00:00:00 · Teresa Carlson, Molly O'Shea
[00:00:00] S0: My business, we build it from about 0 to 10,000,000,000, the government side globally, in ten years. I had two people, no revenue. There was no way for government to even buy cloud. I would say we really did create the industry for cloud computing at AWS for governments around the world. We won a contract in 2012, 2013 with the Central Intelligence Agency, and it really was kind of the shot heard around the world because commercial enterprises were like, What? [00:00:28] S1: If the CIA can use cloud, we can use cloud. How important is it for startups and these AI companies to land those contracts early and first? [00:00:38] S0: I will say, I used to tell my team at AWS, strap in because you won't see anything like this. And with AI, I'm like, this is a double or triple strap here. It's like nuts. But I also worry that we're moving really fast without the frameworks in place. I really want our companies to have an unfair advantage. And that's kind of what the General Catalyst Institute's all about. Teresa Carlson, welcome to Sorcery. Molly, thanks for having me. [00:01:12] S1: I'm so excited to have you today. We're here in LA. You're here for Milken. [00:01:17] S0: Yes. [00:01:17] S1: And I think you just got back from the Kentucky Derby.
00:01:17 · Molly O'Shea, Teresa Carlson
[00:01:17] S1: And I think you just got back from the Kentucky Derby. [00:01:20] S0: I did, and it was such an exciting race. I was like, first of all, to have the first female trainer win this was unbelievable. I mean, it really was unbelievable. In fact, my friend, Pamela Brown, who's a CNN commentator, was at the Derby with me and just had her on the show this morning, the trainer, Sherry. So like, I'm just, it was really thrilling and seeing the horse come from the very back to the, I mean, was like, we're like, what? So it's probably one of the most exciting Kentucky Derbies. And I've been for, I think now I've been seventeen years straight. [00:01:58] S1: Wow. [00:01:58] S0: So I've played nine or 10 times since college that I started going. I'm from Kentucky, obviously. [00:02:05] S1: Yeah, that's so exciting. I went once, it was so much fun. [00:02:08] S0: The hats are crazy. I always go nuts with my hats. I've got stacks of hats in my wardrobe, but it's a lot of fun. I've never seen anyone ever in a bad mood at the Kentucky Derby. There's high spirits no matter what the weather is, and the races are, there's always some thing that happens, something exciting and seeing people bet and win or lose, it doesn't matter. People are just in a really good mood there. I always enjoy going back for that time.
00:02:08 · Teresa Carlson, Molly O'Shea
[00:02:08] S0: The hats are crazy. I always go nuts with my hats. I've got stacks of hats in my wardrobe, but it's a lot of fun. I've never seen anyone ever in a bad mood at the Kentucky Derby. There's high spirits no matter what the weather is, and the races are, there's always some thing that happens, something exciting and seeing people bet and win or lose, it doesn't matter. People are just in a really good mood there. I always enjoy going back for that time. [00:02:36] S1: So exciting. That's great. So today, we're going to talk about a couple of things as it relates to policy founders, regulators, and the tech transformation that's going on in DC and Silicon Valley today. You are the founding CEO of General Catalyst Institute. We recently had Hemant on and he touched upon this, so I'm so excited to have the conversation with you. I wanna start going back to your days at AWS, and I know you had a long standing career that also touched upon Microsoft, so we can also touch upon that, but I'd love to start at AWS because you were transformational in bringing public sector to AWS. What was the environment like then, bringing cloud into DC and making sure that that was palatable for not just the tech world, but also for policymakers?
00:03:28 · Teresa Carlson
[00:03:28] S0: Yeah, it was a really interesting time. I started there in 2010 and I went all the way through 2021. And when I started with AWS, Microsoft. I'd been their US federal, I'd been there ten years. I'd been running the federal business for about three years. And you heard people talking about wanting a web service, talking about cloud, but it really had not been defined yet in federal government. But the one thing that was clear is they were tired of paying for this client server model, this licensing model. And just quite frankly, government was paying too much. Like they would buy a lot of license that they never used. And the software companies kind of use this as a model. They would keep selling them. And if you think about adoption and deployment in U. S. Government, it's not easy because there's a lot of legacy systems. So you've got to make sure things integrate And you can't just throw everything out and start all over because you have years and years of data and storage that are critical knowledge points that they just can't get rid of. Whereas a lot of times in larger companies, they'll just create a new application. But when we started, we really literally had to start from scratch. I had two people, no revenue. There was no way for government to even buy cloud. There was no contracting mechanism. So I would say we really did create the industry for cloud computing at AWS for governments around the world. And one of the things that we did, it's kind of crazy when I think back, we would just I had a little team. We were in a little building in Herndon, Virginia, and I would say, look, let's just, I knew all these customers and I said, let's just start demonstrating what cloud is. And we would literally do like pizza or cookie evenings. So we would like email everybody we knew in government, every technical CIO, CTO, director, and we would say, hey, just come and let us show you about cloud. Bring your computer. And we would set up in a little conference room and we would just, I would have my solution architect and we would just demonstrate. We'd give him like a little Amazon card with some credits on it just to try. And we would let him, we demonstrated how cloud computing worked. How did you get on the console? How did you spin up an instance? How did you use storage? And their mind was, I mean, it was like blown.
00:05:52 · Teresa Carlson
And it was like, did you know you can spin up a data center in five minutes? And they would just, it was like almost voodoo. They couldn't really believe it because they didn't have experience. The ones at that point in time that were using a lot of cloud were your startups and individual developers and engineers. They were very savvy. And we always said, hey, we never want to forget startups because they were key to us actually building the business. But then when we started doing that, we started getting momentum. And I will say we had a lot of antibodies because we had a lot of system integrators, larger ones who saw this. Called in CIOs, called them server huggers. They did not want to give up what they felt was their domain, and so we really had to demonstrate to them it actually gave them more control over what they were building. But one of the big dynamics that we saw shifting was you saw kind of the control and momentum move toward the mission owners in government. Whereas a CIO had just more control of what they would buy and build up, you saw a mission owner like NASA, JPL, and others who were some of our early customers. They were like, wow, we have a mission and we need compute and we need storage. Can you help us? So we started not directly with the CIO. A lot of our early workloads were low hanging fruit of things that, you know, the agencies just needed help with. The Mars rover is a really good one. NASA came to us and said, Look, there's a Mars rover up here, and we thought it would only rove for four months. It's still roving, like, eight months later. And they're like, It's using all our data and storage yet or, you know, processing. Can you help us? So we created a model. It was a lot, less expensive for them, and they were thrilled. I mean, did case studies. They were an early customer to get on stage with us at re:Invent. So that was like It was an interesting time because no way to buy it, no definition of cloud, there is no security or compliance regime around cloud computing. We literally just had to go into government and help create all that, and we were very patient because we knew we couldn't just go sell something. We had to actually define the market. And I'll tell you one other really funny story. I've told this before, you probably heard it.
00:08:13 · Teresa Carlson, Molly O'Shea
But one of my kind of moments is I went to Capitol Hill to have some conversations with some congressional leaders I knew, and they were like, Oh, Teresa, you're Amazon. Are you here to talk about books or taxes? So that was their entire concept of Amazon at [00:08:28] S1: Oh the my gosh. [00:08:30] S0: Because taxes back then was a big deal. And I said, No, I'm here to talk about cloud computing. And of all the congressional leaders I met with, there's only a couple that really understood what it was at all. So we had to educate and advocate on behalf of AWS around cloud, and we had to build up the entire partner ecosystem. We had no partners that were certified or understood it. So it was really grassroots from the ground up creating that entire market. And it was really phenomenal when I look back and also feel like we opened it up for so many other companies to come and do that work. [00:09:10] S1: And AWS is one of Amazon's largest businesses.