Women Who Inspire Us
Internet

Megan Smith

Megan Smith is CEO of PlanetOut, an Internet site that provides a vibrant, welcoming and safe community for all gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people as well as their family and friends.

Smith came to PlanetOut from General Magic, Inc., where she worked for six years serving as manager, European alliances; manager, partners and licensing; lead mechanical engineer for Magic Cap 1.0; and hardware team projects manager. While at Magic, Smith closed $9 million of equity financing from Toshiba and Nortel and $2 million in software and hardware licensing deals including Philips and Nortel; managed the partner relationships with OEM's Sony, Apple, Motorola, Matsushita, Philips and Nortel, and led the mechanical engineering of the original reference prototype PDA's and Smart Phones.

Previously, Smith worked at Apple Computer Japan in Tokyo with responsibility for market development of the then nascent multimedia market where she and her colleague executed a full day of NHK programming on Hypermedia.

Smith holds a B.S.M.E. and M.S.M.E. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work included two years at MIT's Media Lab, working with Woodie Flowers, Alan Kay and Marvin Minsky as part of the Apple Computer Vivarium early learning project. She served on the Board of Trustees of MIT for five years as a recent graduate of the university. While at MIT, Smith was the captain of the women's varsity swim team, president of the MIT Athletic Association, and was a member of the MIT-Solectria student team who designed, built and raced a solar car in the first Cross-Continental Solar Car race, 2000 miles across the Australian outback.

Over the years, Smith has designed an award-winning bicycle lock, worked as part of the team on a Space Station engineering construction experiment that eventually flew on the U.S. Space Shuttle, and run a field research study on solar cook stoves in Ecuador and Bolivia.