Megan Smith

As of March 2018 she is the CEO and Founder of shift7 which offers consulting services in tech-forward innovation and inclusive collaboration for faster, scaled impact.

In 2014, she left Google to become the 3rd U.S. CTO. After leaving the White House in 2017, she helped launch the Tech Jobs Tour, which aims to promote diversity in the technological sector.

In 2003, she joined Google, where she rose to the vice president of business development, leading new business development and early-stage partnerships across Google's global engineering and product teams. She led many early acquisitions, including Keyhole (Google Earth), Where2Tech (Google Maps), and Picasa, and later also took over as general manager of Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org. Smith co-hosts Google's Solve for X think tank. In 2012, she started Google's "Women Techmakers" diversity initiative.

Smith married technology columnist Kara Swisher in Marin County in 1999 (before same-sex marriage was legal in California). They have two sons, Alexander and Louis, and are divorced.

Following MIT, Smith worked at a variety of start-ups, including Apple in Tokyo and General Magic located in Mountain View, California, as product design lead on nascent smartphone technologies before she got involved with the launch of Planet Out in 1995. She joined formally in 1996 as COO and from 1998 she was Planet Out's Chief Executive Officer, where she presided over that company's merger with Gay.com.

Smith grew up in Buffalo, New York, and Fort Erie, Ontario, and spent many summers at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, where her mother, Joan Aspell Smith, was director of the Chautauqua Children's School. Smith graduated from City Honors School in 1982. She went on to receive her S.B. in 1986 and an S.M. in 1988, both in mechanical engineering, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and completed her Master's thesis work at the MIT Media Lab. She was a member of the MIT student team that designed, built and raced a solar car 2000 miles across the Australian outback in the first cross-continental solar car race.

Megan J. Smith (born October 21, 1964) was the third Chief Technology Officer of the United States (U.S. CTO) and Assistant to the President, serving under President Barack Obama. She was previously a vice president at Google, leading new business development and early-stage partnerships across Google's global engineering and product teams at Google for nine years, was general manager of Google.org, a vice president at Google[x] and the former CEO of Planet Out. She serves on the boards of MIT and Vital Voices, was a member of the USAID Advisory Committee on Voluntary Aid and co-founded the Malala Fund. On September 4, 2014, she was named as the third (and first female) U.S. CTO, succeeding Todd Park, and serving until January, 2017.