Eric Schmidt wound up at Google by compromise. In 1998, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had made a promise to the 2 venture-capital corporations that funded them—they’d rent an skilled CEO to handle the corporate as soon as it started to take off. However two years later they had been hedging, insisting they might scale Google to a worldwide energy by themselves. VC John Doerr satisfied them to maintain interviewing potential leaders. None clicked till they met Schmidt, who not solely had been a talented govt at Solar Microsystems and CEO of Novell, however was a revered laptop scientist. Better of all, he’d been to Burning Man!

The remainder is historical past. In 2001, Schmidt turned Google’s CEO, protecting the job for a decade of unimaginable progress and mindboggling influence. He then remained a key a part of management as its govt chair, even because the company restructured itself in 2015 to a holding firm named Alphabet, with Google its largest and most worthwhile division. As of Thursday night time, that’s historical past, too—Alphabet introduced that Schmidt, 62, will step down from the chair put up subsequent month, 17 years older and virtually $14 billion richer than when he joined the agency. He’ll retain a board seat and worker standing as a “technical advisor.” Google says his compensation ($1.25 million, plus bonuses as of 2016) will stay unchanged.

Schmidt’s departure from the chief chair position ends Silicon Valley’s most profitable execution—ever—of the dilemma that Google’s funders had been dealing with within the agency’s early days. How do you herald an authoritative chief with out dimming the brilliance of the callow founders who made the corporate priceless within the first place? Although Schmidt gained deserved plaudits for his tenure as CEO, his most spectacular feat was a fragile balancing act of being each the boss of Google’s freewheeling founders—supplying so-called “grownup supervision”—and enthusiastically assuming the position of their scholar as nicely. All too conscious of how related conditions wound up in continuous boardroom spats between a hoodied founder and a khakied govt, Schmidt decided early on that exercising authority over Web page and Brin would result in catastrophe. He by no means missed a possibility to ostentatiously proclaim the genius of his youthful colleagues. (After I questioned him as soon as about utilizing that phrase, he ​replied, “I wasn’t utilizing it intentionally, however now that you simply’ve pointed it out, it’s what I imagine.”) And he didn’t let his personal ego lead him to place his mark on the agency simply because he might. “My opinion is that the tradition of corporations is ready very early,” he advised me in 2004, “It will have been silly for me to attempt to change them a lot, as a result of it wouldn’t have labored, and it will’ve been unhealthy. It’s type of a provided that that is how the corporate works now. In the event you modified it you’d lose all of its nice issues.”

So he didn’t change it. As an alternative, he ruled Google as a part of a troika together with Web page and Brin. Partly it was an excellent act of realpolitik—he knew that neither geeky co-founder was a lot desirous about areas like buyer relations, lobbying, exterior communications, and different pedestrian however crucial duties of constructing a company powerhouse. However he additionally sincerely believed that Web page’s and Brin’s technical instincts must be heeded, usually above his personal. “One of many issues that’s exceptional to Boomers is that we’re now not fully in cost, as a result of we’ve been in cost for our entire lives,” he advised me as soon as, “and I’ve realized to respect it.”

A superb instance of this give and take came visiting the problem of whether or not Google ought to create its personal web browser, which Web page and Brin started urging in 2001. Schmidt thought of the browser wars of the 1990s (the place Microsoft used market energy to conquer rival Netscape) to be one of many defining experiences of his profession. He urged them to carry off, fearing Microsoft’s wrath. Finally, the founders satisfied him that Google was ready to create a superior product it doesn’t matter what Microsoft did. So in 2008, Google launched Chrome with the CEO’s blessing. “One of many guidelines concerning the new era is that they don’t combat the previous guys’ wars,” Schmidt advised me on the time. Certainly, the Chrome browser—the challenge led by a younger govt named Sundar Pichai, now Google’s CEO—is now the world’s hottest, and a pillar of the corporate’s energy.

After a decade as CEO, not lengthy after Google’s 2010 retreat from China, Schmidt turned over the CEO role to Page, who has run Google after which Alphabet extra because the undisputed decider than as one in all a ruling troika. However as a result of Web page assiduously avoids press interviews—and just about some other encounters that require him to undergo fools—it fell to Schmidt to globetrot and argue Google’s case as its de facto “ambassador.” Extra just lately, he’s been doing much less of that. He was energetic in Hillary Clinton’s presidential marketing campaign (not precisely an asset in Trumpland), and has been a strident voice for technology reform in the Defense Department. He’s is former head and nonetheless a backer of the New America Basis, a liberal DC assume tank (the place his affect will not be as deftly employed because it was at Google—the muse recently booted out a team whose analysis was crucial of Alphabet’s energy, eroding its credibility). And as NPR listeners know from sponsor soundbites earlier than their favourite exhibits, Schmidt oversees a philanthropic basis.

Based on a supply, Schmidt and Web page have been discussing his resignation as chair for months, resulting in his formal resignation on Monday, as reported to the SEC. “In recent times, I’ve been spending quite a lot of my time on science and know-how points, and philanthropy, and I plan to broaden that work,” Schmidt stated in a press release Thursday. (As a result of Schmidt has been linked with ladies exterior his marriage, some have puzzled whether or not his departure is a #metoo form of factor, however the truth that Alphabet is protecting him each as an worker and board member suggests not.)

It’s considerably ironic that Schmidt is taking a lowered position at Alphabet as the corporate fights antitrust charges within the US and Europe which can be paying homage to these introduced towards his previous nemesis, Microsoft. However that’s bizarre proof of his legacy. Sixteen years in the past he took the reigns of an organization with a couple of hundred staff and a minimal backside line, and helped develop it to a behemoth with a market cap of almost three quarters of a trillion —and an influence so outsized that regulators really feel it have to be curbed.

No matter his subsequent act is, it gained’t prime that. “For me personally, that is it—that is the Tremendous Bowl,” he as soon as advised me of his Google position. And he’s acquired a $14 billion ring to show it.

Steven Levy’s e book on Google, Within the Plex, was revealed in 2011.