White House CTO Megan Smith on the Value of Tech Diversity
Released on 05/01/2015
So welcome everybody.
Now we'd like you to
relax and
get comfortable.
'Cause we're gonna be up here for about
half an hour talking.
And then I'll open it up to you guys
and invite you to jump into the conversation.
And Megan,
I've had the opportunity to interview you
many times over the years and I want to make sure
that we spend a lot of time talking about
the big priorities for our nation
and what you're doing in DC.
But I'd love to start in a more intimate place, Megan.
I want to know when you decided you liked science.
(audience chuckles)
I think, that's an interesting question.
I'm gonna go to Buffalo on Friday,
which is where I'm from,
and talk at my high school which should be really,
it's really nice to go back.
She's going Friday because it will
have stopped snowing by then in Buffalo.
(everyone laughs)
I love snow!
Come on I grew up in snow, I'll go anytime in snow.
Actually just a tech thing you know kids.
We moved to DC and every day this fall
Louie would say, Siri, when is it gonna snow?
So that's the modern version of excitement for snow.
I think my family is incredibly entrepreneurial
and progressive and so my parents were always
doing all these things.
So I don't think it was that science in specific
but it was like impact.
So whether it was going to this place called Tifft farm
where you just went for the weekend,
it was like the city dump which is now
a super cool park and just pulling tires
and stuff out and being environmentalists, basically.
My dad started the recycling center for Buffalo.
They worked together to start the bike routes.
You know and this was in the '70s
before it was sort of, you know the same thing
as critical maths was existing in those movements.
And they were part of that.
My dad was doing a lot of art at the time.
He did business but he also did a lot of art,
stained glass and other pieces like that
and brought us in on that.
I remember like we would make
our teacher's projects you know for Christmas.
So we would make stained glass.
So we just had a real hands on experience.
My mom was a kindergarten and a preschool teacher.
So I think it wasn't that anything in specific
of science, maybe really more making
and engineering and building things.
What was your school like?
That was a really extraordinary.
So during all the busing that was going on in the '70s,
people were lying down in front of buses,
it was so crazy.
And Buffalo did this really creative thing
where they did all these magnet schools.
Later Clinton came and copied Buffalo
for the Little Rock schools.
It's really a fabulous school system.
And so our school started as we were kids
and so we got to watch our teachers make our school.
And so like middle school, elementary school?
You have middle, sort of 7th grade through 12th grade.
And so getting to see these entrepreneurial teachers
do their thing with basically no money,
you know 'cause these are inner city (audio skips).
Passionate about what they were doing.
And so, what was the result of the experiment?
I mean you're going on Friday so I assume
the school still exists.
It's an amazing school actually it was
the number four school in the Newsweek poll
I think two or three years ago, in the country.
Still inner city
school, public school.
Just extraordinary, at the time it was more scrappy.
And now it's a little more organized and they've had
Intel science winners and those things.
But one of the things that they did
that made a huge difference in my life,
in becoming technical was that science fair was mandatory.
And so everybody did science fair it was part of class
all the way through high school.
And also Mr. Soffen and Mr. Keene who were
our math teachers who are awesome.
They had the draft for math club, math team.
So most math teams are just the kids
who figured it out it's fun to do
and they're doing it
and everyone else doesn't know or thinks
that it's nerdy.
And so they made us do it.
And so we had-- Wait the draft
like every kid did it
or like you got a number?
They basically made pretty much every kid do it
or at least the kids who were kind of good performers
or whatever, they just made us all do it.
You know the kids who would have been in the play,
but they were in the math team and they were in the play.
So it created-- Was there a moment when you
were bitter about that as a kid?
No. (laughs) (audience laughs)
I like it.
It just exposed us to things.
They just exposed us to the breadth of everything.
Actually one other thing they did
that was extraordinary was,
one of our teachers wrote away for a grant
when I was, I think a sophomore.
And instead of starting school,
and I wish all schools did this,
they started on whatever right after Labor Day.
For the first three days plus the week
all the teachers changed gears
and they just did some teaching thing
and you could join whatever you want.
And I joined our physics teacher's seminar basically,
which was called The City as an Ecosystem.
And they took us in that particular one,
some people were doing architecture or art
or anything that was city based and they had won
this grant to do it to pay for it.
And so we went to this sewage treatment plant
and the water treatment plant
and all the ecosystem of our city
and learned sort of the mechanics
of how it physically worked.
It was amazing, we went on our bikes
'cause we didn't have any money.
We'd like find bikes or borrow bikes.
And so these teachers were just astonishing.
And they just got it done and they
treated us really well, believed in us
and got us working together as a team.
We came from all across the city.
And so what was college like for you?
Was it a no-brainer that you were
gonna study engineering or did you
consider doing other things?
I was lucky, I was the kid who did solar and wind things.
All the time in Buffalo of course. (chuckles)
You know solar's so big and what.
But I was inspired.
It actually came full circle for me in the White House
because the president was going up on the roof,
President Obama, to see the solar panels
on the Department of Energy.
And I had been inspired by President Carter
putting the solar panels on the White House.
So it's like, This is an interesting day.
We were in an energy crisis and so I was
coming to understand how you use technology
and science to make a difference
to solve a problem that's really significant
on behalf of the nation.
It was something I got to do early on.
And so I,
something came, a thing came to our school
about an NSF course out in Colorado.
So I ended up doing a small summer class
called Solar Energy and Energy Engineering
at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
And it was in the civil engineering department.
I'm like, Oh what we're doing is
this engineering thing.
So that's how I found out what it was.
In addition, despite my family being a bunch of engineers
from my grandfather.
And so from that I applied,
I just looked for mechanical engineering.
I had worked in a bike shop,
so I wanted more things that move engineering
versus things that are still.
And I just looked at the list and I applied
to some of the schools and MIT was on the top.
So I applied to it.
Didn't really understand what it was.
And so I went to visit and I ended up getting in
and I was the first kid from my school to get in.
And so my biology teacher's like, You're going there.
[Jessi] Ever?
Ever, yeah well were a new school.
I guess a new school, sure. Yeah, a new school.
And so I remember getting my admissions
and I had to wait for financial aid
'cause I was an inner city kid.
And so I remember opening it up
and doing the math and I could do this and this
and figuring out I can make it work.
Now you were in the very early days at MIT,
media lab, too right? Mmhm.
So what was that like?
It was incredible.
I did mechanical engineering and worked with a guy
name Woodie Flowers who, I just was at
the First Robotics Nationals.
All that first robotics stuff was he worked on,
but at the university level.
So I was part of more the design core
in mechanical engineering.
And then the media lab started when I got to grad school.
And what's great in STEM is they pay for grad school.
So for those who are interested.
Which is a good thing.
So there's these research assistantship.
And somebody told me about the media lab.
And so I went over and I ended up
working with Alan Kay, who had been the lead
for Xerox PARC.
And Marvin Minsky, founder of AI.
And this amazing Apple project.
Which in my particular project as mechanical engineer
I was making it,
how you could feel what you see on the screen,
sort of haptics, which still really hasn't come yet,
but it will come.
It's here a little bit.
Uh-Ha.
So how many years ago was that?
You don't have you to say. It was in the '80s.
It was in the '80s. (chuckles)
(interviewer chuckles)
It was right when we did the solar car race
across Australia at the same time, which was 1987.
And we're just writing about haptics again,
as about to finally have some sort of impact.
So we saw in the video the
early smartphones, would you call it an early smartphones?
Yeah.
So tell us a little bit about General Magic.
General Magic was a company that
was founded actually within Apple.
A guy named Mark Porat had an idea,
he called it Paradigm.
And it was basically this, but you saw
in the video it was like this big.
It really was exactly a smartphones.
It was the idea of a personal,
they called it a personal intelligent communicator.
And the idea of it was a device
that you took around that had apps.
And could do communication
and content and e-commerce.
And he had the cloud.
And he had all these devices connected.
And then he had all these services.
It was exactly internet.
He had the cloud like a picture of a cloud?
Or did he call it the cloud? Yeah, it was like a cloud.
This was 1990.
He had a cloud and then he had
smartphoness and TVs and the phones on your desk,
all the stuff connected.
And then he had these different services that were
content, communications, commerce
and I forget the last one, but they're all
the stuff that's happening.
So what'd you think, Megan, back in 1990?
What did you think that people were gonna use it for?
Exactly what they use it for.
We really were onto that.
You know it was a time, I'm a mechanical engineer
so I was doing engineering.
There were no things like this.
So we had to figure out touch screens
and what screen size.
That video that you saw was us figuring out
what kind of touch screen we were gonna use
and what size should this stuff be?
Sort of reminds me of the beginning
of internet advertising, had to figure out
the sizes of IAB ads.
All of the devices, should it have buttons?
And how should it work?
And then Susan Kare who did all the graphics
on the original MAC, it was much of the MAC team,
Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson, Joanna Hoffman.
All these amazing people from the MAC team
had come to do this.
And so we worked on this, in fact Pierre Omidyar
who founded eBay was there
and he was in the developer relationist team
working with all these third party developers
who are making apps for the phones.
It was just too early.
No one knew what we were talking about.
So no one had email yet, so we knew it was coming,
it was too big still, also.
It was this big carrying-- So what happened
[Jessi] to General Magic?
You know like many things in Silicon Valley
it became the next things.
So androids, Andy Rubin was there.
His Andy droid, androids.
Now he works on robots and other things.
And he was there and he went on to do Danger.
And then eventually creating androids and go forward.
Tony Fadell came from school.
Tony created the ipods with Steve Jobs.
So the ipods heritage which is the iphoness,
came out of there.
Ebay and the early device and app side of it,
so many people were in that company
who then spun out to do.
So it was not destined to happen
in that company, but it's really the heritage.
Like some people in the chips world know
a company called Fairchild,
that later Intel really is the one that gets it done.
So it's sort of the Fairchild of smartphoness.
So as you're naming these people
they're essentially lions of Silicon Valley today, Megan.
And as you think back on
the arc of your career which mirrors
the arc of the growth of the internet.
What would you point to as perhaps
the turning moment in your career?
You know I think it just builds on itself
in a lot of ways.
It's a combination of having the energy
to go forward, but also amazing luck that comes
and astonishing people that you meet
who are doing great things.
And having the courage and the initiative
and the go for it with them.
Hey that's a crazy idea that just might work.
You know and joining them in that.
Were any of those decisions hard, though?
Because I mean looking at them from this perspective
it looks like you made a lot of great decisions,
but when you're on the other side of it
you don't know if they're gonna be great, yet.
I mean Google, is that a thing, should you go there?
I believe in people
and the ideas and so you sort of bet on
your team mates together and
see what you can do.
I went, right out of school actually,
I went to Tokyo and worked for Apple
and that's where I met Bill Atkinson
and some of these other folks.
And Bill was spinning out with Mark Porat
to make this General Magic company,
spinning out of Apple at the time
and Motorola and Sony and all these
folks were investing.
And I had a chance, I had interviewed.
I was gonna stay in Japan and go into
a Japanese company, just learn more.
I actually interviewed, my Japanese is so bad now,
especially with the
Prime Minister Abe coming.
But I had interviewed in Japanese and got the job.
At Nissan I can't believe I did that,
it was a long time ago. (laughs)
(everyone laughs) I've forgotten all of it.
You want to try it out on us?
Because... Aaah, no.
All right, fair. (Megan laughs)
Actually there was a line in media lab
that, there were many Japanese fellows.
The first thing I learned in Japanese was
(speaks foreign language).
Which is have you eaten my toothbrush?
(everyone laughs)
Which Kenji had to say to all
the Japanese visitors all the time.
And they would look at us like,
What are you talking about?
We were down by two students.
Anyways so I had...
I don't know I think it was sort of coming,
I came back into
choosing to do a start up was what I decided to do
instead of going to the Japanese company.
And I think at that time I wrote down
all the things I wanted to learn.
And when people come and ask me for advice
about what they want to do,
I often suggest that, it was really helpful to me,
I wrote down all the things I wanted to learn
and I would learn in this choice or in this choice.
And then just thought about it.
And I wanted to learn more about
how to ship a product.
And so I decided to come,
to Silicon Valley which a great place
to learn how to ship a product.
It turns out, yeah.
But a lot of stuff is serendipity.
When I left General Magic and it was too early
so it sort of curved up and it didn't make it
and my friend Tom Reilly had founded PlanetOut
and he needed help.
And so sometimes, I'm not often the founder,
but I'm there early there's these,
Reid Hoffman calls us the smart generalists
that you need if you're a founder,
you need them in your team.
I think it's very important especially
for our young people.
How do we help people jump into start ups?
And even if they don't, we obsess sometimes
on the founder, but it's really those founding teams
that are so exciting and so fun.
So I helped to get PlanetOut over the finish line
for a couple of its early launches as a contractor.
And then we had a bunch of issues
with choosing the wrong CEO that Tom had
and so things flipped around.
We had to buy back the company from the VCs
and so I ended up running the company.
