CEOInterviews.AI
Start App
Try: AI strategy tariffs earnings guidance layoffs interest rates growth

Teresa Carlson

Global Head of Public Sector, Anthropic; formerly Founding CEO, General Catalyst Institute, Anthropic

Search every verified Teresa Carlson interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Teresa Carlson, founding CEO of the General Catalyst Institute and former global head of public sector at Anthropic, appeared on the Sourcery podcast in May 2026 to discuss her career building AWS's government cloud business. She described growing that unit from two people and no revenue to $10 billion in a decade, and highlighted the 2012–2013 Central Intelligence Agency contract as a pivotal moment that legitimized cloud computing for commercial enterprises. Carlson credited Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy for supporting the company's transformation to handle classified work, and she recounted lessons from Amazon's culture, including its "no PowerPoint" writing style and the importance of answering yes-or-no questions directly. Carlson also addressed current AI adoption, expressing concern that the industry is "moving really fast without the frameworks in place." She said the General Catalyst Institute aims to give startups an "unfair advantage" by working with government to reduce regulatory red tape, such as permitting for energy capacity and data centers, and by promoting a unified AI framework to replace the current patchwork of rules. She emphasized that customer usage, not just technology, legitimizes products, a principle she said she learned from Andy Jassy.

Recent appearances

  • The AI Public-Private Divide

    July 14, 2026 · 📺 Security Visionaries and Netskope

    Season 3, (Bonus) Episode 51 On this episode of Security Visionaries, host Bailey Popp sits down with Teresa Carlson, Global Head of Public Sector at Anthropic and former CEO of the General Catalyst Institute, for a wide-ranging conversation on the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and public-private collaboration. Teresa draws on nearly three decades in technology to share what it truly takes to work with government. From navigating compliance frameworks like FedRAMP to building sponsor networks that accelerate the path to authority to operate. The discussion explores how security leaders c…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • The Deal that Invented Defense Tech: Teresa Carlson and Scaling the USA's Cloud

    July 14, 2026 · 📺 Cobot

    In 2013, Teresa Carlson led a team of four to bid against hundred-person squads for the CIA’s first commercial cloud contract. Competitors called to laugh, and she figured she’d either get promoted or fired. She won, delivered in record time, and accidentally created the playbook that made “gov tech” and “defense tech” real categories where none had existed. Before any of that she spent five years as a speech-language pathologist at the Nuremberg Hospital, transforming Romanian orphans through therapy, nutrition, and relentless contextual cueing. It is the same listening-first operating system…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • Episode 105: Teresa Carlson on Frontier AI, Smart Regulation, & Keeping America Number One

    June 24, 2026 · 📺 Special Competitive Studies Project

    Artificial intelligence is advancing faster than any technology before it, yet the United States still has no federal framework to govern it, leaving a patchwork of state and foreign rules that startups can barely navigate. With Europe regulating aggressively and China surging forward, the central tension is sharper than ever: regulate too much and risk falling behind, regulate too little and risk chaos. In this episode, we ask: As AI reshapes jobs, children's lives, and the integrity of our information, can America strike the right balance between innovation and safety before it's too late?…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • How AWS Sold Cloud to the CIA – Teresa Carlson GCI

    May 11, 2026 · 📺 Sourcery with Molly O'Shea

    Teresa Carlson, Founding CEO of the General Catalyst Institute, joins Molly on Sourcery to share the inside story of how she built AWS's public sector business from zero revenue and two people into a $10B global powerhouse — including the legendary CIA contract that legitimized cloud computing for the entire world. In this conversation, Teresa pulls back the curtain on what it was really like working alongside Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy at Amazon, the brutal "no PowerPoint" writing culture, and the one-way vs. two-way door framework that shaped how she made decisions. She also draws sharp para…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • The Pentagon-Silicon Valley divide: Who blinks first on AI?

    March 13, 2026 · 📺 Washington Times Podcasts

    Ben breaks down the latest on the Pentagon-Anthropic feud and the fast-moving developments across the Mideast, including America's use of small combat drones for the first time. Then, Teresa Carlson, founding president of the General Catalyst Institute, joins the show to talk about whether the tech industry can bridge its differences with the Pentagon on AI, if a drone "bubble" is forming in the economy, and how the military can drive innovation. Plus, the "Threat of the Week."

    Watch on YouTube ↗

Other executives at Anthropic

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →