00:12:56 · Teresa Carlson
And that was a big culture shift for Amazon because we had to get people cleared, people had to go into skiffs, we had to build skiffs if we won this contract. And we literally bid this thing. 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. But the CIA had a really, they were very far ahead. They had been looking at cloud computing already, and they knew that they could not, they could build this, they had very smart people, but they couldn't sustain it because of the contracting environment in government. And what I mean by that, Molly, is that, you know, in government, the reason they've moved toward commercial is because they can build something now and it can be really good. But in order to keep it up to date with how fast technology is moving, their contracting process can't do that anymore. So they kind of would bill things and it became very stagnant quickly. And if you just fast forward, we'll talk about this later with AI, they really couldn't do it now with an AI model. So we won this contract. We built the first classified environment for the intelligence community. And it really was kind of the shot heard around the world because commercial enterprises were like, what? If the CIA can use cloud, we can use cloud. And at that point in time, people were still very skeptical about the security and compliance, because we would hear things like, Oh, that's not secure. Oh, you can't use cloud. I mean, we had everything thrown at us. And you have to be really patient and answer questions and just know you're doing this for the long term. And you're doing these things to outlive what you are doing. You're building something that is meaningful and that you know your government really needs. But these industries, to your point, are very different. And in government, have these also at state local education, not for profit NGOs. And then I had the global scope. So you have countries that act and behave differently globally. But the one thing I'll say that we did really well, we got NIST in the US government to define what cloud computing was. And then other governments around the world started using that same definition. Oh, wow. Yeah, it was funny.
00:15:24 · Teresa Carlson
The first contract we did in Australia, we kind of laughed. We saw they'd use the NIST definition. And then we worked with GSA to actually do something called FedRAMP, which was the first security and compliance model for cloud, Because you couldn't have a paper based model because it was distributed computing, you really needed to have this ongoing model that you could look at cloud. We worked with them, and I really have a deep appreciation for what the U. S. Government did. People say they're slow, but they knew that there was a change and they had to get through it. On the industry side, I'll share in healthcare and financial services as an example, they began to adopt the same models that the US government, and this was probably the first time that I had seen more regulated industries say, Oh, the US government has actually created a model that we will snap into. So even today, that FedRAMP process, if you look at it, healthcare and financial services still use that model as much as government uses it in terms of certification and compliance. So this is how industry trends begin. You need to shape them and make sure that you're building something because, again, back to those connection points, Molly, the Fed Reserve, the SEC that are government FINRA, they have connection points to every bank. So you've got to make sure these things work. That's why the commercial industry side of regulated industry and government, there's just such close connections. Telecommunications, things like that. It's critical that you build something that will move across these types of industries.
00:17:05 · Molly O'Shea
[00:17:05] S1: How do you build the internal team out for that? Are you pulling from public sector? Are you training people? How do you get that type of, and what kind of expertise do you look for?
00:17:15 · Teresa Carlson
[00:17:15] S0: I found when I built this business, it was very different than my business at Microsoft. In fact, I love my team at Microsoft. They were so good. I've honestly, when I look at myself, I think one of the things, my superpowers has been building good teams. I love people and I like to make sure those human connections make sense in building out a team and that there's good synergy and energy. And I also look for people that have a burn in their belly for that industry. I used to say for every leader that I hired, like my state and local, my education, my intel, I tried to find somebody that loved that industry as much as I love the work I was doing. And I know that kind of sounds silly, but when I saw that in their eyes and the way they behaved, I knew if they were smart, they were diving deep and they wanted to deliver results, I was moving in the right direction. But at Microsoft, we had very more, I would call it transactional leaders back then, not in a bad way. They were very good, but we had tools and products that they took and they put it to work. They sold it into government, and that was their job. So they configured an enterprise agreement. They configured something specific. And they had to be able to talk about what the tool did, but it was more transactional. At AWS, it was very different. We were actually, in order to get the customer to buy something, we had to first demonstrate their desire and their delight in using that tool because in a software license model, it's a one to one transaction. I sell you something, you pay for it, you get it. In cloud, that's not the case. You only paid for what you used. So, and this is kind of a funny story. When I first looked at my spreadsheet of what customers I had and how much they were using, I had hired my biz ops guy that came over from Microsoft. And we looked at a spreadsheet and I said, Oh, that's like, okay, this is good. Here's four customers. This is 100,000. This one's doing a million. And he said, No, that's a dime and that's a dollar. And they were literally spending a dime and a dollar. And I was like, What? How are we ever gonna make any money if they're And spending dimes and they would get a charge as they spin up the instance. So they might spin it up and then stop just to get an account going.
00:19:47 · Teresa Carlson
And so what I realized, I had to hire people if I was only going to pay them if they were an account executive. 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 the tool. So in order to get them to use the tool, they had to dive deep. They had to be very curious. They had to spend time. They had to listen to the customer's needs. So this is the type of person I had to hire. It wasn't a transaction and how do I get a deal across the line. It was, let me hear what you're saying. What's your mission? What things are you trying to solve? Let's whiteboard this. Let's talk about how we can do this. Let me bring in a solution architect. Let's try it out. You can spin it up. You don't have to spend a lot of money. And so I really had to find these people that were hungry to solve the mission problem, not the tech problem. So these were the two big differences I saw. So the type of people that I hired were very different, very different backgrounds from people who had been on Wall Street, a lot of technical people I found, you know, I thought it would be easy, but it was hard technically for our customers. So I need a lot of very, my solution architects, I look for those that were aware and had good EQ with customers because you couldn't be also dry. You had to, again, be a good listener, be able to solve the problems, whiteboard, have a good conversation. And it really did change the type of people I hired. I had a totally different group. And I will say, I'm so proud. It was probably one of the best teams I ever built globally. I just had like a phenomenal set of leaders and I made mistakes for sure. And I tried people that had worked for me before and they were amazing individuals, but this was just not the right place for them. And, you know, on a personal note, even for myself, the business was growing and scaling so much. There were days I would say, woah, can I do this? I would literally look in the mirror and say, we're growing at a rate. We're opening these countries. These customers are so like, do I have the skills? How do I need to readjust what I do as a leader?
00:22:20 · Teresa Carlson
And how do I learn the business in a way that I'm interpreting it in the right way to make sure that we're growing? So it was just a really different dynamic.