And it was an amazing thing to get to do,
it was an honor.
And you went right from PlanetOut to Google, right?
Pretty much Louie was born so I spent,
our older son and Kara was writing a book,
so I spent a bunch with him during his first year
and then I went to Google.
Okay.
So tell us a little bit about,
I was trying to decide between founding Louie.
and working at Google. (Megan chuckles)
I think we'll go with Google on this
and we'll come back to Louie.
So tell us a little bit about your work at Google.
And there's some colleagues here you know,
Tim Armstrong was there, of course now at AOL.
Amazing time with him and others who are here.
It was incredible I remember, it's definitely
fly the plane and build the plane at the same time.
I joined when we were about 1,200 people.
I went on maternity leave for Alex our other son
and the company doubled in size.
And I was only gone like three and a half months.
So it was impressive.
And just amazing and incredibly talented,
passionate, mission-driven people to work with.
David Drummond was running a team that was
early stage business development
and so we were helping the engineering
and product management teams start things.
So whatever deal work they needed to do
whether it was tech licensing
or first of a kind deals.
So we got to basically team that was quite small.
We also did acquisitions like Earth and Maps
and those others, but we got to be the team
and Christian Morrisey is here from that team.
We got to help the engineers do basically
everything that Google started.
So it was a stunning thing.
So you just had to stay with them
and help them keep moving forward.
It sounds sort of similar to the job
that you have now in many ways.
Yes it's interesting 'cause I was just
flashing on that Alex Macgillivray was there
who's now deputy CTO, was general counsel at Twitter
for many years after Google.
He and I worked on Book Search in the beginnings.
So figuring out how to work with the publishers
and what would the deal be in?
How would that be structured?
And he was on the legal side and I was on the deal side.
And new business development is a lot
of what you did at Google.
But you wore a lot of hats at Google, right?
You were involved with Google.org,
you were involved with Google X.
What did you do with Google X?
With Google X I was part of the leadership team
and so working a lot, Sergey was running X
and Astro with him.
The thing that I ended up doing there was
not only working with particular teams
but really starting a couple like company wide initiatives.
One of them was a little more Google X
called Solve for X and Puneet Ahira's here,
who did that work with me.
Which was really many of the solutions
that we need in the world are here,
we just have to find that person
and get them distributed, get them more knowledge,
get more research, so X being sort of
a variable for passion.
So we would find people in every continent
doing amazing work on energy break throughs
or food and nutrition break throughs
or water break throughs
and try to give them a TED like stage
where they would propose their idea.
And so we'd do kind of four proposals in a row
and then have an amazing curated room
of people we could gather from lots of different
cross functional areas,
engineers, policy makers, others.
And have them help 2/3 yes and
and 1/3 yes but brainstorming
and then report out.
And it was really helpful to the entrepreneurs
and it got their voice out there
on ideas that we really needed to solve.
So we did that work and we also started something called,
I started something with some colleagues
called Women Tech Makers.
Which is very much about...
It's based on the idea that
there's 16 million programmers in the world roughly
and that means there's two to three million women.
Why don't you ever see them?
And so Women Tech Makers like Makers,
the visibility is so important.
And so you can't be what you can't see,
which is what Geena Davis always says
about the lack of girls and technical girls
and technical people of minority in children's television.
Same thing at all of our conferences.
So I love what you guys are doing here because
technical women are amongst the most invisible.
Because they're invisible in technology
and they're also invisible amongst women, typically.
Women are tend to not be doing tech stuff,
so they're doing something between makers
and wired as a brilliant idea.
Just because the role models are here,
they've always been here, we just need to see them.
And so that was what Women Tech Makers was about.
Well that's really what we're hoping to do
with the event, Megan. Great.
So congratulations on your new role as CTO,
we love having you on the East Coast.
You are among family and friends.
And you called this role you have
when we interviewed for the Wired story
and I have to read it.
Because it's specific, an architecture and instigation job.
[Megan] Yeah.
What, what the heck is that? Does that mean?
(everyone laughs)
You know I think that way because
it's not like you're running government engineering.
Chief technology officers often in companies
also it's an architecture job,
you're not running NASA or the National Institute of Health.
You're not running government IT.
You're helping to bring technology,
innovation and data practice to everything
you can convince and get going.
And trying to prioritize amongst that.
So we do a lot of work on tech policy,
so the net neutrality work or broadband or
privacy, big data, discrimination in big data,
looking out for that, patent reform,
all of those topics of the day.
