"Co-opetition" in Defense with Teresa Carlson, President, General Catalyst Institute

Teresa Carlson SUMMARY KEYWORDS public sector, AWS leadership, General Catalyst, venture capital, public policy, military veterans, government integration, cloud adoption, procurement challenges, global partnerships, applied AI, work-life balance, female leadership. SPEAKERS Lauren Bedula, Hondo Geurts, Teresa Carlson Lauren Bedula 01:16 Welcome back to Building the Base. Hondo Geurts and Lauren Bedula here with today's guest. I'm so thrilled to have Theresa Carlson with us. Theresa is currently the founding president of general catalyst Institute, which is so relevant to what we discuss on our show. So, looking forward to digging into this, but has also had a long and impressive career leading public sector teams on the technology side, including at AWS, where she stood up the public sector team and business and Microsoft and others. So, we'll get into that all today. But Theresa, thank you so much for joining us. Teresa Carlson 01:50 Oh, thank you so much for being here. I love this podcast, and really love what you are doing. It's really critically important to have it. Hondo Geurts 01:57 Theresa, I think I say this on almost every episode of You know, we bring really interesting people here with fascinating backgrounds and it's always interesting to understand how they got to where they are. We see them kind of a lot of them at the end of their journey. What got you on the journey? What was the background? And how did you go from a girl in Kentucky to standing up the public sector at AWS, and everything you're doing now. Teresa Carlson 02:24 Well, it's interesting because, you know, I could spend writing a book just kind of how I got here, but I'll kind of make this brief, but I am from a very small town in an area called Nancy, Kentucky, which is south central Kentucky. My parents are both teachers, but on the policy and societal side, I'll just say there was never a memory of my childhood where we were not involved in an election or something organized, organizationally, about, you know, the local board or the mayor or county judge or the local Senate race up to the presidential race, like my family was always involved in some way in democracy, and it's a very early memory. In fact, when I was a very young girl, I remember my mother was chair of the Republican Women's Club at the county and state level, and by the way, worked in elections through her 80s. But I remember calling as a little girl with like they put me on the phone, just dialing. That's when you actually dialed things. We don't do that anymore. So, I think for me, it was always a part of my heart, and I just didn't know anything differently. And I look at my family today. My brother is county attorney where I'm from, and my niece is chair of the Democrat party in Kentucky, working for the governor. So, I look, I'm so proud that I have a family that still is involved on both sides of the aisle, which is good. We kind of cross it. We kind of cross everything. And then, you know, fast forward in my career, I now have had over 25 years working in public sector businesses and with policy makers and lawmakers and the individuals who have mission on the ground. And it's been such an honor to be able to do that in the United States and around the world with my work with Amazon and some other companies, Lauren Bedula 04:23 how amazing. Tell us a little bit about the general catalyst institute that just launched that you're leading. Teresa Carlson 04:29 Yes, this is actually really exciting. So general catalyst is a global venture capital company. They are, you know, one of the top three to five, depending on the day, largest VC groups in the world have a long track record, over 24 years of investing in what I call kind of highly regulated industries, defense, intelligence, healthcare for a long time, manufacturing, financial services. Businesses, very exciting, and they for many years because they've invested in these areas. And by the way, over 900 companies they've invested in today, they've always had kind of thought leadership in what I call public policy. And I like to talk about this flywheel, which the institute kind of stands for, which is, if you take capital, which they have a lot of we just, in fact, closed a new $8 billion fund we announced a couple of weeks ago. So, if you take capital that you're able to raise, you apply that to transformative technologies that you're investing in, and then you add the right public policies, you have a real flywheel approach for success to create that innovative circle that really supports all sectors, government and commercial. So the institute is really about taking all of those together, but really we're going to focus on the public policy side, and that element is about deep collaboration with government leaders, policy makers at every level, as well as we were kind of chatting before the podcast started, at the Mission level, of really thinking through and talking to government leaders about their needs, listening to them and then supporting them and shaping public policies where they're always thinking about startups. Because, you know, big tech, which I love, and I was part of for so long, they got this, I say, you know, they got this as just part of their DNA. With a startup culture, they innovate first. They don't really think about how the technology should, should be thought of in a public policy perspective. But if you are building for a highly regulated industry, you really do also have to start with that in mind, because you don't want to have to go backwards and then think about security and compliance controls as an example. So Hondo Geurts 06:59 Theresa, we were, you know, going in a way back machine, thinking back, I think it was either at SOCOMM or the