November, 2005 Google CEO Interview

Epicenter - Wired Blogs:

"Eighteen months ago, in November 2005, I interviewed Google CEO Eric Schmidt for a story I was working on for Fortune Magazine. I left the magazine before I finished the piece, and in a classic case of old media thinking, I didn’t publish the interview. It seemed like a great piece of research for a bigger Google story in the future, so I squirreled it away hoping for a better time to use it. When I finished my most recent interview with Schmidt at the end of March, I decided I’d made a mistake - that I needed to post it. The interview is a fascinating conversation about how Schmidt along with founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin ran and, based on recent conversations, continue to run the most interesting and profitable company in a generation. In it Schmidt talks about what it was like to join Google back in 2001 when it wasn’t yet making money, how the company almost disintegrated amid bickering over how to partner with AOL in 2002, how he was ultimately able to bond with the two powerful founders when most other executives would have become frustrated, and how flying his own jet helps him manage"