Jonathan Schwartz: From Sun CEO to Health Care Entrepreneur of Innovation (
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When you're meeting with Jonathan Schwartz, it's easy to feel that
the only way you'll ever be the smartest person in the room is if he
leaves it.
There isn't a gray hair in Schwartz's characteristic ponytail, yet the
46-year-old software developer and business executive started and led
his own company (Lighthouse Design) while in his 20s, was CEO of a major
corporation (Sun Microsystems) by age 40 and helped engineer the
tremendously complicated $7.4 billion sale of Sun to Oracle in 2009.
Along the way, he became the most credible enterprise open-source
software advocate to other large enterprises, extolling the virtues of
Java, MySQL, Zettabyte File System (ZFS) and other development tools.
Without taking anything away from Bob Young or Marc Ewing (Red Hat),
Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux), Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), Brian
Behlendorf (Apache), Monty Widenius and Marten Mickos (MySQL), it's
clear that none of those visionaries ever ran an $11 billion
corporation.
Schwartz (left) also gave the Japanese haiku new visibility with his
tweeted resignation announcement on Feb. 3, 2010, about a week after the
acquisition closed:
"Today's my last day at Sun. I'll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku:
Financial crisis/Stalled too many
customers/CEO no more."
These days, Schwartz, who resides in San Francisco with his wife and
two boys, thoroughly enjoys working in private companies, where he
doesn't have to deal with quarterly reports, analysts, and pesky
journalists and bloggers.
"It's a big weight off my shoulders [not running a large public
corporation]," Schwartz told eWEEK. "It [working in a public company]
can be madness at times, but you know that going in. You can move so
much more quickly and easily inside a private company and get a lot more
done without having to account to anyone. Well, almost anyone."
It's a good thing, too, about the weight being off Schwartz's
shoulders—literally—since he recently had much-needed back surgery.
"This back issue was partly the reason I'm getting into what I call the
intersection of IT innovation and health care with Picture of Health,"
he acknowledged.
New Company in Stealth Mode
In fact, Schwartz now runs Picture of Health (currently in stealth
mode), a health care-related startup. Although Schwartz and his San
Francisco- and Seattle-based team remain tight-lipped about Picture of
Health, he did say that more would be forthcoming in the first quarter
of 2012.
"At this point, we're not discussing anything except that this involves
the application of technology to public health," Schwartz said. "We are,
however, hiring developers and designers and software development
generalists.
"The Website is up to recruit developers, and we're finding some truly
dedicated people. One of the things about having your own private
company is that you get to pick whom you work with, and you really want
to work with good people. That makes it so much more enjoyable."
The site asks prospective employees if they can build "highly usable
Websites as well as engaging interactive controls for data
visualization." This is speculation, but it leads one to believe that
the startup will use interactive infographics to help users build an
actual picture of their personal health—one they can use to track
nutrition, medicines, health history and other key metrics.
Schwartz is also on the boards of Moxie Software, Taleo and Silver
Spring Networks (see sidebar at the end of this story). Moxie CEO Tom
Kelly was delighted to bring Schwartz onboard to his company, an
up-and-coming enterprise and consumer social networking and
collaboration service that prides itself on immediate usability and
corporate scalability.
"Jonathan means the world to us," Kelly said. "You can't buy that kind
of influence and experience for your team. He's very intuitive about
things, and when he's got an idea, you listen. He's been there, done
that and is well-respected. He's going to help us tremendously."
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