Navy, where we were working together. And your background at Microsoft and AWS has been, oddly, very publicly facing, public sector facing. What are some of the things that you've learned over the time or that you talk to your team about on how to engage very technically oriented companies into kind of mission driven organizations like the DOD. Teresa Carlson 07:27 Well, one of the things I would say that I'm proudest of is I spent a lot of my career actually making sure we hired military individuals, veterans, and really talking to the to the leaders in the military to understand what they wanted. And in fact, one year we tracked in over 15% of my hires had been military veterans and or their spouses, and we had a lot of training programs. So, I just want to say I think that's critical for every large company to make sure that they're constantly thinking about their customer from that perspective. Hire them, train them, make sure that they get the best skills that they can to continue their career after they leave the military. But one, one aspect that I will just say, that I believe is very critical when you're a large or small company and working with government, is sought to understand it's very easy to walk in and say you're doing that wrong. You can do this a lot better, but I always survey you have to take into consideration governments. Is the enterprise, especially DOD. I call them the enterprise of enterprises at global scale. No one can really understand how large and complex their missions are even if you think about VA. VA is the largest healthcare system in the world, very complex. Even the types of disease states they treat are things that most commercial entities really haven't seen. It's very differentiated. So, I like to say, seek to understand, really listen to your customer. Don't just take in a technology to solve a problem, when you really have to understand what is that problem and what's the next five steps they're thinking about. And then the other element is, I say, you have to remember they've spent billions of dollars on systems that they just can't rip out. So, you have to integrate. You have to think through integration. And there could be a period of time when that older system gets diminished, or the capabilities are not as strong as what they are today, and the newer system takes over. But that's a process that you have to go through. So, one is really listened, seek to understand, be patient, because it's not for the faint of heart, and you have to help them solve the problems they have right now, and you have to help them through thinking through problems they maybe haven't even thought of. And I'll give the example. Who would have really if, sitting here today, I don't think any of us would have said we'd be using drones potentially at the scale. For war, fighting as we're doing it right now. We know we are now. We have to think through what's the next iteration of how that's going to look. Hondo Geurts 10:07 Was there anything you did specifically with your team? Particularly, one is integrating veterans maybe in but other things to help train them, to get into that mindset, maybe get away from technology promoters, they have maybe a little humility in understanding use cases and stuff. Teresa Carlson 10:25 Yeah, I tell this story, which we're kind of talking about earlier, when I was at Microsoft, one of my early lessons around this was when I was running that business for federal, I had a lot of my customers say, and back then, at the time, I don't know where it is today, but the US military was our number one customer at Microsoft. Both revenue lots going on there, so they were super they were always important. But for us at Microsoft, they were very important. And the military told me, Hey, we hear a lot just at the products from your team. Your team's always coming in here with a new product, and this product and that product, and it's frustrating, because we need to understand how the capabilities fit in. So, I said to my team for one month, we're not going to talk about any product. We're not going to say a product name at all during any of the conversations with our customers. We're going to talk about capabilities all of it. We're going to we're going to rip out all of the names of the products, and we're going to talk about capabilities, whether it's collaboration, information, sharing, security, we're going to talk about that capability, and then we're going to put it in the framework of what the military needs. So, for a month, we I sit in a bunch of presentations, and it was hard, because you're basically telling the story. When you pull the curtain back, you do have a set of, you know, you have architecture and design with set of technical capabilities with names. And so, we went through all this, and the team did say to me at the end, it was one of the very best projects and processes, because it changed their mental model on how they were thinking about the customer. And it helped them listen more and really redo their presentations. But I laugh, because I did have some of the customers and say, well, what's the product? Because we had trained them so well to ask about what the product was as you start to get through acquisition, but it's just an example where you know, technology is an enabler to the solution. It's not the only solution, right? You've got to just really make sure that you understand what you are solving for, and work back from that. And the only other thing I will share that in government, I like to talk about co-opetition, because you are very much different than commercial industry. We pretty much have to work together with every I'll call them vendor out there. You have to really learn how you integrate and work together, and you may bid on deals that you never thought that you would even