Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Sonal and I'm honored today to have as our guest, Teresa Carlson, who's a vice president of the worldwide public sector for AWS or Amazon Web Services. And what that means is she basically covers everything related to government, education, and the not-for-profit sector. So let's just say that's pretty much everything. Welcome, Teresa.

Thank you.

It's great to be here today.

Thank you.

And by the way, this is another one of our podcast live from D.C.

Actually, not live.

We're just in D.C.

So, Teresa, let's just get started by talking about what you do.

So I think a lot of companies are embracing the cloud. But for something that we take as gospel, like, oh, this is amazing, it enables all

these startups and companies in, you know, AWS, the private. How does that, how is it different

in the public sector? Like, do you see a lot of people wanting, I mean, what are some of the

misconceptions that you have to work with when people are trying to think about adopting the cloud?

Because the public sector is so different from the private sector. It is a little bit different. You know, it's interesting because I tell everyone, we started

this business with AWS about five and a half years ago now. And when we first came in to

public sector, and we did originally start out here in U.S. federal government because we felt

like we're a U.S.-based company,

and if we can't get the U.S. government on board, it would be hard to go around the world

and get other governments on board. And, you know, what we found was in the very beginning,

we could not even get through two sentences without people saying you're not secure. Like,

it was the early days. it was all about security.

I mean, even private companies still have that concern. They're standing with private clouds.

Absolutely. How did you kind of overcome that? We said, we've said the whole time that we were going to

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