 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We're joined by Megan Smith. We're very excited to have you on the show. She is the third US CTO and also the CEO of a new company, Shift7.co. So thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. It's so fun to be at Hopper. It is, it is. You know, and it's cool. It's the Grace Hopper Celebration because we're trying to celebrate women in computing. And we're at 18,000 people now. It's the biggest ever. Exactly. Plus I think 6,000 people joined on the live stream. Which is great. So before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about your role as the third US CTO. And just talking about getting more technology into government to help leaders work together and move faster. Tell us a little bit about this initiative. Yeah, so, and what's so great is it's not partisan, fixing the government and making it work better. So all the work that we were doing continues. So what we were able to put in place during the Obama administration and continues from Trump were things like the CTO office. So having technical people, so I worked at Google, people at Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, these companies who have that background to join in on policy conversations one. To join in on capacity building the government. So data sciences and tech and let's have our services be as great as Amazon or as Twitter or Oracle and not be sort of retro. We want to serve the American people. And then also helping the American people in general with capacity building, things like computer science for all. So that was an initiative that continues but to get all of our children to have coding at school that all children, you couldn't graduate from high school without having had some experience in learning of coding. Coding is a 21st century fluency. It's a skill we all need. Like freshman biology, you want to know some biology, you want to know some coding, you want to know how to write. So making sure to have a tech hire, which was a program that we started to help train Americans, there's 600,000 jobs open in the United States and they pay 50% more than the average American salary. The companies are starving. How do we rapidly get more Americans into these jobs? So it turns out that people of course created these fabulous code boot camps there. You can train in three months for these jobs. Some of them are paid, sometimes they pay you and all different kinds, some are online, some are offline, they're all over the country. So we're able to get more people to consider a job like that. Culturally they think, why would I, I don't know how to do that, but you can. This is a fun and interesting and exciting career. You can do digital marketing, you can do user interface design. You can get involved in front end or back end coding, product management, all those things, sales. And so how do you pull lots more Americans in, get our companies fueled so we highly have that economic opportunity? And they're all over the country, like location-wise and topic-wise. And so we did tech, now we're on a tech jobs tour, which is not what we did in government, but what we're continuing some of that work. It's just weird dichotomy, because I wanted people to worry about tech taking jobs. On the other hand, there's a ton of open tech jobs. And there's this transition period that's difficult obviously for people that didn't grow up, one of the keynote speakers today told a really heartening story that she didn't get into it until the day she had to leave her abusive husband and now she is a coder. That's Dr. Sue Black, who was just given the order of the British Empire. I mean, she is an incredible computer scientist. Yes, she escaped an abusive marriage with three small children in her early 20s, I think, ended up moving into public housing and dealing with three children and only being able to go to school from nine until three, and eventually getting her PhD in computer science. And really, she's started tech moms now. She continues to do research and other things, but she's really trying to use her story and her organizing capacity to have more people realize this isn't hard like figuring out gravity waves that won the Nova Prize. This is hard like writing a hard essay. So we all can learn to write an essay. It takes some mastery work. You don't learn it in kindergarten, but by the time you're in 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th grade, you can do it and on it. Right, so coding is like that. The other piece you said that's very interesting is the consumerization of IT. We've seen it in enterprise, a huge trend, but now it's I expect everything that's on my phone when I interact with Facebook or Amazon or whatever to be in all the applications. So as you said, that's influencing government and the way they have to deliver services. And I would imagine too with kind of the next wave of kids coming in, graduating, going into public service, they certainly have that expectation, right? They've been working on their phone forever. Of course it should be on the phone. And so we want that everybody in our country fluent in computer science and coding at a basic level, like again, like freshman biology or taking chemistry in high school or taking writing, so that everyone could realize this is not rocket science. We could have these kinds of capabilities as part of our services from housing and urban development from the department of education. You know, a lot of us use our phones to get places, you know, on our maps. And so that's actually data coming from the US Geological Survey. If you're looking at the weather, you're looking at NOAA satellites. These are, this is open government data. We're able to open over 200,000 data sets from all over government, not private data, but public data that you could make an entire app store, you know, or Google Play set of products on top of that. Government wouldn't have to pay for that. It just packages up the API as well. And a really good example of that is the US Census team. I mean, there's nothing more big data than census. They have all of our information from a data perspective. And so they did opportunity.census.gov and they said to various agencies, let us help you bridge these data sets into something that someone could build on top of. You know, like we're seeing from the commercial sector, we saw wonderful