SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) said on Thursday its Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will step down in January, ending a 17-year-run in which he played a central role in building a promising startup called Google into a global technology powerhouse.
He will continue to serve on the Alphabet’s board of directors and act as an adviser on focused on technical and science issues, the company said. (Alphabet Inc1070.85
The company has also been hit with lawsuits alleging that it pays women less than men. It also faces a series of antitrust actions in Europe, though Schmidt was instrumental in convincing the U.S. Federal Trade Commission not to pursue antitrust actions in the United States.
Schmidt spent more than a decade at Sun Microsystems and ran the now-defunct networking company Novell before joining Google in 2001. The 2004 initial public offering came at time when the industry was still reeling from the dot-com bust, but it helped lay the groundwork for the current boom.
Shuman Ghosemajumder, chief technology officer of Mountain View, California, startup Shape Security and a Google employee from 2003 until 2010, recalled that shortly after the IPO, Schmidt spoke at an all-hands meetings and said that he, Page and Brin had the ambition of making Google a $100 billion company.
“Did you mean a $100 billion market cap or $100 billion in revenue?” one employee asked.
“And Eric said ‘You pick,’” recalled Ghosemajumder. “That was definitely inspiring to me.”
Alphabet now carries a market cap of $741 billion, and this year, it is projected to surpass $100 billion in annual revenue, according to analyst estimates.
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