So whatever the hot topics are the CTO team
is at the table as technical people, I call it TQ.
Like IQ, EQ. So take net neutrality.
So you're at the table, what table?
How's there?
Obama's dinner table?
(everyone laughs)
What's he eat?
(laughs) No, not at Obama's dinner table.
So actually it's interesting,
it was so interesting to learn
how the policy process works 'cause I hadn't
been exposed to that.
And so the way that this is done,
it reminds me of maybe, it's incredibly collaborative.
And it draws from the best of people's knowledge.
Where they're documents get circulated
people can comment from all across government.
You're reaching out across all the different constituency.
I mean the FCC ran that process where they got
four million comments.
And so they did all kinds of analysis on that
and what people thought and what they wanted.
So you're trying to capture the voice
of anybody who wants to say something on that topic,
make sure you've heard it.
So it's an incredibly inclusive process.
What I think is slightly different now
is at the main table you go through
a general drawing, you pull a lot of information
then there's a deputies,
counsel of deputies committee meeting
and then there's principals.
And so the deputies debate and organize all this stuff
and then the principles meet, you're making decisions.
And what has not been happening at the principles table
on technical topics in the past
is there weren't always engineers at the table.
And so you have extraordinarily talented Americans,
economists, legislative folks,
legal folks, et cetera and now we've added
that extra set of seats of technical people.
But the Office of bet365体育赛事 and Technology policy,
which we're embedded and also the CTO team,
that makes a big difference in the room.
I mean it's a head scratcher that you wouldn't
have engineers as part of these big technical decisions.
You have them but they're consulted.
[Jessi] Got it.
Or they're thought of as implementation.
They aren't in the architecture of the conversation
and that's changed.
And we do it as a country when we're at war.
We bring everyone together as fast as we can
and we start solving things.
I mean we invented computers.
The UK, if you saw Imitation Game
you saw the Bletchley Park team,
we had the ENIAC and other teams here
that just did break through work.
As class collaborative.
When we're in peace time we kind of get separated out.
And so one of the great things
that President Obama's doing
is I think post Healthcare.gov,
that was an experience where he learned
that there were a set of people missing from government
and he went to go get us.
And he's bringing a lot of people in.
And we, CTO team, Jen Pahlka, who did
Code for America and Todd Park who was CTO before me.
Their teams together with colleagues
across Office and Management and Budget
and other agencies, architected what is now
the US Digital Service.
And so in addition to the policy table I was talking about
there's also the implementation of tech in government
and the beginning of what I call digital government.
So I think we should just unpack this a little bit.
[Megan] Okay.
'Cause even when we did our interviews there were
so many different sort of areas to keep track of.
And it seems like your job is a lot
about collaborating and helping those people work together.
Right.
And so when you're talking about Todd Parks group
they're not, okay look you've already lost me.
Okay.
You want me to go for it?
So they're on the West Coast
and they work under a different
organization than you work under,
but you still help recruit for them
and work very closely with them, right?
Yeah, so think of us as,
like an architecture in a tech company
maybe a board member.
So we're trying to IPO the best in class tech
though whoever wants to do that with us.
So whether it's the VA or whether it's
Department of Agriculture, whoever that is,
they need to be the best in class.
And so what's been missing is
we're a country that makes Amazon,
we make Facebook, we make AOL, we make these things.
And those Americans have not been in government
at levels, or they have been, but they're buried underneath
and only called on to make stuff.
Like, Let us design a website without
anyone technical and here please build this.
And we all know as tech people
that the best stuff gets built when
the marketing people and the writing people
and the coding people and the art people
are all working together.
And also making like first versions and prototypes,
not making a spec that's gonna be built across five years.
Like can you imagine Amazon writing a spec
for what they're gonna build across five years?
They would never do that.
No, no.
And so we need to not do that anymore.
And so you still are having, are gonna have
great people outside of government building this stuff,
so you'd be contracting them,
but you can contract better.
So Megan, you are the third US CTO that we have had.
And with Obama in office for another 18, 19 months,
you have limited time-- I think it's 94 weeks.
(laughs) Or so. Or so.
You have what to people outside of tech
might seem a limited time.
Of course you point out that if you work in tech,
I mean 19 months you could be IPOing
a company in that time.
What do you hope to do, what are your priorities?