go in together. It's just a very different type of model. And that was something I was also proud of that. We were able to really both works cooperatively, but sometimes we had to compete, and we would just tell, you know, that vendor, sorry, we're going to bid in this direction, but we're going to do what we think is the right thing for the customer. Lauren Bedula 13:12 That's all such great advice, especially for our entrepreneurs who are listening and trying to break into public sector markets. Something that is so important is positioning yourself as a trusted partner and advisor, not a salesperson at the other side of the table. And I think that's a great way to do so, and also to change culture. And I always look at cloud adoption as a great case study of that culture shift. And something we talk on our show quite a bit about is do the hurdles that technology companies are facing have to do with policy or culture. Is it more heavily weighted one side or another? Can you talk about that a little bit, especially because the institute's focus is on the policy side, like any key changes there, and how culture plays into it? Teresa Carlson 13:55 Well, it is. That's a great question, because they're both very strong, and culture, as we know, is a very hard thing to change or break at government or a company or an agency where our culture kind of tramps everything. And breaking that culture is always at the top is that it's at the top. We used to talk about this a lot. Andy Jassy, who's now the CEO of Amazon at the time, was my boss and the CEO of AWS. And we used to talk about, you know, in order to get customers to adopt cloud, you had to have leaders at the top that were willing to take a chance on this new, transformative technology. Because you get so used to something, and it's so comfortable. Remember the book Who Moved My Cheese? Or, you know, it's the same, like, don't, don't move what I'm doing. I'm so comfortable. And Cloud was very transformative. Now looking at AI, it's even more transformative and uses cloud. Of course, we have AI because of cloud, but culture was a very challenging and difficult thing to leap over. And in fact, I'll say we. Didn't leap over it. We really had to go through it and break through it through a variety of efforts and mechanisms that we had to set up. And it was everything from teaching and training to patients on security and compliance regime. Because, if you remember, there was no security and compliance model for cloud. So, we came up with something called FedRAMP, which was the early tool, because there is FISMA, which was a very paper based old school model for security. And February, FedRAMP began to look at all the controls for cloud. And we were very instrumental in AWS at the time to help share what controls were used. And if you look around the world, actually, if you go around the world today, and you look at any security and compliance regime for most governments, or what they're looked at, they are very similar. You know, you have kind of different controls. And even within the US government, you go from a civilian agency model into DOD, into intelligence, and they're additive, right? They could be a little different, but very, very similar. And I think this set the stage for globally, for all countries and organizations. And what I've heard from the GSA folks is that if you look at who uses even FedRAMP today, you go out, looks like health care, financial services, other enterprises outside of government have taken care, taken advantage of that model, to utilize it so culture was hard. Policy, I have found over the years is always possible, you know, and it might not be a law, but it might be a standard or a framework that gets set by these agencies, that is highly utilized in a proactive way to get technology infusion in there more rapidly. So, you've got to do both, and you've got to be patient. And I'll just share a really quick story, because I've told this a lot, but in the early days of even going to Capitol Hill, that most of the policy makers. I'd known them from my time at Microsoft, and when I got to the Hill, they'd say, Oh, Theresa, it's good to see you've gone to Amazon. You know, what do you want to talk about? Are you here to talk about books or taxes? And I said, No, cloud computing. And most of them then, they had heard of this concept of cloud, but it was like a new thing. So, teaching and training again, the lawmakers being patient, education, advocacy and then into the agency level. When we first set up the office here, we had a little bitty office over in Herndon, and we used to set up three times a week we would have, like a conference room and invite everybody in, Navy officers, Navy enlisted, Army civilian, and we'd say, bring your computer, and we'd serve like cookies and coffee, and we would just say, open up your laptop and let us show you how to build a data center in five minutes. And it was like voodoo, literally. It was so early days of them seeing how they could take advantage of cloud computing. And that was really just awesome. Again, patience. It was whacking a mole, one at a time, teaching, and training, working with partners, going to government, talking about the change really demonstrating to them workloads. I used to say, I don't care if it's cafeteria management, let's show government how this can really be a differentiator for how they're working in order to fail fast and try things at a very low cost, but that doesn't risk the mission. Hondo Geurts 18:29 So, building in that a little bit, can you talk a little bit? We have a lot of listeners who are commercial companies thinking about getting into defense, and we talked, we've talked already a little bit about how to approach a customer. How did you approach building your organization? What was your thought process