After nearly 17 years in a top role at Google and then its parent Alphabet, Eric Schmidt is stepping down.
Alphabet announced on Thursday that Schmidt would move out of the role of executive chairman as of its board meeting in January 2018, moving into a "technical advisor" role. Schmidt will remain a board member and the company plans to appoint a non-executive chairman, according to its release on the news.
Larry Page, Google's cofounder and now Alphabet CEO, said in a statement that Schmidt would now focus on "science and technology issues." “Since 2001, Eric has provided us with business and engineering expertise and a clear vision about the future of technology,” Page said.
“Larry, Sergey, Sundar and I all believe that the time is right in Alphabet’s evolution for this transition. The Alphabet structure is working well, and Google and the Other Bets are thriving,” Schmidt added in the release, referring to Google cofounder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai as well as the holding company's non-Google initiatives that it lumps together as "Other Bets," which includes home automation company Nest, healthcare unit Calico and life sciences unit Verily, among others. “In recent years, I’ve been spending a lot of my time on science and technology issues, and philanthropy, and I plan to expand that work.”
Schmidt had first joined Google in 2001 as an outside CEO, guiding the public company in 2004. The billionaire stepped down from the chief executive role in 2011 to make way for Page, who returned to the top job, and served as chairman since. Google's management created Alphabet as a parent company in October 2015, in part to separate Google's advertising revenue-dominated search engine and business units from its more long-term, money-losing efforts in healthcare and frontier science.
In 2014, Schmidt reportedly sold a large percentage of his Google stock, which still represents the vast majority of his wealth. The former Novell CEO and chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems acquired 20% of hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. in May 2015 through his family's investment vehicle for an undisclosed sum. He's donated money over the years to causes including a park on Governors Island in New York, grants for social impact technology and political causes such as Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
In May 2016, Schmidt wrote a guest op-ed for Forbes remembering CEO Bill Campbell, the legendary executive coach for Silicon Valley leaders who'd passed away the month before.
