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Eric Schmidt to become technical advisor to Alphabet
- minimaxir 9y agoSchmidt will still be on the board. IR release: https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2017/1221.html https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2017/1221.html
- puzzle 9y agoWhen he was hired, there was a pact with Larry and Sergey that the three would run the company for 20 years: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-executives/top-google-execs-pledged-to-stay-20-years-report-idUSN3026301220080131 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-executives/top-goo...
- rajnathani 9y ago> Alphabet expects that its board will appoint a new, non-executive chairman at its next meeting in January, meaning that it will join the ranks of Apple and Microsoft as major companies with non-executive chairman. Could someone provide some context around this topic of executive/non-executive chairpersons? Edit: The above quote is taken from the original link which this HN post pointed to - https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/eric-schmidt-is-stepping-down-as-the-executive-chairman-of-alphabet.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/eric-schmidt-is-stepping-dow...
- sjg007 9y agoNon-executive means that the person is not an employee of the company.
- GeorgeTirebiter 9y agoYes, I think of an 'executive' as one who executes. Yes, both meanings...
- dragonwriter 9y ago> Could someone provide some context around this topic of executive/non-executive chairpersons? An executive chairman is something of a weird beast; they are both chairman of the board and an executive employee involved in managing the firm (as an employee, they usually report to the CEO, but the CEO is accountable to the board, which the chairman, well, chairs.) The exact division of duties between an executive chairman and the CEO is different in every firm using the arrangement, I would expect. A non-executive chairman is just the head of the board and not involved in day-to-day executive management of the firm, only oversight of management.
- sjg007 9y agoWell you can be the chair of the board and CEO so then that's not too weird.
- Angostura 9y agoNot great from a governance PoV though
- dragonwriter 9y agoChair and CEO is less weird than separate executive chairman and CEO. The executive chairman model is more analogous to if, say, the CIO or CFO was also the board chair.
- walshemj 9y agoIts considered best practice for corporate governance - mainly as the independent non exec chairman can hold the CEO to account on behalf of the share holders - this should have happened in the HP scandal a while back.
- yuhong 9y agoAs it happens, I posted a blog post on some issues about Google, Mozilla, and the debt-based economy: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2017/12/google-mozilla-and-debt-based-economy.html http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2017/12/google-mozilla-and-debt... I now have email threads with jrockway and ChuckMcM on this.
- jtchang 9y agoInvestors are seeing this as a non-event. He's still going to be around, just a much more limited capacity. More interesting is who they decide to appoint.
- notatoad 9y agoWho they decide to appoint will only be interesting if they appoint somebody interesting, which seems unlikely. Larry Page is still running the show, and moving from an executive chairman to a non-executive chairman will probably only mean that the board has less power than they did before. Odds are they appoint somebody politically well-connected, and that person then gets to use the "chairman of the board at alphabet" title to lobby various governments in Google's favour, rather than they appoint somebody who is going to do any serious oversight of alphabet's executives.
- georgeglue1 9y agoInteresting. Obama could be a good bet if he would take the job. (Perhaps the departure was predicated on Obama agreeing in advance)
- maxpupmax 9y agoHonest question: Why would Obama be a good bet? Or is this comment a joke?
- georgeglue1 9y agoObama could personally call any world leader and talk about taxes, privacy, regulation, etc. with authority. He would also be generally pragmatic, likable, and qualified.
- andrew_ 9y agoObjectively speaking, he would generally be considered likable by about 47.9 [1] of the voting public. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that the vast majority of employees of either Alphabet or Google would agree with your assessment, and indeed likely most in the tech sector. But I'm not sure any polarizing figure would be a good fit outside of those niches. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_approval_rating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_app...
- prepend 9y agoIs this related to #metoo?
- bertil 9y agoFor anyone wondering: there have been some rumours that Eric Schmidt has been indiscrete in the past, more specifically that he described that he had an “open marriage” and that he had relations with “exotic dancers”. As far as I can tell, there is no reason to think that his close collaborators at Google didn’t know about and discovered something unsavoury recently. More to the point, there is no reason to think his behaviour (although offensive to some) was ever non-consensual. It’s entirely understandable that, after more than a decade at the helm of the most incredible companies of all time, he’s stepping down to simply retire. Given the times, the question bears being asked -- although as far as we can tell, No.
- eanzenberg 9y agoCool, I always wanted our sexual culture to revert back to the puritan 1600's.
- rayiner 9y agoIt's not a reversion, it's a continued evolution. As Dworkin noted: > Empirically speaking, sexual liberation was practiced by women on a wide scale in the sixties and it did not work: that is, it did not free women. Its purpose—it turned out—was to free men to use women without bourgeois constraints, and in that it was successful. The hippies became Reaganites and women were allowed to participate in the economy to some extent, but that freedom also came with the expectation of sexual availability. You see it even now: suggest that maybe we should prohibit relationships between coworkers, and men flip out. The idea that we might categorically close off some spheres of life to sexual advances, so that women can work in peace and build their careers, induces apoplexy.
- mrleiter 9y agoThank you, exactly this.
- jamiesonbecker 9y agoOne of the most interesting debates was between Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel back in 2012, especially in the positions that Eric staked out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsXFwy6gG_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsXFwy6gG_4
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- semperdark 9y agoInteresting enough to be frustratingly incomplete. I wish they had the time to go into more depth rather than debating the meaning of terms.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pavs 9y agoWow, Peter Thiel, is annoying, to say the least. He sounds like someone who lives in a bubble that is completely decoupled from the real world. He doesn't even let anyone else make any point. Am I even allowed to say all these without getting sued or banned?