of, okay, I'm gonna stand up AWS, federal, right? You know, pay your patient zero. How did you think about building up the team that you needed that would have the right mindset and culture and thinking that would allow you to be successful. Teresa Carlson 19:03 That's a really great question, and I look for mission-oriented people. I will tell you; I hired a lot of individuals that weren't just what you would say a traditional seller. In fact, a lot of them were not traditional sellers. I because in a cloud-based world, what a lot of people may not understand is, if you are hiring a sales org, somebody to actually go and spend time with the customers and try to sell them something, right? On the basic level, in a cloud-based world, our teams only got paid if customers use something which was a really different model than a license-based model, right? Because you were selling a license and you got paid for it. So, in a cloud-based world, my story to my team was you have to delight the customers. You have to make sure that the customers understand the value. You're going to have to get through design and architecture. You're going to have to get through security and compliance controls. You're going to have to help them understand. And how they do acquisition. And then, oh, guess what? People kind of have to be trained to use it. And oh, did I forget to tell you that we have to go get partners that actually are certified on our platform that can help us grow and scale this thing? So, we had, like, this big it was a big thing that we had to go do. So, I had to hire individuals, number one, that were mission oriented. They cared about government being successful, defense, Intel, civilian agencies. It wasn't just somebody trying to sell. It was somebody that really cared about the mission, but also wanted to make money if they did well. And then the second thing was, were they a good communicator? When it came, they listened, they just didn't talk, right? That's another key. Are you good? How do you ask questions? Or do you listen? How do they follow up? So diving, deep, high ownership, wanted to deliver results and see success in the government. So, I know this sounds crazy, but really, we interviewed on these cultural skills for Amazon that were our it was our DNA. And then we also looked for these individuals that cared about government being successful. So, what they had to do, once they started seeing government being successful in these areas, and trying the tech, it actually grew very quickly, once a once a customer was delighted. Then the cloud actually started. They started using it on their own. So, if you're building a new business today, and I get this question a lot from all of our startups, which I'm always so happy to help them. One is, I tried to make sure I introduce them into other individuals they can have a conversation with, because you want to go out and just really, one, talk to the customer, talk to other groups. And then two, I really stress that it's not impossible, but it's much more difficult if you try to hire somebody who has never sold into government, because it is a totally different animal than selling into commercial. And I always used to laugh at my commercial counterparts. I was like, you guys got it easy. And when I started running commercial, I did think it's just so to me, it's so much easier, because if you apply all the principles that you've learned in selling to government to commercial, you actually do really well if you apply because again, you don't have the procurement challenges in commercial industry that you have in government industry. But if you apply these same principles of delighting the customer and listening and really taking care of them. Your commercial business can be really fantastic, so you know. And then I do tell them, in government sector, especially in US federal government, it is a lot about networking, like you have to show up. You can't sit at home and win this business. You have to show up where the customers are. You have to have a voice. You have to make sure that you're sharing what you learn, having these conversations. Because you and I know from being in the military, you have to your job is also to go out and represent your branch of the military, right? So, you're showing up in these places, and I want to walk up to you and introduce myself, and make sure that I have a warm introduction and let you understand what I'm doing, and then say, can I come see you? So, a lot of this is very much tactical, mission oriented on the ground, introduction and selling when you're doing business development, but number one is just, I think, love of that you're supporting a mission. Hondo Geurts 23:19 Do you Do you sense the challenge of working at home or working remotely, have has that caused some challenges in getting that trust between a federal customer and a provider? Teresa Carlson 23:38 You know, it's I'm probably not the best person to ask that question, and here's why I have spent 25 years of managing global teams. In fact, I went from zero to 15,000 people at Amazon in 52 countries. And so, I was so used to managing and working with people globally that it just was natural that people were running around. What I do think has changed, and this is probably a little bit more old school of who I am. The way I personally learned as a leader is my time with all the individuals at the office like I love that just having the conversations I learned I'm a very visual learner, so watching behaviors of great leaders and being able to ask them questions, I love that. What they, you know, the old school water cooler talks and, you know, today I think that's missing a lot, not being able to get into the office and really talk to your teammates and strategize. And we used to have what we called deal days. And