 Live from Washington DC, it's Cube Conversations with John Furrier. Hello everyone, welcome to the special exclusive Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier here, the heart of Amazon Web Services headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, the heart of Washington DC. I'm here with Teresa Carlson, the chief of the Amazon Web Services Public Sector team. Great to see you again. Welcome to Washington DC, John. A lot of action, having the cubes on the ground all day yesterday, we got interviews all day this afternoon. Really getting the top stories and the big story is the cloud computing impact to government. You've been leading the team on the public sector worldwide for Amazon Web Services, really had great success since the CIA deal four years ago, which was a watershed moment to this gestation period of Amazon infiltrating into all the different systems of the government and worldwide. Congratulations. Thank you, it's been a great seven and a half years, it's gone by so fast, but I still feel like every day is day one. One of the things I'm most impressed with you and I want to get your take on it is, you've been very passionate about the mission of the public sector from nonprofits, education, inclusion and diversity, women in tech, a variety of things, as almost a higher level mission, but Amazon has been real enabler for the change as well. So what is your official role now at Amazon? It's now global, it's always been global. How has it changed over the past few years? Well, in the early days, even though when I started here, Andy and I always agreed it was worldwide, but what ended up happening was the fact that it went from really just focusing on the U.S. to actually focusing on worldwide, because if we couldn't really win business here in the U.S., it was gonna be hard to win business worldwide. You're one of the most powerful women in Washington, D.C. has voted recently one of the magazines. Been doing great work here in D.C., but also globally. But one of the things that you're doing, I wanted to explore with you, is you're changing the game, not just with technology and government, but in society. There's a lot of entrepreneurship that you're enabling. You've kinda cracked the code on this formula with the work with Amazon, where there's now the silos are being broken down and the blurring lines between the different sectors are all cross-pollinating. We're seeing that with entrepreneurship, nonprofits, education. What's going on there? What's your view on this? Well, when you're really gonna drive change globally, and when you're doing such a transformational change and shift with technology, you can't just look at it as a shift of technology. It's gotta be a shift of the sectors of what's happening. And also, you can't just educate one group. You have to go and educate the society and have real societal change. Everything from ensuring that the community colleges have the right kind of programs for computer science, K through 12, that they have access, because if you miss one group, you're gonna miss a whole generation of something. And the realities are, there's millions of jobs worldwide that are needed for cloud computing in a variety of roles, including new ones for AI and machine learning, which we almost have no individuals that are as qualified as we want them. So to drive real change, you have to start at the policy level and ensure policymakers and regulators around the world are aware of what they need to put in place so that these tools and technologies are enabled, that they're promoting and budgeting for things like educational programs. And then they're very focused on not just old tech companies, but actual new tech companies that are driving forward to startups, entrepreneurs, and social engineers, I'll call them. And that's really where we are trying to drive toward social change or societal change, starting at the policy and going all the way down to educational and diversity issues around the world. One of the things that you guys have done here in Washington has been successful. You've done the hard work, you put the time in, you paid your dues, you did the brute force work you need to do in security and cloud. Now it's up and running successful. Now you have a elevated responsibility with the cloud to enable wealth creation, value creation, change in society. So you're steward of a change agent at the same time you have to create value across those sectors. What does that responsibility mean to you and how are you leading the team to continue to up the bar on the innovation in that area? Well, it does mean a lot to me and it is super important because if you again get one element wrong, it's almost like you misstep something. So we are like, my entire team is really gritty. Like every day we're sort of challenging each other. Do we have it right? The whole concept of the ability to dive deep and really understand your customers and what they need to do. But an example of that would be is we really have sort of a model we've developed as a team for going in and creating digital innovation or digital footprints for countries. So if you think about this, if you walk into a country and they have zero idea how to become a digital nation, you have to through your influence and your experience really educate them on what are the elements. And again, that goes through everything through how do they set up policies? How do they have acquisition vehicles? How are the regulators working? Everything through financial regulators, telecommunication providers, through the educational systems of how you operate. But then not only that, but the entrepreneurs. How do they actually set up a group teach and train sometimes