An Eric Schmidt Investment Firm Crumbles After Mismanagement, Soured Romance
The former Google CEO once said Steel Perlot, founded by his then-girlfriend Michelle Ritter, could become a new kind of Y Combinator. Now Ritter blames Schmidt for the firm’s unraveling, while former employees point to Ritter’s erratic management.
Michelle Ritter felt stuck. She knew it was an odd thing to say last month, as she sat on the living-room carpet of the 13-bedroom Bel Air mansion—previously owned by the Hilton family—that she currently lives in.
The owner of the mansion is Eric Schmidt, the 69-year-old former Google CEO, whom Ritter, 30, began dating in 2020 when she was an ambitious third-year student at Columbia University’s law school. The business Ritter had started with funding from Schmidt, a startup incubator and asset manager called Steel Perlot, was out of cash. Several of the fledgling companies it had launched had shut down.
And she and Schmidt, Steel Perlot’s only funding source, had broken up earlier this year. This spring, Schmidt said he would stop funding the firm, Ritter wrote to Steel Perlot employees last month. While Ritter blamed her frayed personal relationship with Schmidt for the business separation, Schmidt had found evidence that Ritter had asked employees to exaggerate the success of the business so it would be more likely to get additional funding from him, a person close to Schmidt said.