Megan Smith was the third chief technology officer of the United States, serving under President Barack Obama, and the first woman to hold that position. She previously served as a vice president at Google, leading new business development for nine years; as general manager of Google.org and a vice president at Google X. She is also the former CEO of Planet Out. Smith gave the 2017 USC Viterbi master’s commencement address last May.

As U.S. CTO, you were charged with bringing Silicon Valley innovation to the dot-gov world. What do you consider your proudest moment and your biggest regret in this arena?

It wasn’t specifically Silicon Valley. It was more, how do you bring more of this tech world “TQ?” Like tech IQ. We were able to bring extraordinary Americans who were experts in these topics to bring their best game. The president would say that we should rotate them into government and have a seat for TQ in the senior policy. We brought over 500 people to the government. People like Alex MacGillivray, who was the general counsel of Twitter — he’s a coder lawyer. Cori Zarek, from U.S. National Archives, who’s one of the best experts on open government. DJ Patil, U.S. chief data scientist, who was the data scientist for LinkedIn and had experience in national weather and in defense. … Lynn Overmann, who was a public defender in Miami and who started the Data-Driven Justice Initiative, which now has 140 jurisdictions covering 94 million Americans.

You know, bringing something of value like community practice — talking every few weeks, sharing and accelerating what works. For example, Miami’s gone from 7,000 people in prison to 4,900. Closed it down, saved $12 million. So how do we create the same kind of community practice networks that allow Miami to rapidly share that with others would copy it? Versus a nice little best practice thing that gets reported out in a PDF. Right? So, make that a thing that we accelerate almost like a venture capitalist would — finds Twitter and lifts it. A venture catalyst in government, or anywhere, is looking for things that are working, getting the word out and getting enough connections so people can copy things that work.

Was there a particular interaction with a student that really resonated with you?

I remember this young woman in Connecticut, a high schooler who dropped the cost of the Ebola test by 99 percent and took it from 12 hours to 30 minutes. You know, using the internet and other things. It was just fabulous — the amount of talent that’s out there. But one of the groups that I really loved meeting was in the Phoenix, Arizona, area. These students came up with this ingenious idea: Why don’t we elect a chief science officer in our schools? Just like you could have a class president or treasurer, why don’t you have a chief science officer? And so these middle school and high school kids, 150 of them, became the evangelical chief science officers. There’s this whole idea of, We need to get the kids to like STEM! And they’re like, “No, I got this.” And they start evangelizing in a way that you never can. Inside the community of students. They’re also incredibly diverse because they’re elected by their peers. This year, there will be over 500 CSOs in five states. We should bring that idea to
all schools.

So, one of the keys is that sometimes the problem that you’re working on, that we need STEM in schools, is actually the resource. The kids are actually the resource. The kids that you think that you’ve got to help are the resource for solving.

You also did some interesting things with digital government and higher education.

Todd Park, who was CTO before me, started the U.S. Digital Service [an effort to bring reams of government data to individuals who can use it]. Here’s an example of the science advisor and the CTO really catalyzing things. There had been a group trying to make a website to help students see, Is this the right college? You know, do people graduate from this college? What percent? How much does it cost? What kind of degrees? We were sitting on all this data and information about it. A lot of data. So what the tech teams did was they’re like, Why don’t we have some APIs (application program interface) and open this data?

Just like the iPhone has all these apps on it, the Department of Education could have all kinds of apps on their open data. We could engage with the developer community and make products for our students, including this data. So they made one called the College Scorecard that helps you with that basic information. Really important, because if you’re going to sign up for all those college loans, you want to know what kind of money people make when they get a degree from there. What’s the graduation rate there? You know, is this a good college to go to from a kind of buyer-beware perspective?

[With the Digital Service] We opened over 200,000 data sets that should be open. Just like the mapping data that your phone uses, that Google Maps use, that the weather apps have a billion-dollar industry on top of weather data from NOAA. We have all this data from Housing and Urban Development and the [Departments of] Education and the Census and others. If you go to opportunity.census.gov, you see amazing apps that all kinds of app makers have built on top of census data.

We were sitting on all this data and information about it. A lot of data. So what the tech teams did was they’re like, Why don’t we have some APIs (application program interface) and open this data?