in societies that really have not had zero training in entrepreneurship? You know, you think about the United States. I could call you up, John, and say, hey, I have a question about something I'm doing in media. Can you like give me some suggestions? You would help me. If you go to countries like that, they don't have the same network we even have here. So really establishing, helping them establish what is their blueprint? And I will tell you it's working. And the reason I think it's working is because we go in very humbly. We begin to, we're very patient. We have a long-term view of what we're doing. And we really demonstrate for them, and not just demonstrate, but help them ensure that they're getting there. And that's the customer obsession side of us. In the old way, the old competitive landscape used to be, hey, our price and our product performance is the best, therefore you should buy it. And make as much money as possible and provide some customer support and some maintenance. Okay, done. Now you guys have hit the form. That's just one element of a successful formula, mission-driven, but also ecosystem and community. That's right. Talk about the dynamics between those three things. Having a mission, the right price performance, and also community, and how does that formula work for you guys, and how do you make that successful? Yeah, well, so here's a really interesting fact. When we decide to go in and build a new region, we could, the realities are, we could go anywhere in the world and build a region. But will that region be successful? And there's many elements to that being a success. And one of the things, as an example, is price. So in order to have a region that is priced in a manner that individuals can buy for cloud computing, you've got to ensure that the elements that you need to build that region are in place. So you've got to think about things like utilities, power, water, land, networking, telecommunications, and then education. Are the people there that can actually respond and take the jobs that are required? So you have to look at each and every element and go in and really make those changes. And an example that I'll share is telecommunication providers around the world. We're the most advanced in the world in the United States on telecommunications. But if you go to other parts of the world, there's a monopoly or duopoly, and their prices are generally outrageous. And for a company like ours, of course, we're a big networking company. And if you go in and if a customer pays 100% more, then they would pay in a region that was right next door, they're probably not gonna want to use that cloud. So when I say that we're going in and driving real change, we really feel like it's our obligation to go in and ensure that we put all the pieces and parts in place with that country and those officials to ensure that they understand. And then the added element, if we're gonna do that to telecommunications provider that maybe had part of their revenues toward government or it's all they know, then we need to teach them how they set up new business models because there are fantastic business models for telecommunication providers with cloud computing, managed service offerings. They can do a lot more mobility, gaming. There's so much stuff, but many of them have been so used to an old business model. We really have to help them transform in order for that entire community and region to be successful. Would it be safe to say that you guys are enabling value creation and that you guys are allowing others to take advantage of that? It's not just your profit, you're enabling them to profit and or win. How are they see value? It could be for social good, but also it could be for making more money. I mean, you can't lose by helping people make more money or achieving their objective. We love that. And if you think about Amazon Web Services, where we started was with startups and entrepreneurs. The ones that loved us first were the developers and engineers. They came in, they started using AWS, and then those developers and engineers turned into small companies and startups and then large companies. And so we really have a soft spot for entrepreneurs and startups. So we talk about all the time in all parts of our business that we really need to be focused on those young entrepreneurs that are creating value and wealth. And if you do that, you really see, you see a lot of change. And even if you come back to the United States, you're starting to see in small communities. I'm from Kentucky. We have agri-entrepreneurs. We have individuals that are looking at new farming techniques. They're taking healthcare startups in Kentucky. I mean, it's great because you don't need to be respectful in Silicon Valley anymore to have a startup and do really great work. You're a disruptive enabler. You're a change-adding, you're a force of nature. You're one of the most powerful people in Washington, D.C. You're from a small town. How does that make you feel? I mean, sometimes you pinch yourself. I'm very humbled. I'm super humbled. My parents were both teachers. My dad was a high school basketball coach. Love coaching. I'm a huge Kentucky basketball fan. But, you know, humble, I feel blessed every day that I get to do this role and that I've been able to work for such an amazing company who believes in this because, you know, Andy Jassy, myself, always said from day one, the first day I met him, I was like, wow, he is gonna be such a champion of this because we talked about paving the way for disruptive innovation and making the world a better place. And in order to do that, there's multiple aspects of those things. And again, the technology is the bridge-builder. It really