Megan Smith

Megan Smith is an award-winning entrepreneur, engineer, and tech evangelist. She is the CEO and founder of shift7, a company working to solve systemic social, environmental, and economic problems and engage proven tech-forward, open, shareable practices to drive direct impact.

Smith served as the third U.S. Chief Technology Officer from 2014-2017 -- working on issues from AI, data science, and open source, to inclusive economic growth, entrepreneurship, structural inequalities, government tech innovation capacity, STEM/STEAM engagement, workforce development, and criminal justice reform. Prior to serving in government, Smith was a Vice President at Google for eleven years leading new business development where she managed early-stage partnerships, pilot explorations, and technology licensing across the global engineering and product teams; she led acquisitions of Google Earth, Maps, and Picasa; led the Google.org transition to increase engineering adding Google Crisis Response, GoogleforNonProfits, Earth Outreach/Engine; and later co-created SolveForX and Women Techmakers. Earlier, Smith served as CEO of PlanetOut, an online LGBTQ community and digital media company in the early days of the Internet, working on early smartphone technologies at General Magic and at Apple Japan.

Board member of MIT, Vital Voices, LA Olympics 2028, Thinkof-Us; Co-founder of the Malala Fund and UN Solutions Summit, advisor to Silicon Valley Comes to the UK and the Algorithmic Justice League, and World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. Smith has a Bachelor's and Master's degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT, and a Master’s thesis at MIT Media Lab. Smith was a member of the MIT student team that designed, built, and raced a solar car 2,000 miles across the Australian outback in the first World Solar Challenge. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and National Academy of Engineering.