Megan Smith is CEO of shift7 and 3rd US CTO and I got an opportunity to interview her a while back.

In this wide-ranging conversation Smith talks about her work at Apple and General Magic, how she decided to study engineering and her work with President Obama as the 3rd US CTO  and  what keeps her busy now.

Smith went to  work at Apple in Japan right after getting her engineering degree and this is how she got to meet and interact with Bill Atkinson, who is the creator of hypercard and one of the members of the original Macintosh team. When Atkinson co-founded General Magic he encouraged Smith to join the company. Smith did and went to work on their hardware product.  General Magic was  a spin-off from Apple and one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley in the 1990s.  The  startup was building a personal communicator for a post-PC generation. While the company did not succeed, the ideas they unleashed went on to influence smart devices like the iPhone, iPad and Android phones.

The story of this iconic startup’s birth and why it failed to succeed is captured in the documentary General Magic that releases in May 2019.

This interview aired on TV in the US.

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