Teresa Carlson, Founding CEO of General Catalyst Institute and former AWS public sector chief, discusses government openness to startup procurement across presidential administrations.
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
Four-person AWS team beat IBM and Microsoft for landmark CIA contract
“We, I had a team of four people, that was it, and we did one outside contractor that helped us, And other teams, IBM, Microsoft, others that bidded, had these huge teams bidding this thing, and they kept saying, you guys can't win it.”
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…”