Megan Smith has a knack for driving change. As an MIT mechanical-engineering student, she built a solar car and drove it in the first Cross-Continental Solar Car race across the Australian outback. In her business career, she’s managed strategic acquisitions that produced Google Earth. In between, Smith has challenged world leaders to address hatred of gays.
As director of new-business development at Google since 2003, Smith enjoys “experimenting with new ideas to find out what’s most useful to the most people.” She led acquisitions that created Google Earth and Google Maps, two of the company’s most popular tools.
Smith arrived at Google from PlanetOut, an interactive media company and series of websites serving the gay and lesbian community; she was COO and then CEO until 2001. “It was rewarding to build a successful for-profit company with millions of members who come from every country in the world,” she says. When PlanetOut was named a 2001 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum (WEF), Smith spoke against religiously based hatred of gays at the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. “I told them that of the 2 percent hate mail PlanetOut received, 90 percent was religiously based,” Smith says. “The Vatican representative admitted this was disturbing.”
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