Brent Schlender was a writer, editor, and author known for his award-winning magazine profiles of prominent entrepreneurs and business leaders of the Digital Revolution. He wrote analytical business stories for 30 years, first for the Wall Street Journal starting in the late 1970s, and continuing after 1989 through a 20-year career as a bureau chief and editor-at-large at Fortune.
He wrote dozens of in-depth feature stories about the exploits of many of Silicon Valley’s most famous figures—Apple’s Steve Jobs, Intel’s Andy Grove and Craig Barrett, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Sun’s Scott McNealy and Bill Joy, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and Pixar’s John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, to name just a few.
Schlender also is considered the journalistic authority on Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, who he first met in 1985. And over the years, he wrote extensively about Sony Corp. over the decades, and worked closely with each of the company’s CEOs, starting with founder Akio Morita. During Peter Drucker’s final years, Schlender wrote many articles based on extensive, in-depth interviews with the famous management guru.
In 2015, Crown Business published Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, the culmination of a three-year collaboration with writing partner and Fortune colleague Rick Tetzeli.
