The 'Warrior' Within Jonathan Schwartz

A tough background, a college scholarship, and a near-death experience all went into making Sun's CEO the driven success he is today

by Peter Burrows

Sun Microsystems (JAVA) Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz writes about a lot of things in his well-read blog, but rarely about himself. Indeed, given all that's known about Oracle (ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison and his yachts, and Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs and his trademark turtlenecks, Schwartz is known far more for his opinions—say, that regulators should allow disclosure of key corporate information via blogs—than for his personal story. That's how Schwartz, a 42-year-old family man who admits to few consuming interests other than his family, his job, and food and wine, likes it. But he shared glimpses into his past during two recent interviews.

As a youngster, Schwartz showed few signs of the precocious future CEO. Rather, he was introverted and studious, consumed with living up to the high expectations of his parents, each of whom had overcome adversity. Schwartz' father had grown up "dirt poor" in the Bronx during the Depression, but excelled at New York's Stuyvesant High and got into City College of New York. His mother, of English and Asian descent, grew up in England. The boarding school she attended from the age of 5 was bombed by the Nazis. "They didn't lack for courage at all," Schwartz says. "They didn't feel like they had the ability to make a lot of choices. So I've always been very focused on making sure I had that ability—and wanting to make decisions that would have an impact for a very long time."

Serious

That desire overwhelmed him at times. Through high school, he describes himself as "paralyzed with fear" of making the wrong decisions. Making things tougher were frequent moves; the family moved back and forth between Riverside (Calif.) and Washington (D.C.) suburbs three times before he went to college, as his father shuttled between jobs as a professor in the University of California system and working as an intelligence analyst with the State Dept. Meantime, Schwartz poured himself into getting good grades. He stuck mostly to a small group of close friends, with whom he engaged in the intellectual sparring he'd learned at the dinner table. "Jonathan was considered a dork—not a techie dork, but a social outcast dork," says a grade-schoolmate who requested anonymity.

Schwartz got into Carnegie-Mellon, with aspirations of becoming an architect. But after a year, he decided the school's demanding program wasn't for him. Not wanting to commit to any life course, he transferred to Wesleyan University because it was the best school he could find that wouldn't force him to declare a major until senior year. "I was petrified of making choices at that point," he says.

Instead, he embraced the intellectual side of life. Nick Rasmussen, a roommate and close friend today, remembers Schwartz talking excitedly about his first economics course. And despite his leftist leanings, Schwartz eschewed the anti-apartheid and other political protests that swept the campus. "He had a keen understanding of the sacrifices his parents were making to send him to a pricey private school," says Rasmussen. "It gave him a seriousness of purpose."

Help from Mrs. Fields

Schwartz started to find his direction in his sophomore year. Running out of money, he says he shocked himself by winning a scholarship related to corporate responsibility that paid the rest of his tuition. He met with the sponsor, consulting firm McKinsey, in a borrowed suit, and then spent his junior summer working on a project in a shipyard in Denmark.

Schwartz joined McKinsey, though he quickly became shocked at the quality of management of some of the firm's clients. "I remember meeting people and thinking, 'Hold on, I can do this better than they can!,'" he says. "I went from being a not particularly self-confident kid to feeling that maybe I had a lot more choices than I thought I'd had. It totally changed my life." Then came another life-changing event. In 1986, Schwartz was almost killed while traveling. His train collided with a locomotive at 108 mph near Baltimore. "In retrospect, that's one of the things that led me to decide to run a company," he recalls. "What's the worst thing that can happen? You're not going to die."

That business chance came four years later, when some friends set out to create a company to write software for NeXT Computer, the company founded by recently ousted Apple CEO Jobs. Before long, Schwartz had moved into a rental house in Chevy Chase with an overgrown lawn and Ethernet cables draped over bannisters, and he dove into his role as the "business guy" of the operation, called Lighthouse Design. He says the group vowed not to cut their hair until the outfit was profitable—the genesis of his signature ponytail today.

At first, it was difficult just to get noticed among the many software houses clamoring to partner with Jobs. At one point, Schwartz and a colleague flew to Silicon Valley and sat in NeXT's lobby day after day, hoping for an audience. They finally got noticed after Schwartz bought Mrs. Fields cookies for the company's staff.