helps take the divided and pull them together. But it's gotta be all these other elements that really make it work completely. With this power you have, and you are humble, I will say that that's true, comes great responsibility. How are you using this opportunity to go the next level at a higher level? Not just help Amazon achieve their business objectives. Within DC, you're involved in some things. What's your mission on that level? If you go the higher level, what is that? And what are you doing with this opportunity that you have? Well, it's really about helping drive social entrepreneurship. And then I would say the second one is diversity and ensuring that we are really getting more women in tech and a more diverse work environment for tech. And I'll just start on the social entrepreneurship side. It really interacts nicely with all of our goals. But the thing that's really changed about social entrepreneurship, in the early days, people thought of that just as a not-for-profit kind of, and people were like, that's not so cool. Well, today, social entrepreneurship is cool. Many young men and women, if you talk to them, they wanna be involved in something, they wanna make money, but they wanna be involved in something that's really doing good things. And we've sort of, again, been able to bridge how we're doing things at AWS through social entrepreneurship. So an example, we talked about Bahrain a little bit. We have a scalerator in Bahrain where we take these groups in. But we have also one here in Washington, D.C. at the US Institute of Peace for PeaceTech, which we're looking at technologies that help push down corruption and improve peace around the world. And then we have Halcyon House, which we support. And Halcyon is just this beautiful, and Georgetown is such a lovely place that Dr. Sachi Okuno started, where we support, but it's all social entrepreneurs that live there for five months in residency. And they're helped through some of the most amazing minds here in Washington become social entrepreneurs, and they have technology enablement, legal enablement, venture capital access, and that's good. And then the last one that we've done is in Cal Poly Tech, where with the president there, President Armstrong, who's another gentleman from Kentucky, we started there, he left what we were doing, and he said, I want to go all in on AWS, and I wanna start an innovation center where right here on campus, we can bring our talented students, we can also merge it with the community and solve real government issues. So there they're doing areas of justice and public safety, they're looking at healthcare issues, they're looking at also child exploitation issues, and they're bringing all those things together to try to solve real problems, and we're helping. So it's really... How about the women in tech? You're involved in, so you are a women tech leader, again, one of the most powerful women in DC, powerful people in DC. Well, women in tech is such an important issue because again, we're a fairly significant part of the population and pretty underrepresented in tech. And one of the things that we've done, we started a program at AWS called We Power Tech, where it's really about diversity and overall, but we go out into communities, we work with the schools, we have coding days on campuses, we help start coding clubs, we have empowerment days where we teach women how do you interview, how do you understand the roles in tech? We do sort of early, what is cloud and how do you get involved with cloud? And then we talk about other jobs. You and I have had this conversation before about tech is great in the coding part, but also there's so many other jobs in tech, like it's finance, it's operations, it sells, you know, PR, name marketing, and you have to be pretty talented in tech to do any of those. It's not again, I'll say for the faint of heart. So we are making progress, but we still have a long way to go. And tech is super fun. What's your secret of success? I think I learned very early on how to operate in a very diverse world. My dad was a basketball coach. During my time growing up, I had a lot of young men basketball players in our home. We were always cooking, and I had to stand toe-to-toe with them all the time. And every aspect, I could not, you know, I just really, I was like, oh, you know, I'm going to win this argument. One on one, let's take it to the court. And so I don't like to lose for sure, but I really once, I guess once I set my mind to something I really believe in it, there's passion in me. I just keep going. I don't know, no is not the right answer. How do we get there? Blockers are just something that can be removed in my mind. And I think Amazon is the kind of culture that, you know, obviously, the way the whole company has been created and how it's driven, nothing has gotten in the way. You just sort of learn from those things. And if you say every day, we may not have gotten to where we want to be today, but we learned from the failure that we had today and that experience. And you take that in each day, you sort of evolve and say, okay, now we learned from that, let's adjust. And the other thing I tell my team because we're such a young company, you don't really know what you know. So don't get tied to the ways that you're doing things because we need to adjust very quickly. So I try to promote an environment where that we don't, we maybe don't know the right, yeah, we don't know the right answer every day. And we need to constantly be looking at, did we get that right and how do we adjust? So, you know, getting that agility in your business because a lot of the hiring that we do today, there's so many that we bring in that are from sort of