The departure of Eric Schmidt as CEO of Google came as no surprise to Silicon Valley movers and shakers, who say Google's co-founder Larry Page has always wanted to be CEO of the company. Google announced Thursday, via blog post, that Schmidt, who has been CEO since 2001, would step aside and become executive chairman of the company, while Page would take the reigns as CEO. Co-founder Sergey Brin will move into a role where he focuses on developing new products.
Until now, Google has employed an unusual three-way management scheme, with Schmidt, Page, and Brin acting as a triumvirate and making decisions together.
That arrangement has become increasingly clumsy and slow as Google’s business has grown larger and more complicated, Schmidt wrote in his blog post. In recent months, the three men started discussing ways to streamline Google’s management structure and “speed up decision-making,” Schmidt wrote.
In fact, Schmidt has always been a sort of odd man out at Google. According to Silicon Valley lore, Schmidt only joined the company because in 1999, when Google raised its first big round of venture-capital funding. The investors insisted they would put money into Google only on the condition that Page and Brin would hire an experienced CEO to run the company.
Page and Brin were graduate students at Stanford when they founded Google and had no corporate experience. Still, people close to the company say the pair dragged their feet about finding a CEO, and didn’t hire Schmidt until 2001.
But even then, Page was considered likely to one day take over as CEO.
It’s not an accident that the algorithm upon which Google’s entire search business is based is called PageRank, named after Page. Apparently now, at age 37 and with a decade of corporate experience under his belt, Page figures he’s ready.