Just like the iPhone has all these apps on it, the Department of Education could have all kinds of apps on their open data. We could engage with the developer community and make products for our students, including this data. So they made one called the College Scorecard that helps you with that basic information. Really important, because if you’re going to sign up for all those college loans, you want to know what kind of money people make when they get a degree from there. What’s the graduation rate there? You know, is this a good college to go to from a kind of buyer-beware perspective?

[With the Digital Service] We opened over 200,000 data sets that should be open. Just like the mapping data that your phone uses, that Google Maps use, that the weather apps have a billion-dollar industry on top of weather data from NOAA. We have all this data from Housing and Urban Development and the [Departments of] Education and the Census and others. If you go to opportunity.census.gov, you see amazing apps that all kinds of app makers have built on top of census data.

Your White House office created a great website called “The Untold History of Women in STEM.” Can you share one or two of your favorite stories?

There’s a great [Winston] Churchill quote that says, “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you will see.” So it’s really important to do this work — to go back, look at the photos, ask questions and say, “Who was on the whole team?”

One of my favorite stories on the website is about the ENIAC programmers, which is really an “Imitation Game”-like story for America. During World War II, we needed tremendous mathematics for the war effort. We got these hired “computers,” who were primarily women. [J. Presper] Eckert and [John] Mauchly created the first computer — it was the first digital computer in America — called the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania. Upstairs from their room, there was a group of about 80 or 100 women who were doing ballistic trajectory differential equation calculations for the huge guns on naval ships. Eckert and Mauchly went upstairs and they got six of these women, and they became the first digital programmers in America. Ever. It’s like a 70-year-old, nearly lost history that my friend found by looking at photos and asking who the people were. And when she found these women, they were in their 80s. It sort of like “A League of Their Own” meets computer science.

Grace Hopper, of course, was working up at Harvard on the Mark I computer — she’s also in the Untold Stories. Most people don’t know Grace Hopper. She’s an Edison-level American who, like President Obama said, “If Edison is light, and Wright is flight, then Hopper is code.” Grace Hopper felt that people should program in an English-like or a human-like language — that it would really open up the field because there was only this sort of machine coding. And so she wrote a translator compiler. The first compiler, she invented. That began what is now modern computer languages, which led to COBOL and other things. She got the Presidential Medal of Freedom last year from President Obama, posthumously.

I imagine it must have been hugely validating, not only to have the movie “Hidden Figures” come out, but come out and make a huge amount of money.

It’s one of the most important films of perhaps the last half-decade. To help Hollywood see that these stories are important and people want to know them. And that’s why it’s so exciting to see the work that [USC Viterbi Professor] Shri (Narayanan) has done with Dr. Stacy Smith and [actor] Geena Davis on media bias and making tools to help us, because we all watch this media, so we just make the same biased media, which diminishes us. … It’s debilitating to lose these histories.

Two years ago, we were fortunate to have you as a champion of our “Next MacGyver” competition. What’s your idea for a TV show with a female engineer as the main character?

I would re-enact all the heroes that haven’t been seen.

Your pilot episode. What is it?

The Wright family. And then you would see that Susan Wright, Orville and Wilbur’s mother, is like the “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” dad. It’s written everywhere. And Katherine, their little sister, is like their Sheryl Sandberg. So we would see the truth.

I think that you would just tell the true stories. Just last night I was watching [a show on] Lewis and Clark. So, instead, what I would make is Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea and Pomp [Sacagawea’s son]. I’d tell the story of this amazing thing that the four of them did. And they’d figure out who else was in the pictures that’s missing. Because I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t call it Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea. They weren’t getting anywhere without her!

What’s your dangerous idea? A belief you hold that might be controversial, counterintuitive or just ahead of its time?

Yeah, “so dangerous” is in the eye of the beholder! That’s why I think of Jane Addams — most people don’t know her, yet she was considered one of the most dangerous women in America for a while. She later won the Nobel Peace Prize for inventing social work.

We need to lift them to their equal position with Edison, Ford and others, because they really are scientists and innovators. I think sometimes the dangerous idea is not so dangerous. It’s the right idea, which is you can diversify tech, which we must do. You can also tech-ify everything else, which will make it diverse and techie.