- afsina 9y agoI watched this video before. He is very annoying but I am mostly agreeing with him.
- AmIFirstToThink 9y ago2016 Election, Eric's role in it, and the exposure he added to Alphabet to gain favorable political position with the Democrats that he thought would win Presidency. Google was right to start lobbying the Government for good causes, they just chose the wrong horse. Eric chose the wrong horse. Not only that, they paid the price for that access by letting in political advisers on internal content-review/content-policy boards, and adopting new hiring practices. More than the loss of Democrats, this virus that Eric introduced inside their organization to gain that DC access will be bad for Alphabet in the long run.
- sctb 9y agoWe've updated the link from https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/eric-schmidt-is-stepping-down-as-the-executive-chairman-of-alphabet.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/eric-schmidt-is-stepping-dow..., which points to this.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- corporateguy5 9y agoSexual accusations coming, another man down
- samfisher83 9y agohttps://www.recode.net/2017/6/13/15788892/alphabet-shareholder-proposals-fair-shares-counted-equally-no-supervote https://www.recode.net/2017/6/13/15788892/alphabet-sharehold... Larry and Sergey have special voting shares so its their company. In this case how much does the board really matter. Sergey and Larry can do what they want.
- puzzle 9y agoEric has another 5-6% of votes...
- forgotpassagan 9y agoDidn't Larry and Sergey always dislike Schmidt and consider him 'adult supervision'? I remember them being quite overt about how happy they were when 'adult supervision is no longer needed' years back
- telltruth 9y agoHave you looked at Alphabet or other big company board? One thing you will notice is that lot of board members are actually from giant investment funds (3 in case of Google, much worse for companies like Microsoft). Regardless of who owns voting shares, these investors have huge say on how things gets done. For example, they can threaten to dump their stock or not buy in anymore. Because of small daily volumes relative to market cap even small dumping can have huge price swings in stock. For public companies, their stock is literally a currency. They use it for acquisitions, hiring and so on. These investors can reject motions in board voting and usually always want to tighten screws for short term gains. Now you should have more understanding on why Google was forced to hire people like Ruth Porat as CFOs and why she can cut down on so many projects for "more business focus" and increase "shareholder value". Owning majority voting shares are not that useful as they were hyped up to be.
- CalChris 9y agoBloomberg titles this quite differently: Alphabet's Schmidt to Step Down From Executive Chairman Role http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Alphabet-Google-Eric-Schmidt-to-Step-Down-12448538.php http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Alphabet-Google-Eric-...
- brepl 9y agoMakes more sense than the current HN title.
- oh-kumudo 9y agoWhat is he doing as of late? I don't really feel his presence bears too much significance for today's Google..
- oh_sigh 9y ago“In recent years, I’ve been spending a lot of my time on science and technology issues, and philanthropy, and I plan to expand that work.”
- zeep 9y agogood news that he is getting less power
- perseusprime11 9y agoIs it just me or does anybody else think that the reason could potentially be a sexual harassment?
- sumedh 9y agoSomething is fishy which is why they released this info just before the holidays so that the general public forgets about it soon.
- tyingq 9y agoThere is some amount of gossip floating around: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2371719/Googles-Eric-Schmidts-open-marriage-string-exotic-lovers.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2371719/Googles-Eric... Not that the Daily Mail is a credible source, but there is a little smoke.
- perseusprime11 9y agoIt has got to be more than love rat though. He must have crossed a line somewhere.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bennettfeely 9y agoAt the bottom of this thread is a comment by 'AmIFirstToThink' which has been inexplicably marked "dead". It seems to be the only reply as of writing this that makes the connection of Schmidt's stepping down to his strong bets during the 2016 election. A little-noticed WSJ piece from October would support that idea: > [Google] Employees donated $1.6 million to her campaign, about 80% more than the amount given by workers at any other corporation, and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt helped set up companies to analyze political data for the campaign. Mr. Schmidt even wore a badge labeled “STAFF” at Mrs. Clinton’s election-night bash. > His support of the losing side didn’t go unnoticed among the victors. As President-elect Donald Trump was preparing for a meeting with tech executives at Trump Tower not long before his inauguration, he asked strategist Stephen Bannon whether Mr. Schmidt was “the guy that tried to help Hillary win the election,” according to someone who heard the conversation. > “Yes,” said Mr. Bannon. “Yes, he is.” > Google, one of the most powerful players in Washington in recent years, is now facing the consequences of its lost political clout—and is moving mountains to regain it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-dominance-in-washington-faces-a-reckoning-1509379625 https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-dominance-in-washington...
- CalChris 9y agoSchmidt is 62 and worth $13B. Maybe he just decided to do something else. I'm sure Google has plenty of clout in DC. They have 600+ lobbyists and a huge budget. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/30/google-silicon-valley-corporate-lobbying-washington-dc-politics https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/30/google-si...
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoWhat do HN people think about a law to prevent corporate executives from giving money to politicians?
- sowbug 9y agoYou mean overturning Citizens United (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC) and McCutcheon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCutcheon_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCutcheon_v._FEC). A law that targeted corporate executives would have no chance of surviving the legal precedent of those two cases. It wouldn't do much to solve the problem of dollars having more influence these days than one-person-one-vote in the U.S., but hey, don't let me stop you. Easy reading about those cases: https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/04/22/14611/mccutcheon-decision-explained-more-money-pour-political-process https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/04/22/14611/mccutcheon-...
- calimac 9y agoSchmidt has always been a globalist scumbag pushing oppressive propaganda as AI bows and unicorns. Good ridden I hope a yc startup can replace google one day soon. Build it, they will come.
- idooontcare 9y agoAlphabet is google and google IS evil.