CEO & Founder shift7, Former U.S. Chief Technology Officer

Megan Smith is an award-winning entrepreneur, engineer, and tech evangelist. CEO and founder of shift7, a company working collaboratively on systemic social, environmental and economic problems -- finding opportunities to scout and scale promising solutions and solution makers and engage proven tech-forward, open, shareable practices to drive direct impact, together.  

Smith served as the third U.S. Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to the President 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, criminal justice reform and expanding tech and data science talent service opportunities in government. Smith spent over eleven years as vice president at Google leading new business development including acquisitions of Google Earth, Maps, Picasa, she led Google.org, and later co-created WomenTechmakers, and SolveforX. She was PlanetOut CEO, an online LGBTQ community and content company in the early days of the Internet, where she drove engagement and revenue by partnering closely with top Internet companies, including AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, Netscape, RealNetworks, and others, at General Magic where she worked as an engineer on early smart phones, and Apple Japan in Tokyo. Smith holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT and 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.

Board member of MIT, Vital Voices, LA Olympics 2028, Think of Us; Co-founder of the Malala Fund and UN Solutions Summit; Algorithmic Justice League and Silicon Valley Comes to the UK (SVC2UK) advisor and member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Academy of Engineering.