Teresa Carlson recounts competing against legacy IT giants IBM and Microsoft to win the CIA cloud contract for AWS.
Opinion
Carlson: Trump administration is unprecedentedly open to commercial tech startup contracting
“The Trump administration I would say with this administration, one of the things that they are doing that I've not seen in my entire career is how much more commercially oriented they are. And they are willing and open to meet all these companies, and I want t…”
Insight
Tech founders seeking government contracts must dress formally to be taken seriously
“I think if you really want to be taken seriously, you need to show up looking serious with them. Because they have a lot of people coming at them, and again, earlier there was not many of these companies, so they kind of maybe thought it was cool. Today there'…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Early AWS account executives only earned commissions after customers consumed cloud services
“They had to have a spirit of more consultative account management and sales. They had to delight the customer. They had to love that customer's Mission and had to go in because they wouldn't get anything on top of their salary until the customer started using …”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Teresa Carlson grew AWS public sector revenue to $10B in ten years
“We got started, my business, we build it from about zero to ten billion in the federal side or the government side globally in 10 years, so that went really fast.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Enterprise AI spending will eventually hit a customer-driven optimization phase
“One prediction that I think that I'll see with, that you'll see with AI is, You're seeing a lot of spend happening, and it needs to, you know, both with the model development and also just with customers adoption, they're spending and they're using a lot of to…”
Insight
Startups should prioritize securing high-profile anchor reference customers to establish legitimacy
“So I really think these startups should over-focus. Once they have what they're doing, spend time getting the right customers, getting the customer to say you're doing a good job, going after those contracts, really working to make sure that they have scale an…”