deal days for I did this both at Microsoft and Amazon, where we would come into a room and kind of what we call murder, board a customer need, and we would work together on what, let's, let's, you know, put it up here, just like you would in the mission. What are we trying to solve? Let's whiteboard this thing. What things should we be doing? Who should we talk. Into what are the solutions for this? What are we not seeing? It's really, you know, building a business is very much mission oriented, if you do it that way. So, if you're not together, I think it makes it more challenging, not impossible, but you need to build trust. And building trust comes from a lot of those face-to-face interactions. It's hard to do that digitally all the time. Lauren Bedula 25:23 So important, I have a quick one. You mentioned the challenges around procurement processes. Any advice on that front, is it? Just learn it be patient. Any advice to our listeners there? Teresa Carlson 25:34 Well, I like to tell our companies you know that they need a framework when they're thinking about doing contracting in government, it can't be one way. And I think this is for a big business or a small business, you have to have a direct contracting method, whether it's early, getting just a GSA Schedule. You know, start like that's an easy way to start, right you get a GSA Schedule. The second is, depending on the type of technology, I think it's critically that you do have a reseller, and you work with the right reseller that you can partner with that will help you market and sell your services. And again, my advice to everybody is, look, you can't just say you're going to have a reseller and turn it over to them and expect it to happen. It's, again, it's hard work. You have to have interactions with these resellers. You have to have a plan, and you have to follow up on that plan. And then the third is, I always say I'm a big fan of mid-tier integrators, small as you're getting going, Look, I had amazing partnerships with very large companies. I couldn't have gotten my business done without them, but it is very hard for smaller companies to work with large integrators, not impossible, and they figure it out over time as they build a Messel on how to work in government. But you know, they don't have the staff or the time to go, disperse to all different groups. So, my advice is, find, find the agencies. Don't try to do everything. Decide, are you going to work in army? Do you want to work in navy? Who's the best fit? Or even then go further down. And then, once you do that, focus, find your again. Do a direct schedule as you can get you a reseller that can support you, find integrators that are key in those agencies, go get to know them, do all your BD around those integrators, and then work to do some deals with them, because then your kind of dispersing your ability to sell. I call these things force multipliers in your business. That way you're going to get to know. You're going to learn from them. And then the last piece of advice I always give them, whether Microsoft is your partner, or Google as your partner, or AWS is your technical partner, you need to push on them to support you, because they have very large teams. I was set up very proactively to support every single startup, like, I love startups. And so, I had a startup team in defense, Intel, not for profit, education. I had, like, a not for profit. I mean, I had a startup for every single vertical that I owned. And then once I ran the regulated industry, I had a startup team my aerospace and satellite business. It actually got off the ground because of startups, because we found all these components and pieces that were selling to defense and NASA and others, and they weren't being covered, even though a lot of them were running on AWS at the time, they weren't really being covered. So, we helped them build out a much larger business through our efforts. So, I always say, go, go talk to your large tech company and make sure that you are working with them to get your Fed ramp, or whatever you're doing to help you get your foci set up. So, it's really about again, partnerships in government, you cannot do it alone If you're a startup. Lauren Bedula 28:59 You’re hitting on my next question. I really saw you do that where you were an enabler, or a bridge at AWS for non-traditional or disruptive tech to get in, just by the nature of cloud as an enabler, as you mentioned before, but you mentioned co-opetition, which I really liked earlier. And I see so many companies eager to sell directly in because they think there are greater benefits to do that, and maybe they belong in a stack, or aren't thinking about the benefits of the partnership environment. So, thank you for hitting on that. And so, what I'll do is evolve it a bit to see if you can talk about partnerships globally, how companies or each of the stakeholders we've discussed here should be thinking about the global partnership environment. Teresa Carlson 29:40 Yeah, I do, I do think that can be a challenge, right? Like, when they think about globally, how do they operate? But in a defense world as an example, and in the intelligence world, we have allies, you know, you have the five eyes you need to understand, can your technology be an enabler? In like, as an example, if you're in a five. I world. I always like to go to my intelligence community customer and have a conversation with them about what we were doing and the enablement. And, you know, let's have then a conversation with allies. And that's a good way, if you're doing like intelligence community work, to really have a conversation with your sponsor here locally. And they will help navigate that a lot of times because they see the technology opportunity. What I've seen work, believe it or not, really well, is, interestingly, it's