CEO — Relativity SpaceChairman — Sandbox AQCo-founder — Schmidt FuturesFounding Partner — Innovation EndeavorsFormer CEO and Executive Chairman — Google
Steven Levy's comprehensive narrative of Google from academic project to 24,000-person global company, following the firm since 1999 with access to CEO Eric Schmidt and extensive staff interviews. Covers Google's engineering mindset, acquisitions (YouTube, DoubleClick), expansion into China, battles with EU regulators, and the corporate culture that shaped the company's rise through search dominance and advertising innovation.
Fred Vogelstein's 2013 narrative of the bitter rivalry between Apple and Google, tracing how the two tech giants evolved from allies (Schmidt served on Apple's board; he was onstage when Jobs introduced the iPhone) to fierce competitors battling over mobile dominance. The book features Schmidt's leadership at Google and the strategic decisions that defined the Android era, based on Vogelstein's decade-long reporting and rare access to key players including Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt.
Corona Brezina's biography profiles the three leaders of Google: Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who founded the company, and Eric Schmidt, recruited as CEO in 2001 to bring management expertise and scale operations. The book explores Google's business model, innovations, and mission while examining how these three individuals shaped the company's growth and culture.
Ken Auletta's extensively reported account of Google's evolution from Stanford startup to media-disrupting giant, based on unprecedented access to founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, CEO Eric Schmidt, and 150+ interviews. Examines how Google's rise threatens traditional media institutions and explores the company's business ethics, philosophy, and societal impact during the search and early advertising era.
Ken Auletta's 2009 investigation examines Google's evolution, competitive strategies, and cultural philosophy, based on interviews with approximately 300 people (150 from Google, 150 outside observers including media executives). The book explores Eric Schmidt's role as CEO, Google's relationships with competitors like Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook, and tensions between the company's stated commitment to information access and its actual opacity regarding algorithms—framed through the concept of "frenemies."
Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time
David A. Vise, David Vise, Mark Malseed
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2005
Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David A. Vise and researcher Mark Malseed trace Google's evolution from a Stanford research project through its explosive growth under the leadership of founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt. The book examines the motivations and personal growth of all three leaders and focuses on the human story behind Google's rise to dominance. A 2018 updated edition extends the narrative through two decades of company growth.
Eric Schmidt ran Google as CEO from 2001 to 2011, taking it from a brilliant search startup with no business model into the advertising juggernaut that would eventually buy DeepMind, build TPUs, and put a transformer paper out into the world. He stayed on as Executive Chairman of Google and then Alphabet until 2017, and left the board in 2019. He is, by net worth, one of the richest people in tech — and almost uniquely among Silicon Valley founders, he chose to spend the second act of his career on Washington rather than another company.
That second act runs through the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which Schmidt chaired from 2018 to 2021. The NSCAI’s 756-page final report is the closest thing the US government has to a coherent AI doctrine — it framed AI as a great-power competition with China, recommended pouring federal money into compute, talent, and chips, and seeded much of what became the CHIPS Act and the Pentagon’s AI buildout. He spun the same thesis into the Special Competitive Studies Project in 2021, a privately funded continuation that keeps writing the playbook Washington reads.
Outside policy, Schmidt Futures (now Schmidt Sciences) funds AI research at the academic level, his family office Hillspire has invested in 22+ AI companies since 2019, and he personally bankrolls White Stork (later renamed Project Eagle / Swift Beat), a startup making cheap AI-targeted kamikaze drones for Ukraine. He also co-authored The Age of AI with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher in 2021, and the posthumous follow-up Genesis in 2024.
For developers, Schmidt matters less for what he builds than for what he influences. When he says US power grids are the bottleneck for AI, or that open-weight models are a bio/cyber risk, those framings show up in legislation a year later. He’s also a useful reminder that the people writing AI policy are often the same people invested in AI — a tension worth keeping in mind when reading any “national strategy” document.
Stanford remote-work talk (August 2024). In a Stanford class Schmidt apparently didn’t realize was being recorded, he said Google fell behind OpenAI and Anthropic because it prioritized “work-life balance and going home early” over winning, and floated stealing TikTok’s IP as a hypothetical startup move. Stanford pulled the video; Schmidt walked back the remote-work line and said he “misspoke.” See Fortune’s coverage.
Policymaking while invested. A 2022 CNBC investigation and a 2023 EPIC report documented that Schmidt shaped federal AI policy through NSCAI and OSTP while his funds were invested in 50+ AI startups, several of which won government contracts. He has not been found to have broken any rules; the conflict-of-interest concern is structural rather than legal.
Spotify Podcasts
Episode 186 - June 12, 2026
Biotech Hangout
2026
AI is More Dangerous Than Nukes? Eric Schmidt’s 2-Year Warning
