The White House’s Alpha Geeks

A Q&A with United State chief technical officer Megan Smith and Deputy CTO Alex Macgillivray.

Until about a year ago, Megan Smith was the ultimate Silicon Valley insider. A brainy math kid out of Buffalo (NY) who earned an engineering degree at MIT, she hit California like a meteor, working for Apple, General Magic, and Google. Then Todd Park, the United State chief technical officer and advisor to the President, called, asking her to take his job. She said yes. Around the same time another Silicon Valley lifer, Alex Macgillivray (known widely as AMac) got a similar call from Park. Macgillivray had been a top policy attorney at Google and general counsel of Twitter. Park was tapping him to become Smith’s deputy CTO, and he also agreed.

The duo, on the job almost a year now, have presided over the White House tech policy operation, situated within the Office of Science and Technology Policy, at a time when President Barack Obama seems to finally be getting his geek on. It is probably no coincidence that in the aftermath of the healthcare.gov debacle -- and the subsequent triumphant rescue by a cadre of Silicon Valley veterans of Google and other companies  -- that the chief executive is speaking forcefully and frequently about utilizing the energy of our nation’s tech talent to make government more efficient. He has also been more present in speaking up for some of his long-held tech-friendly policy issues, like net neutrality. Smith and Macgillivray are taking advantage of the gov-tech moment to involve the White House in a number of projects, including the Police Data Initiative (compiling information from cooperating local departments on things like who gets detained, and what happens with bodycams) and TechHire (to open up technical jobs to a diverse population). Smith has been at the President’s side at a number of events familiar to Californians but previously rare on Pennsylvania Avenue, like meetups, tech fairs and demo days.