things like housing and urban development said, okay, our challenges are housing affordability, mobility, these are the challenges. Instead of having HUD make an app for Americans to come to, they just can explain what their problem is, what data sets and engage extraordinary companies like Airbnb, Redfin, Zillow, these fabulous tech companies who can make instead a product for 100% of Americans rather than only wealthier middle class Americans. And so they did things like Opportunity Score and Airbnb helping you figuring out if I rent a room in my house, I can make my rent more affordable. Very creative apps that we can see, same thing for Department of Add or Department of Labor. And as the data gets out there, and as apps come, also the opportunity for data science and machine learning. What if as much as we serve ads to ourselves, and in these algorithms, what if we use the algorithms to help Americans find a job that they would love? Job matching and these kinds of opportunities. So really applying AI, machine learning, data science to all of the problems of the world and helping government get more fluent at that. And the way to do that is not so much jam the government, you have to do this, but find terrific talent like we see at Hopper and have them cycle into the government to be co-leaders just like a surgeon general would come. Are you facing recruitment challenges in that same way though, in the sense that technology is having a hard enough time recruiting and retaining women. But the government too, is that seen as enough of an employer of choice for young, talented, bright, ambitious young women? Right, so I'm not in government now, but when we were in there, we found a very interesting thing. Alex McGilvery who had been the general counsel of Twitter, who was deputy CTO with me and led a lot of our tech policy called a TQ, like tech IQ in policy, together with economists and lawyers and others have, if we're going to decide net neutrality, let's include everyone including a computer scientist, if we're going to see encryption open source. So that, we talked about that. And on the way going into government, he said wouldn't it be cool if, just like when you look at a lawyer's resume, you might see that they clerked and they serve their country through clerking and through the judicial system as well as being a private lawyer or they were a public defender. That's a pretty normal thing to see on a legal resume. If you looked at medical, you might see them going into NIH or doing some research. If you looked at scientists, they might have gone to and done some NSF work with us. But for the tech crew, there's of course amazing technical people at NASA and NIH and the Department of Energy and there's great IT teams. But there's not this thing that the Silicon Valley crew, resume would say, oh yeah, I serve my country. So that's why under President Obama, we're able to create these incredible programs, the Presidential Innovation Fellow, which is a one year term of service, the United States Digital Service, which is a three months to a two year term of service in the VA. What's more amazing if you build Amazon than to go as a second act and help our veterans? It's an incredible honor. So to the point of, will they come? Yes, that's what we were hoping. Like, could we have that be a normal thing? And yes, it's become a normal thing and the Trump administration continues it. So the 18 F team is in the General Services Administration. They're on 18th and F, so they have a cool name. But that particular team is located all around the country, not only in DC, but in San Francisco, in Chicago and others. So you see this tech sector flowing now into the government at a regular basis and we welcome more people. The government is who shows up to help and so we need the tech sector to show up because we've got a lot of money as a country, but if we're not effectively using it, we're not serving the American people and foster children, veterans, elders, others, need the services that they deserve and we have the money. So let's make it happen the way the tech sector is delivering Amazon packages or searches. So what is your feeling? This is not your first Grace Hopper, obviously, but what is your feeling about this conference and advice that you would give to young women who are here, maybe for their first or second time in terms of getting the most out of their time here? You know, I think the main thing is it's a celebration and it's fun and you can walk up to anyone. So just talk to everyone. I've been talking to a million people on the floor. Fabulous. Students are here, more senior technical leaders are here. We've been running a speed mentoring. We're running a program called the Tech Jobs Tour. It's at techjobstour.com. It's the hashtag America's Hiring and we've been going to 50 different cities and so we're running a version of that and we do speed mentoring. So come to the speed mentoring sessions. It's a five minute pop. You know, talk to someone about what you're trying to do. Lots of programs like that. Get into the sessions, come to the keynotes which are so inspiring and you know, Melinda Gates was amazing today. Dr. Fei-Fei Lee was incredible. Just across the board, Dr. Sue Black was here. I thought it was great today actually just to reflect on Melinda's keynote. I think this might have been the first time I was talking to her that she's really talked about her own technical experience as a coder. You know, starting in community science. I didn't really understand that she had really started very early, you know, with the Apple III and the story of her dad. This early high school coding, which is so important for young people in high school and middle school, even younger. The Muskogee Creek tribe in Oklahoma is teaching robotics and head start. So we can start in preschool. Right. You know, just make it fun and interesting. They're funny. They say they don't do battle bots because you don't really want to teach three and four year olds to fight. So they have collaborative robots. Robots who work together. Exactly, exactly. Age appropriate. Well, Megan Smith, this has been so fun talking to you. Thanks so much for coming on our show. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. We will have more from the Grace Hopper Conference just after this. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick.