Zschau was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Zschau graduated cum laude with an A.B. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1961 after completing a senior thesis titled "Space Time and Geometry from Kant to Einstein." He also holds M.B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. During the 1960s, Zschau was for five years an assistant professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, teaching courses in computer systems, management science, and business policy. In 1967–68 he was a visiting assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, where he taught the required first year MBA course in managerial economics. Also during the 1960s Zschau founded a computer company, System Industries. One of his collaborators in founding this company was Henry B. Eyring. Zschau served as CEO of System Industries from 1968 to 1981. In 1987 Zschau became a general partner of Brentwood Associates, a Los Angeles-based venture capital firm, and in 1988, he was elected chairman and CEO of Censtor Corp., a company which had been founded by Brentwood to develop advanced magnetic recording components for disk drives. He was recruited to be chairman and CEO of Adstar, the IBM Storage Systems Division in 1993. Zschau is also the founding chairman, emeritus, and a member of the National Advisory Board of The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, is on the board of scholars of the ACCF Center for Policy Research in Washington, D.C., and is a fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology. He serves as chairman of the board of NanoOpto Corporation, Princeton Power Systems, and StarTek, Inc., President of Polyera Corporation, as a director of The Reader's Digest Association, Inc., and Washington Live, Inc. Zschau is currently a visiting lecturer with rank of professor at Princeton University in the Departments of Electrical Engineering, Operations Research and Financial Engineering, and in the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. Prior to his current post at Princeton, from 1997 to 2000, he was professor of management at the Harvard Business School and a visiting professor at Princeton University. In the summer of 2019, Zschau accepted a pro bono position as Interim President of Sierra Nevada University, in Incline Village, Nevada. Zschau and his wife, Jo, currently reside in Nantucket, Massachusetts, and Los Altos, California. They have one son and two daughters. Zschau is skilled in playing the ukulele and was known to some as the "singing congressman".
