Known before he was Eric Schmidt
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Chief executive of Google from 2001 to 2011 and afterwards its executive chairman. Before that, chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems and chief executive of Novell.
Jonathan Hare knew him at Sun, in Hare's phrasing, when he was a player but not a big deal — he had a real job there, but he was not Bill Joy or Andy Bechtolsheim or Vinod Khosla.
S-100 dates the conversation precisely: February 2001, at Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle's Peer-to-Peer conference — an hour on Google's strategy, in which Schmidt confided he was considering the Chairman role and asked Hare what the optimal business model for the search engine might be. He joined Google weeks later. The record does not claim causation; it records the hour.
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They met many times and spoke on numerous panels together, up to 2001 — including a keynote panel at the Peer-to-Peer and Asynchronous Agents conference at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, the event later renamed Web 2.0.
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The network is the computer
Open →colleague at SunGave Hare Bill Joy's personal email address
Open →chief executive from 2001Two men in this graph wrote the first two
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
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