Brent Schlender
Business journalist and author
Brent Schlender is a business journalist who spent decades writing about Silicon Valley leaders for The Wall Street Journal and FORTUNE. He co-wrote Becoming Steve Jobs.
1 summary 23 min of listening
Born in Newton, KANSAS, United States
Influenced by Michael Lewis, Peter Drucker
About Brent Schlender
Brent Schlender began his career at The Wall Street Journal in the late 1970s. From 1989 he spent 20 years at FORTUNE magazine as a bureau chief and editor-at-large, and he later contributed to Fast Company. He wrote in-depth profiles of figures such as Steve Jobs, Andy Grove, Larry Ellison and Eric Schmidt. He also wrote extensively about Bill Gates, whom he first met in 1985, and about Sony and its CEOs, and he wrote articles drawn from interviews with Peter Drucker. His work draws on years of living and working abroad, mainly in China, Japan and Latin America. Becoming Steve Jobs came out from Crown Business in 2015, after a three-year collaboration with writing partner Rick Tetzeli. In 2010, SVForum gave Schlender its Visionary Award for his journalism. Away from reporting, he spent many years playing saxophone with a jazz and rhythm and blues band in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1999-2000 he teamed up with Robert Altman, a film director, and Garry Trudeau, a cartoonist, on developing a TV series named Killer App.