Ep. 8 | From General Magic Idealism to the White House | Megan Smith

Before she was Employee #12 at General Magic, Megan Smith grew up in Buffalo, studied mechanical engineering at MIT, and was working in Tokyo on multimedia projects for Apple Japan when a chance meeting with Bill Atkinson brought her into the company building the first mobile communication devices. She went on to an eleven-year run at Google — leading the acquisitions of Google Earth and Google Maps — before President Obama appointed her the third Chief Technology Officer of the United States in 2014.

In this conversation with Mike and Hersh, Megan makes the case for an optimism she’s carried since General Magic: that the world’s hardest problems — climate, AI safety, equity in tech — don’t get solved by any one person or technology, but by connecting the right people to each other. She traces that thread from General Magic’s apprentice-journey-mastery culture through her civic-tech company Shift7 and its “Scout & Scale” approach, the UN Sustainable Development Goals Solutions Summit’, and a career-long rule borrowed from Diane von Furstenberg. Along the way, she reflects on the erasure of women like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper from computing history, revisits the safety-first design philosophy behind Telescript’s agentic design in the 1990s, and debates what it would take to build “kindness by design” into today’s AI.

In this episode

* 01:29 – “Go where there’s tons of us, and go where you’re rare” — the 2015 MIT commencement advice behind her civic-tech focus; Shift7 and her board work (Think of Us, Planet Read, Earth Conservation Corps, MIT, LA28)

* 04:31 – The “three-layer cake” of policy, law, and tech innovation; President Obama, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the history of science advisors in government

* 06:57 – Why “harder than self-driving cars” problems don’t get tech’s top talent

* 09:02 – What General Magic — Steve Jobs’s original Mac team gone mobile — taught her about apprentice-journey-mastery; the original vision for a “dashboard” device vs. today’s attention economy; the Google Earth/Maps acquisitions and the Mapmaker crowdsourcing story

* 14:53 – Weighing models for AI regulation

* 15:17 – Dr. Joy Buolamwini, Gender Shades, and the Algorithmic Justice League; ROOST and open child-safety tools

* 17:12 – Telescript’s “should we?” vs. AI’s “can we?” — picking up the design-philosophy thread from the Rich Miller episode

* 18:20 – AI companions, “aggregated” intelligence, and Megan’s “Scout & Scale” approach

* 23:00 – The UN Sustainable Development Goals Solutions Summit: 800 submissions from 131 countries

* 25:45 – Remembering mentor Wendell Sanders and General Magic’s first hardware team

* 27:44 – Stanford, venture capital, and the fight for the university’s civic mission

* 30:11 – The American Research Enterprise, teaching kids to “cook” with electronics, and pioneering environmental scientist Ellen Swallow Richards

* 35:24 – Early AOL, Steve Case, and the quilters who met through chat rooms; her own time running PlanetOut

* 41:17 – “Kindness by design,” Pope Leo XIV, and Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction

* 41:58 – The Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and colleague Alexander Macgillivray

* 43:22 – The grassroots data-center backlash, and watching Texas’s ERCOT grid run on solar

* 46:36 – Women erased from tech history: Bletchley Park, ENIAC’s six programmers, Grace Hopper, and Ada Lovelace’s hidden signature “A.A.L.”

* 50:08 – Her trajectory from Employee #12 at 23 to U.S. CTO

* 50:20 – Diane von Furstenberg’s rule: Connect two people every day

About Megan Smith

Megan Smith joined General Magic in 1990 as Employee #12, recruited by Bill Atkinson and Marc Porat after a chance meeting in Tokyo, and served as VP of New Business Development — as well as a product design manager and hardware partnerships manager — on the team building some of the first mobile communication devices. She holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (1986) and an S.M. from the MIT Media Lab (1988). After General Magic, she was CEO of PlanetOut in the late 1990s, then spent 1999–2014 at Google, where she led the acquisitions of Google Earth, Google Maps, and Picasa, served as VP of Google X, and ran Google.org. In 2014, President Obama appointed her the third Chief Technology Officer of the United States, where she focused on data-driven policy, STEM equity, and broadband access. Today she is founder and CEO of Shift7, a civic-tech company connecting technologists to systemic social and environmental problems, and she serves on the boards of MIT and Vital Voices. Her career traces the arc from General Magic’s idealism to Silicon Valley scale to public service — and reflects a lifelong effort to make sure women’s contributions to technology, including her own, are not written out of the record.

Resources & Links

* Megan Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/msmith21

* Obama White House bio: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/administration/eop/ostp/about/leadershipstaff/smith/

* Shift7: https://shift7.com

* Think of Us (foster-care tech innovation): https://www.thinkofus.org/

* Planet Read (same-language subtitling for literacy): https://www.planetread.org/

* Earth Conservation Corps (Washington, DC): https://www.earthconservationcorps.org/

* LA28 (Los Angeles Olympic & Paralympic Games): https://la28.org/

* MIT Solve: https://solve.mit.edu/

* Journey to Lead (women’s leadership network — Megan Smith is a listed “Champion”): https://journeytolead.org/

* Vital Voices Global Partnership: https://www.vitalvoices.org/

* Entrepreneurship for All (E for All): https://eforall.org/

* 99Degrees Custom (Lowell/Lawrence, MA apparel manufacturer referenced as an E for All success story): https://www.rsiapparel.com/99-degrees/

* PlanetOut — the LGBT online media company Megan led in the late 1990s; the company was acquired and dissolved in the 2000s (merged into Here Media): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlanetOut

* Future of Privacy Forum (source of the 2017 AI-harms taxonomy): https://fpf.org/

* Algorithmic Justice League: https://www.ajl.org/

* Gender Shades (Joy Buolamwini’s research project): http://gendershades.org/

* ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools): https://roost.tools/

* United Nations Sustainable Development Goals / SDG Solutions Summit: https://sdgs.un.org/

* ColdHubs (solar-powered cold storage, Nigeria — cited as a Solutions Summit submission): https://coldhubs.com/

* Cathy O’Neil / Weapons of Math Destruction: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/241363/weapons-of-math-destruction-by-cathy-oneil/

* Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights (White House OSTP, 2022): https://digitalgovernmenthub.org/library/blueprint-for-an-ai-bill-of-rights/

* ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas): https://www.ercot.com/

* Bletchley Park (WWII codebreaking, home of the Colossus): https://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

* University of Pennsylvania (built the ENIAC): https://www.upenn.edu/

* NVIDIA chips names after women in Tech: https://www.nvidia.com/

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