Eric Schmidt

Schmidt was chief executive of Google from 2001 to 2011, brought in while the founders were in their twenties, and stayed on as chairman until 2017. How Google Works, written with Jonathan Rosenberg, is the internal argument made public: hire people who argue, let engineers set direction, let the product carry the marketing. He has been blunt to the point of trouble about privacy, telling an interviewer in 2009 that anyone wanting to keep something from a search engine might reconsider doing it at all. He has since chaired American commissions on artificial intelligence and defence.