Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google in 2009 when he joined the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology under Barack Obama, and began working closely with Tom Kalil, who was then a deputy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
In those years, Schmidt and Kalil would see each other every other month, working on a range of council studies on topics such as U.S.-China competition on semiconductors, smart cities, and federal funding for computer science research. Kalil remembers that Schmidt “was able to not only discuss the big picture—for example, ‘What is the potential of this technology?’—but what, concretely, could the government do to foster innovation.”
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