| Jonathan I. Schwartz | |
|---|---|
Jonathan Schwartz speaking at the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, CA |
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| Born | October 20, 1965 |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Wesleyan University |
| Website | |
| http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/ | |
Jonathan Ian Schwartz (born October 20, 1965) is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Picture of Health.[1] He was formerly the President and CEO of Sun Microsystems prior to its acquisition by Oracle, and previously the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lighthouse Design, Ltd., a software company focused on Apple's NeXTSTEP platform.
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Schwartz was born in Southern California, and spent much of his childhood moving between America's West coast and its capital, Washington, DC. He ultimately graduated in 1983 from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda, Maryland. With aspirations of becoming an architect, in 1983 he entered college at Carnegie Mellon University, and subsequently transferred to Wesleyan University in 1984. At Wesleyan, he ran short of funds and was preparing to drop out, when a friend suggested he apply for a scholarship, the Gilbert Clee Scholarship. He was awarded the scholarship, which funded the remainder of his university expenses, and ultimately received dual degrees in mathematics and economics.
He is of mixed origin, a fact he did not discover until late in his life. He is one quarter Indian and one quarter Welsh on his mother's side, and one quarter Hungarian, and one quarter Russian on his father's side.[2]
In 1986, Schwartz was nearly killed while riding on the Amtrak Colonial train that crashed in Chase, Maryland. According to him, the incident had a profound impact on his life.[2]
Schwartz started his career in 1987 at McKinsey & Company in New York City, focused on serving consumer products and financial services companies. In 1989, Schwartz left McKinsey and moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland, where he was a co-founder of Lighthouse Design, a company focused on building software for Steve Jobs's NeXT Computer, Inc. In the early 1990s, Lighthouse Design moved to San Mateo, California. Eventually, Schwartz became chief executive officer of Lighthouse.
In 1996, with NeXT failing in the marketplace and the internet beginning to explode globally, Lighthouse Design was acquired by Sun Microsystems.[3] Schwartz began his career at Sun working for Eric Schmidt, then the head of Sun's Laboratories. After Schmidt's departure for Novell, Schwartz became the director of product marketing for JavaSoft in 1997 and then transitioned through a series of vice president positions. In 2004, Schwartz was promoted to president and chief operating officer of Sun.[4] He eventually replaced Scott McNealy as CEO.
As CEO of Sun, he dramatically amplified Sun's historically tepid embrace of open source and freely distributed software, attempting to drive adoption, in particular, of Sun's operating system, Solaris. The demise of Solaris on Intel compatible x86 computers, he stated in subsequent interviews and blog postings, had entirely undermined the hardware platforms on which Sun depended for revenue - hardware systems that ran only Sun's Solaris.
Sun's stock reached a high of $26.25 in 2007, a point just prior to which private equity investors KKR invested $750m dollars in a convertible debt financing. Toward the end of 2007, with nearly a third of its revenue derived from financial services companies, the global financial crisis hit Sun especially hard. With large customers going bankrupt across the world, Schwartz began looking for a buyer for Sun, apparently contravening the wishes of Sun's founder and Chairman, Scott McNealy, and stirring resentment among employees.
Schwartz ultimately finalized an acquisition a couple months later, when he signed an agreement for the sale of the company to Oracle Corporation on April 20, 2009.[5] Oracle had been Sun's largest ISV, and had a disproportionate ability to determine the competitiveness of Sun's offerings - Oracle was believed to have stepped in front of another buyer. The identify of that other bidder was subsequently determined in an FBI indictment to be IBM, whose executive, Bob Moffat, had been trading on news of the acquisition.
As CEO of Sun, Schwartz was known as one of the few Fortune 500 CEO bloggers, and is recognized for his efforts to bring greater transparency into the corporate world. He had a public exchange with SEC Chairman Christopher Cox about the use of websites and blogs for the dissemination of financial information[6] to meet Regulation Fair Disclosure.[7] Schwartz generally believed the internet, and Sun's web presence on it, was a far more fair and efficient vehicle for the dissemination of Sun's financial information - as opposed to the expensive, and proprietary networks fostered by ratings agencies and the Wall Street Journal.
On February 4, 2010, Schwartz resigned from his post as CEO of Sun. His resignation was a haiku on Twitter that read as follows: "Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more."[8][9]
On August 12, 2010, Schwartz was named to Taleo Corporation's board of directors, on September 9, 2010 he announced founding a new company, Picture of Health.[10]
On April 7, 2011, Schwartz was named to Silver Spring Network's board of directors; on October 26, 2011 he was named to the board of Moxie Software.
Schwartz has long held a view that the Information Age has given way to the "Participation Age", in which individuals connected to the network are both creators and consumers of news, ideas, and content. He has been an outspoken evangelist for technology as a social utility—comparable to electricity or railroads—that creates an opportunity to drive economic, political and societal progress. [11][12] He has been a consistent lobbyist in Washington, DC on behalf of regulations that protect the ability of individuals to maintain rights on par with corporations in the protection and promotion of free speech and intellectual property protection.
| Preceded by Scott McNealy |
CEO of Sun Microsystems 2006 - 2010 |
Company acquired by Oracle Corporation |
| Preceded by Scott McNealy |
President of Sun Microsystems 2004 - 2010 |
Company acquired by Oracle Corporation |