usually a reverse lately that I've seen where in Europe and in the UK, I see a lot of companies that are starting to actually Ukraine as an example. Even in Israel, where they'll build their business, they begin to take the technology that they've created and they put something on the ground here in the US to make sure that they have US citizens and the ability to operate, because the technology is so solid. And they begin to see that in the US, the US government and the US commercial companies just acquire a lot faster in the US. We're such entrepreneurs, people just eat tech up here, right? They're constantly looking for that business or mission, advantage of how they take advantage of how they utilize tech. And so, what I'm seeing a lot more is, and we help them. They're like we're in Europe, and we want to build a practice on the ground in the US, we help them understand how they actually get that set up in general, catalyst and help support their efforts. But I would say cross globally, in government, it's not always as easy cross, cross commercial. It's much easier because you find commercial interest entities in the US are very much open to taking advantage of technologies that weren't necessarily created here. And then those technologies are so open they're ready to actually put a put an entity on the ground. And I'll tell you a quick story. About three months ago, I met with maybe 30 of our startups from general callas in Europe, in the UK, and they're all very worried about the EU AI act. And they, they, you know, they love, they built their business there. They want to grow their business in Europe. But what most a lot of them said, you know, 70 to 80% of their revenues are coming from the US, because they are seeing the US just moves a lot faster. They're very hungry to do, like a beta test or a trial, and then they'll quickly acquire so that's a commercial industry in the US. We'll just, you know, quickly, we talked about easy. If they like the tech, they'll just try it out. Where in Europe, they don't do that. They're not faster, refresh tech, and then their procurement process is much longer. So, you have these really amazing tech startups that have great, great technology, but they're like, I can't grow as fast as I need to grow there. And that's the reason we see them hit a ceiling a lot in the UK, in the EU, you don't have a lot of unicorns there, like we see here, where in the US, these companies, you know, they can just keep growing. Hondo Geurts 33:05 So, I'm gonna ask a question. But from for our government listeners, and you've had a lot of experience, whether in a tech company or now with a big venture capital, what is a value for a government customer, how should they communicate with a tech company? How should they what are things that those companies are interested in here? Besides, hey, I've got a ten million contract, please. I'm here. Yeah, and those initial engagements, how should the customer, government customer, take advantage of those discussions? Teresa Carlson 33:39 Well, I'm going to start with venture and startups, because I think it's we can go back to big tech, but I think big tech is they're just so much more comfortable with if that makes sense. But I will share over the years, and I do think I was an early leader at AWS to bring in venture capital into my business and start showcasing those companies with a lot of VC firms into government, and mainly because my goal was to introduce really new technology and innovation into government. So, I'll start with that. I will say government's goal should be whether they intend to buy or not. They need to be looking at all the amazing, transformative technology that is on the horizon. So, I would say, be curious. Be really curious. And I would have a team of people that just spends a percentage of their time getting to know the top venture capitalists, and then just having the VCs bring to you these companies in certain areas of you know, whatever it is, there's so many categories we could talk about just in the defense side, but be curious like understand, because even for me, I'll just share, I've always felt like technology was at a rate and a speed that none of us over the last 10 years would have dreamed. Yeah, but now, being in VC for like, the last 18 months, even, I'm blown away, like I'm seeing things that are like, Oh, wow. I hadn't thought about the application of the technology that way. And what right now, I would say is the most critical for governments to be thinking and looking at is something we've kind of coined, the term applied AI. And a lot of people was like, Well, what's applied? Ai? Applied AI, I would share, is not there today, but it's getting there. And when you get too real, and that's the true application end to end of an AI capability that does something meaningful, the transaction occurs without you having to take steps involved no human step. And so, we're seeing that. And something as simple as a hey, AI, can you tell me all the apple transactions that I that I pay for today, it looks at your apple transactions, and you say, of all those Apple transactions, what am I using? I'm using these five apps, these 10 I'm not using, hey, can you go cancel these transactions at my bank? It goes and cancels those transactions. So, if you think about from a chain reaction of something that I could do, we're getting there. And the only way that occurs is through data. It has to have access to the data and the use of the data. So, I think in government, being really curious on the mission side, and just saying, show me everything you got, like I want to see it. And the one thing I'll say, I'll share, I loved about Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy. When I was at Amazon, they always wanted to see everything. If there was a tech, if