an old school mindset because these companies did not grow as fast as we're growing. We are in a hyper growth mode. And when you're in a hyper growth mode, you have to constantly look for leaders that can scale. And so that's the other sort of thing really. So the pace, kind of can you hang with the pace? Yeah, I've seen people, you know, where they sort of hit a wall and then they come back, but you really have to constantly say, you know, this is strapped in, you're probably not gonna have this same experience ever again. Here's some oxygen for some people. They need it. Yeah, it really is. Team oriented. So culturally you feel that you're a good fit for Amazon given your personality, that's a key to success. I love it. I mean, I love it because of the pace. I love it because of the change we're driving. And the other thing, after years of working in tech, it's so fun to see your customers be successful. I mean, I can't, that high of seeing customers actually drive results and young entrepreneurs be able to create a company. I had a young girl in Brazil, I was in Brazil at the embassy and we had actually a women's panel and she was on it, she was like 23 years old. And we got to talking and she said, I just, she said I created my first gaming company at 16 and sold it at 18 for some millions. And she was like in our third company. She said all built on AWS. I mean, that is like so cool. Like those stories, you're just like, wow. And wouldn't be possible if you went through the old gatekeepers and other ways. Well, I mean, and I was part of all that. I mean, you spent so much of your money on just building out the tech, the servers, and the early days, entrepreneurs spent so much of their early capital on that. And now I think that's why, you know, private equity and venture capitalists, we are involved with them so much because they see the value that cloud computing can have in their portfolio. Faster time to value. Very much. And then the entrepreneurs, you'll see seven, they'll have two or three companies going at once. You know, and it's like, it's a good thing. And because that cost of creating a business is a lot less, they can focus on their real talent, not just, you know, buying servers and stacking them. Final question for you, talk about the impact that you've had with AWS Public Sector here in town. Your event that you started, the Public Sector Summit, early days, conference room in a hotel, ballroom in a hotel. Last year was at the major convention center. It looks like reinvent. So you had an impact. And this year probably gonna be bigger. That is an indicator that something's going right there. Well, I'm very proud of my team for helping us build this thing out. But it was the early days. I do think we, I say, I've told a certain friend, I think we have maybe 50, 55 people. And I think last year we had about eight or 9,000 and growing and it is like a little reinvent. We have it over a two day period. It'll be June 20th and 21st this year. Please come, we want to have you back. We will be there. But we're doing something a little bit unique this year. We're gonna have a space day on the 19th. And what, you know, obviously at AWS and Amazon, we really, we like space as in like, you know, the moon, Mars. Yeah, like SpaceX, Blue Origin. Not like a comfortable space, safe space. No, no, like true space in the clouds and way beyond. And this is a really interesting area because, you know, space, I remember as a young girl, you know, seeing, seeing, you know, the first, the whole videos of walking on the moon and it makes you feel so good, you know, that science and technology emerging. But there's a lot of that that needs to be updated and modernized now. And we work with a lot of partners now, you know, like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, groups that are building tools, Blue Origin, SpaceX, NASA, Air Force. There's been a huge robotics surge. Huge. People love robotics and software involved. Machine learning. I mean, you think about, so ground stations and if you think about ground and satellite stations, a lot of that is very outdated technology. And that's where cloud computing and the new tools that, you know, that we are driving in our AI and machine learning space are really going to help as well as the storage and compute and do more things at the edge with that. So that's going to be a really fun day and we're going to have folks from all those companies. Is it going to be open to the public? It is, it's going to be open to the public. So it's like a precursor day to our mini reinvent, all kind of our public sector mini reinvent. So we're really excited about that. And it's something new. We're going to try this year and see what kind of momentum, but we wanted to add that and we had a lot of requests. We said, let's just do it. What's your goals next couple of months? We're going to see you at Public Sector Summit. Your event in June, the Cube will be there. What's on your radar right now? I have a big agenda for global traveling. I'm going to be in Australia, Singapore, Argentina. I've got a couple of trips to Canada. I'm going to be doing very shortly here in London. I'm going to be doing a girls in tech conference and I have one out in San Francisco. I'm going to be key noting that. So I have a big agenda this year of travel. So I'm getting myself all geared up for my year on the road, but it's going to be fun. We have a lot of great things going on this year. Worldwide public sector. Congratulations on your success. Thanks for spending the time with me. Thank you, John. It's a Cube conversation here in Washington DC. We're in Arlington, Virginia, Amazon, web services, headquarters here in Washington. Thanks for watching.