BREAKING: How to Sell to the CIA

▤ Summary

Teresa Carlson describes how she grew AWS’s public sector business from a two-person team to about $10B and secured the landmark CIA cloud contract that validated cloud for regulated enterprises. She explains how her team worked with NIST and GSA to define cloud and create FedRAMP, and how AWS transformed operations to meet classified contracting requirements. Carlson draws direct parallels between the early cloud era and today’s rapid AI adoption, warning that AI lacks the regulatory and definitional scaffolding cloud eventually received. She now leads the General Catalyst Institute to help startups engage policymakers and scale in regulated markets.

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