Jeff said, you know, we want to see it, and I think that helps you be informed about where you are with your tech and your own mission, and where you could take it. So that would be my biggest advice. Hondo Geurts 36:52 And do you sense this, I would say, trend over the last five years of defense tech through the VC community. Do you sense that's at a peak that's still growing? It's something to be, you know, continuously evaluated, you know, because we've heard folks say, you know, if the government doesn't get on board, VCs are going to go move a completely different direction. Do you have a sense of that? Teresa Carlson 37:19 I don't think I see them trying to move in a different direction yet. In fact, just us having this conversation, I get excited because I can just share with you in 2010 when I started my AWS business, I couldn't get anybody excited to come and talk to my defense or and tell like, I just couldn't get a VC. They're like, why would we do this? It's too hard to contract and fast forward, we have, like, I can't tell you daily, we have multiple companies that have built a tool for defense, like they build it for defense. It's kind of mind blowing. So, I think we're just still getting started. But to your point, I do. I do think government defense needs to really make sure they continue to engage and encourage this, right? And make sure that they are having cycles of procurement that allows them to try out these technologies. You know, this the SBIR contracts, things that they're trying to do seems to be these kind of baby steps, but, but they don't. They have this new generation of entrepreneurs that, you know, like you said, in the last five or six years, I'm blown away. Everybody defense, until we want to work with their mission. We see the opportunity. And I think, you know, I think there's a lot of reasons this has happened. I think Elon Musk, also, who has done so much with SpaceX and Starlink, these entrepreneurs begin to see, you know, if I think big and I create something differentiated and I work with governments, I can really make a difference and have a big business at the same time, Lauren Bedula 38:58 That pumps me up. I've got one more. And switching it up a bit, you've had this incredible career and largely male dominated fields. You've got tech. You're doing VC now, defense, you name it. Any advice to our listeners on how to stay fresh or think about balancing personal and professional goals? Teresa Carlson 39:19 You know, I'm probably a really bad example of this. I hate to say it, I don't know. You know, my mother just passed away about a month ago, and she was my oh my gosh. She was my example. And I think I live my life on how I saw her, and I again, she was a superstar, like she worked all the time. We always had a warm breakfast before we went to school. Our clothes. She ironed all of our stuff. We had a garden. She got her she did an undergraduate Master's, rank one, I think she made straight A's. She was a teacher, a print first female principal, and. County, I never heard that woman complain a day about a child, a teacher her work and already shared the work she did in community and church and elections. And so, I always loved I love to work. I just have to tell you my sons, I have two grown sons now, and they say, Mommy, you have the work muscle you just like to get, and I do. I have a joy in what I've been able to do. And I think in your career, the first thing is you have to love what you do. And if you love what you do, and you wake up every day and say, you know, it's not perfect, but I really love what I'm doing, I'm making a difference. It just makes your work life balance even better. But I will say, for the moms out there. And even if you're not a mom and you're struggling with balance, it is up to you to get that balance right. Like I laugh as a female, I've told everybody now I never played golf, but I would take people to the spa for meetings. Yeah, hey, we're going to get our nails done. We're going to talk about this deal right now. So, you know, you have to make it work for what you are. And I've never been afraid to be who I am. I'm kind of a country girl, you know, who likes bourbon and horses, and I like to do the things I like to do, and it's kind of worked, but it has been pretty much a male world. I was sharing a story. I did a lot of work in the Middle East. I actually negotiated our first region we did its Amazon, and then the next region with my team. It was a lot, and it wasn't just me as my team, but it was, it was a lot of work, and I had to learn how to work in different countries and different cultures. And that was a lot of time. I remember doing a meeting at 130 in the morning in Saudi with like 25 men and myself, and I walk in. It was kind of a big negotiating me, and I was very intimidated. I was like, okay, breathe and like, it's gonna work out. And it I think you have to have a level of confidence in who you are and what you're doing, and just then, you have to take gender off the table and say, I'm here to do my job, and I'm good at my job, and I'm here to get this task done, and I'm gonna get it done no matter what else I feel is going on around me, but I will have to say, I've been so blessed. I've had amazing men and women in my org, and just had such a great balance. But every day, I do try to ensure that with the women that I take into consideration, they always have a more unique challenge around the world, culturally, I have found that women are just expected to do just a little bit more, and you always have to remember that. Lauren Bedula 42:27 Again. Great advice across the board. Theresa, we're so grateful to have you come and share. We could talk to you all day but thank you again for your time and sharing everything. Teresa Carlson 42:37 Thank you all so much for having me.