Many people see Mike as a loner. I think it's because he's ahead of everyone else. He helped Sequoia Capital invest in Yahoo! in 1995, when no one understood how Internet companies would grow into organizations of real substance. This led four years later to Sequoia's investment in Google. Mike, 52, stayed on our board until this year and helped us grow from a company that held meetings around a Ping-Pong table to a global business with revenue of more than $10 billion last year. Though he is spare with words, when he does speak he is comfortable voicing bold opinions that cut against the grain. I know!

Like many of America's most energetic entrepreneurs, Mike is an immigrant. Born in Wales, he left Britain in the '70s to seek a future in the U.S. After studying business at Wharton, he became a journalist at TIME. He knows a good story when he sees one.

Mike has helped Sequoia export its distinctive investment approach to China, India and Israel. This is a big departure for the venture-capital industry and for entrepreneurs around the world who now have a chance to work with the few people who have been intimately involved with the formation and growth of some of the most important technology innovators of the past 30 years—Apple, Cisco, Oracle, Yahoo! and Google. Mike is as global as the firms he has helped launch.

Schmidt, a former CEO of Novell, is chairman and CEO of Google

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