runs the Rise program in partnership with the Rhodes Trust - a global competition identifying exceptional young people aged 15-17 working on global problems. The Schmidt Science Fellows program funds early-career scientists to pivot across disciplines.

In 2019, Schmidt and Wendy Schmidt announced a $1 billion philanthropic commitment to identify, develop, and support global talent working in service of others. That is not a press release. It is a program with a staff, selection process, and decade-long funding horizon.

Academic endowments include $25 million to Princeton, $12.6 million to UC Berkeley for the Schmidt Center for Data Science and the Environment, and $10 million to Monterey Bay Aquarium. The pattern: fund places that produce people who build things that matter.

What Kind of Person Does All This

Schmidt is not an easy figure to reduce. He is a billionaire who took a $1/year salary for years, a privacy hawk who made one of the most infamous anti-privacy statements in tech history, a national security idealist who obtained a foreign citizenship through a program that was shut down for enabling corruption, a philanthropist who funds ocean research vessels and rocket companies simultaneously.

The common thread is not ideology. It is obsession with the long game. Every major Schmidt project has a decade-horizon or longer: NSCAI was about where U.S. AI capability needs to be in the 2030s; SandboxAQ is solving cryptography problems that quantum computers will create in the 2030s; Relativity Space is betting on a commercial launch market that will mature in the 2030s; Schmidt Sciences is funding scientists who will produce breakthroughs in the 2030s and beyond.

He is also, by all accounts, genuinely collaborative. All five of his books were co-authored. Innovation Endeavors was co-founded with Dror Berman. The Schmidt Ocean Institute is a joint venture with Wendy. He chaired the NSCAI with others. Even his most personal achievement - the book about his mentor Bill Campbell - was written with colleagues. This is not a man who needs to be the only name on the door.

The Details They Don't Put in Press Releases