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.