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MEGAN SMITH

Megan recently joined Google's advanced products team, Google [x], where she is working on range of projects including co-creating/hosting SolveForX, a forum to encourage and amplify technology-based moonshot thinking and teamwork (http://www.wesolveforx.com/). For nine years before that she oversaw Google’s New Business Development team managing early-stage partnerships, pilot explorations, and technology licensing working closely with Google’s engineering and product teams globally across all product areas. She led many of the company’s early acquisitions, including Keyhole (Google Earth), Where2Tech (Google Maps) and Picasa. Megan also led the Google.org team transition to expand and innovate engineering based projects including Google Crisis Response, Google for Nonprofits, and Earth Outreach/Earth Engine, Googler 1%-time (now called “GoogleServe20”) in addition to operationalizing Google’s more traditional corporate giving.

Prior to joining Google in 2003, Megan was the CEO and, earlier, COO of PlanetOut, the leading gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender online community, where the team broke through many barriers and partnered closely with all of the early major web players. She also held roles at General Magic and Apple Japan. Over the years, Megan has contributed to a wide range of engineering projects, including an award-winning bicycle lock, space station construction program, solar cookstoves and was a member of the MIT student team who designed, built and raced a solar car 2000 miles across the Australian outback. She holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from MIT, where she now serves on the board. She completed her master’s thesis work at the MIT Media Lab.

BENEDIKT TASCHEN

Benedikt Taschen, 1961, Cologne, Germany, is a German publisher. His professional life started at age 18 in a 250-square-foot (23 m²) store in Cologne, Germany, named TASCHEN COMICS. In 1984, he bought 40,000 remainder copies of a Magritte monograph published in English with money borrowed from his family. The books sold through at double the price in two months and he was soon publishing his own books. By the end of the 1980s TASCHEN titles were available in over a dozen languages at prices that made art books affordable to students and collectors alike.

By the late 1990s, he had become a household name in publishing. When Vanity Fair’s Matt Tyrnauer deemed him, “one of the few people in business who has the courage to do exactly what he wants whenever he wants to”, Benedikt Taschen tested the theory with Helmut Newton’s SUMO, the largest bound book of the 20th century. “I have done a lot of books, and I can tell you—without mentioning names—that publishers are not all like him. There are very few like him. Or there are none like him. He is also, I might add, a madman”, says Helmut Newton to Vanity Fair.

SUMO is also the company’s most successful title of the last ten years and the precursor to Benedikt Taschen’s most ambitious personal project: GOAT—Greatest of All Time, a tribute to Muhammad Ali, shipping in Spring 2004. Four years in the making, GOAT weighs 75 lbs and is 20" x 20" in size, with nearly 800 pages of archival and original photographs, graphic artwork and articles and essays—including those of Ali himself.

Another of his books is the Icons series of art books, some of the most accessible in the world.

Today, TASCHEN has offices in Cologne, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Paris and Tokyo and stores in Amsterdam, Berlin, Beverly Hills, Brussels, Cologne, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Hollywood, London, Miami, New York, and Paris. TASCHEN employs 200 staff members worldwide and many longtime freelance editors. As Billy Wilder put it in Vanity Fair 2000: “Benedikt reminds me of an old-time Hollywood figure—a studio head, someone who is in firm command and has his hand in everything”.

He is married and lives in the Chemosphere, designed by John Lautner in 1960. He bought the home for $1 million in 1997, restored the building, and published a book on Lautner. He lives and works in Cologne and Los Angeles.

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