We work in these three areas, the policy area,
this digital government area and then an area
I call innovation nation which is
work that we're doing to help the American people
get in on this innovation economy that we're all part of.
In addition to all of us here sort of
in the New York tech scene, how do we also get folks
from all different regions in on this?
Like Tech Hire.
Which is a project that Jeff Zients
in the National Economic Counsel and I put together
with the president around jobs.
So we have five million jobs open in the country.
Half a million of them are in tech.
And we don't have enough four year degree folks
to fill those jobs, so we have to think more creativity.
So take those people and what else?
And the companies are starving for talent.
From the economic perspective we want people
to have those jobs, we need the companies,
we need the companies to stay here.
We are finding things like the San Antonio folks
who are spending $15,000 bringing people
from other parts of the country
or other parts of the world.
And they're like, Why are we doing this?
So they founded a coding boot camp for Rackspace
to do cloud-based tech.
And now they have all kinds of people
from San Antonio who would have never been in tech
joining in months, not years.
So that half a million jobs.
I mean where in the country are they?
They're not for the most part in Silicon Valley, right?
That's right.
I was just in St. Louis last week
and the launch code team is there
who's the St. Louis incubator, Louisville
is doing this work.
Philly's doing this work.
Everywhere in the country this is happening.
People are using these short course boot camps,
three months of training, some apprenticeship.
Sometimes they're independent but they're
slowly getting into community colleges,
they're coming onto the base so the veterans can do it.
And then people can get into these companies.
What the companies have to do is adapt
their hiring practices to include ways
to evalsuate this person who has
a different kind of resume, but still pull them in
and that's happening.
And there's cohorts of companies helping
each other do it.
And then there's municipal leaders like here in New York.
Penny's here from the New York team.
They are also facilitating helping moving workforce dollars,
moving workforce programs to get the word out.
And then the Department of Labor put up
a 100 million dollar grant that already exists
for this funding, but adapting it to let people
apply for any kind of innovative ideas that they have
in these kinds of boot camp onboarding programs
that we can do across the country.
So in doing that it seems to me
that you'll also get a more diverse group
of workers, as well.
Yeah that's in fact that's the whole focus.
We just had a tech meet up, the first ever
tech meet up at the White House.
So we took
50 with Scott and the meet up team,
50 of the top meet up organizers in the country
and then we put them together with folks
who are doing amazing work on these boot camps.
Some of my favorite ones are like Digital NEST.
Watsonville, California where lots
of our strawberries come from,
they've created a Silicon Valley like space
and they've got the migrant worker youth,
they pay them in there doing tech stuff.
And so they're onboarding all kinds of people
who are near Silicon Valley into that world.
So you have lots of that kind of unusual training
all around to bring people in.
So before we finish up tonight I want to make time
for a couple of questions.
Do we have anybody from the audience
with something to ask?
Okay guys.
Of all you've done-- I taught fourth grade, hey.
[Audience Member] I've got one, Jessi.
Way back in that, now what's your name, sir?
(light giggles)
Of all the things that you've done
which are extraordinary, is this the most daunting?
Do you think you can really move this needle?
This is the most exciting.
It's incredibly welcoming.
And the president has teamed Dennis McDonough
who's the chief of staff.
Everywhere I turn people are hungry
to try to figure this out.
And people are incredibly entrepreneurial
and they're extraordinary talented.
And they haven't had us, the techies show up
for them, with them and we need to show up.
And so we're trying to structure
the US Digital Service so the people can
come for sprints and just come and debug something.
We just had an amazing marketing team come for two years.
We just had, Dave Recordon came for a short time
to work on IT from Facebook.
And he just decided to stay so we're very happy.
People come for two months, they can come for a year
they can come for periods of time.
And we're working with the tech companies
to let people take leaves to come.
I think that we need to think that way.
Like our government will only be
what it is based on all of us as talented people
showing up and helping and being part of it.
And I hope that, Alex Mcgillivray and I
were talking about, when we went,
we were thinking like, How would we would
change the brand of government?
And would we ever be able to talk to somebody,
let's say you're talking to,
a 30 year old techie.
And they say to you,
I'm gonna join, you know fill in the blank,
I've got an offer from, you know Dropbox,
Twitter, whatever, really cool company.
I might do this start up and I've got some
pretty good backing ideas in that.
Or I might join the VA Digital Service.
And that that would be a totally credible thing to say!
(everyone laughs)
And the good news is that we just got
the number three employee of Amazon to join the VA.
Her code is everything you see
with the smile boxes going around for all these years.
And what is your second act after you do Amazon?
It's the American veterans and helping them.
I mean serving them is an extraordinary
thing to be able to do.
And so everywhere you look the scale
of government is incredible.
And the thing that government can do
is serve our poorest Americans and help them.
And we know how to do amazing things
that we can help our team mates
who have these awesome policies or business models.
They know their thing and when we get together
we really solve a lot of problems quickly.
And then on the higher side like the innovative side,
I always say Henry Ford didn't have
anything against horses he just had a new idea.
And so how do we help the regulators see through
the idea of sand boxing and test cases?
And how do we help keep America's top innovators
moving and get out of their way
while we still protect American people,
protect privacy, do the things that
we need to do as government?
So it's those things together
that we're really focused on.
Like unlocking talent.
I was lucky to be in Ferguson in the high school
because we went to First Robotics Nationals on Friday.
And so we went to grab their robot team to come, too.
And just those kids needs to be in on this game, too
and their parents.
And how are we doing that as a country?
With 500 tech meet ups a day
those Americans are everywhere.
We just need the other people in their cities
to meet them and just start innovating
the way we all do and collaborating.
[Jessi] And so I want to throw our last question
out to Tim back there.
Wanted to quickly start by a quick infomercial
from Megan, I think Megan is one of the most
exceptional people in this country
and an exceptional leader and exceptional person.
I think we're exceptionally lucky to have you
in the government, Megan.
So thank you for doing that.
(audience applauds)
And my question is,
there's been a lot of discussion tonight
and what you do about the US,
but I'm wondering if you have counterparts
in other countries?
And how many countries have a CTO at this point?
And what do you think the United States
opportunity is to lead at a global scale
also in this environment?
Yeah.
This is a really exciting thing.
Cory Zirak who's in my team who runs
all the open government work for us,
just came back from Mexico City
where the open government partnership folks are meeting.
The president has started the open government partnership
with seven other countries.
He's unlocked 120,000 data sets since being in office
by just doing, like to the structure,
really clever rule making around how you get
the agencies and the way that the Executive Branch moves.
We have analytics.usa.gov now so you can see our analytics.
We started doing that because of the UK.
The UK has the government digital service.
You can see they're super digital.
And they actually started this thing called the D5,
which is digital, like G8, D, whatever
fill in the blank number.
And the first five are,
the UK, Estonia, Israel,
let's see South Korea and New Zealand.
And those folks all have open source policies.
They're communicating and putting a lot of stuff online.
They're teaching coding or are on track to teach coding
to every child in their country.
And so we're hoping to join that.
Mexico's working on joining, I think Australia.
So I think we're,
we're in sort of the..
Jeff Zients who's the director
of the National Economics Counsel
often has this idea of like, imagine a marathon,
where it's like those front runners.
And then there's the front of the pack
and everybody after.
We're definitely in that front runner group.
There's some other great countries that are with us.
And it's fun to work with the National Security Counsel
'cause as we get them and when they're doing
very formal visits we're like, Okay let's have
a multi lat and it looks like an email thread.
So (chuckles) you know we're just talking
to the CTO of the UK or talking to the CTO
of India who's moving really fast.
Brazil's moving really fast.
So it's great to see this happening all over the world.
And then Puneet Ahira who's here
is in the USAID global development lab.
So one of the other things that's happening
in government is these innovation labs.
Where entrepreneurs and residents,
not only the presidential innovation fellows
who come from outside government,
but entrepreneurs and residents from inside
can come and do, we call it, the NSA team
calls it kick starter, and then myth buster.
So you have a kick starter time and you can show
some new prototype and then test it out and build it.
The global development lab is one at USAID
that's prototyping extraordinary things.
So it's not only digital government
but also just, what are we doing about
the connectivity deserts in our country?
Where connectivity's missing like a food desert,
in other countries.
And really getting the techies involved
in the global UN level conversations.
We've been working with Samantha Power,
Ambassador Power here.
So it's really exciting to work on all that.
And it really is
the beginning of digital government.
And inclusion in a Wikipedia way,
of all of the talent of the world into that game.
You know that way that, APIs not RFPs.
Megan (laughs) on that note,
we thank you for all that you do to bring
government to the tech community
and to bring the tech community to government.
Thanks.
And thank you all for being here tonight.
(audience applauds)
Thanks, Jess.
Starring: Megan Smith
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